It’s Wednesday again and time for another Wedding Wednesday post! If you’ve missed them, here are all my #WeddingWednesday posts from May.

A big detail of every wedding is the stationery. With so many things to print and send out -save-the-dates, invitations, and programs to name a few- it can get pretty pricey. So I decided to actually order my invitations from a boutique, but I created and printed the save-the-dates and programs myself.

First of all, my roommate took a bunch of awesome engagement pictures, so we knew we wanted to use them in our save-the-dates and invitations. I also knew I wanted to just do a simple postcard for the save-the-date to save on postage and envelopes. As we were looking through the photos, we came across the one where Pearson and I are hiding behind newspapers looking at each other and my mom had a great idea. She said I should edit the picture to look like the paper was announcing our wedding! Brilliant!

See what we did with the wedding announcement in the paper? Pretty cool, huh? My mom’s a genius. The back gave the date and location, a clause saying a formal invitation would follow, and a place for the recipient’s address. I printed them myself on blank cardstock and they were a hit!

Now, I wanted to have the invitations professionally done for many reasons. One being that I didn’t want to regret doing this on my own in the future as I looked back on my wedding. Another was because printing all those save-the-dates was a pain and I didn’t want to go through that again. I still love our invitations. I went a less-traditional route and found some on card stock that fold up to be sent. Therefore, I didn’t have to buy envelopes for these either (the horizontal lines you see in the picture below are where it folds). On the bottom  of the invitation (not shown below) was a little card to detach and send back to as an RSVP.

And lastly, the programs. I started just playing around with the wording I wanted on my computer and before I knew it, I was designing our program. With some encouragement from my mom, I knew I could easily create the program just how I liked it and save money there too. I seriously just used microsoft word, found a picture of a purple daisy on the internet (the main flower in my wedding), and created the below masterpiece. 🙂 One thing I didn’t do on my own this time was print them. I saved the design on a flash drive and took it to Kinko’s to have them print it on cardstock. It was pretty pricey though, but I waited till the last minute and wasn’t able to try anywhere else. The program below was one page front and back.

One of the sweetest ladies who could not make it to the wedding sent me my invitation back framed as a wedding gift! I loved it so much that I framed my save-the-date as well and used them in the decoration at the reception and I had to include them here.

So that’s what I did for my “stationery.”

My Advice: Do as much as you are comfortable with by yourself, but if you would rather spend more on something you can keep forever (as opposed to things that only last the day of the wedding), go ahead and splurge a little. But always shop around first whether you’re looking at invitation books in a boutique, looking for a designer, or just looking for a place to print your own design.

Thanks for reading!