Today, I’d like to share another DIY project I did for our wedding.

I had a TON of fun designing the invitations (a little bit less fun putting them together… lol). Knowing I was going for a ‘country classy’ type look and that I love Kraft paper, I scoured pinterest for inspiration.  This was the spark for the whole project:

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After seeing these gorgeous invites I knew I wanted to DIY lace wedding invitations using doilies and kraft paper.

The layout of the invitations was based on this next invite: (I seriously spent way too many hours of my life obsessing over font choices and styling ;))

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For the paper I bought 250 8.5×11 Kraft paper sheets for $45  (I recently found them here for less, I used the 100 cover weight, Desert Storm).  The invites took around 90 sheets and I ended up using nearly all the rest for other wedding paper projects.  All the printing was done at Staples, they are very reasonable.

Here is a close up of the invite sans the doily…  I sometimes just sit and stare at it, because I love it so much…

But, seriously… I’m sure I spent over 5 hours meticulously analyzing every font in the world… haha  I was going for a more contemporary and fun layout with words that popped, versus the traditional invites in the cursive.  Those are pretty too, but I was going for ‘gripping’  

If anyone is interested in knowing any of the fonts, or wants a copy of the wedding invitation template I used scroll to the bottom of this post.

I bought the Doilies for around $10 off of the Webstaurant store (it came in a package of 500!)  Putting it all together was pretty simple.  I centered the doily around the invite, folded, then used a craft paper cutter to remove the excess doily on the top and bottom.

So I took these pictures before I made most of them, and I actually ended up tying bows instead of knots like the one above.  Tying the ribbon was a learning process, but the more I did the better I got.  Jake graciously offered to assist me, but after ten minutes of laboring over one bow, he asked to be relieved of his duties  Men’s fingers are just not cut out for these sorts of things…

For the RSVP postcards  I had them printed and cut at Staples, then I used stamps I had and embossed the back.  They looked so pretty with the black shiny  I wish the picture captured it better….

My mom and sisters helped me a TON with these… I mean like many hours of cutting, tying, stamping and embossing, not to mention envelope licking, stamping, and addressing… You gals are the best!  And, I should mention that Jake helped me a lot too, who would have thought he has a knack for embossing?

Again, if anyone is interested in fonts used/more information on the embossing process, I’d be happy to fill in more details!  Thanks for reading about my DIY lace wedding invitations.  If you like my blog, I would love for you to follow me (by email or bloglovin’ in the right sidebar) or view my Pinterest.  

Update:

I’ve been so flattered by the positive responses to our wedding invitations!  After getting several requests for the template, I’ve decided to make it available for download here.  It is in Word form and remains largely the same as I designed it… meaning that while it is not the cleanest or simplest template ever, it is fully customizable!

(please read the instructions prior to download!)

Instructions for Template Download

1.  Download and Install these fonts:

• Oranienbaum
• Chalk Hand Lettering Shaded
• LT Nutshell Library
• Romantiques
• Janda Elegant Handwriting
• Sail
• Some Weatz with Swashes
• Decadence

2.  Download Invitation and RSVP Template

3.  Personalize and Format

You can customize the invitation and rsvp by clicking in the text boxes and typing your wording.  For the wedding location text box on the invitation (bottom right), I adjusted the font spacing in order to make each line the same width.  You can adjust this as well by selecting the line of text, right-clicking, selecting font, then the advanced tab.  From there you can condense or expand the text by playing with the spacing.  You can also try this technique on the reply by date for the RSVP.

Other Information:

• Printing: Staples
• Size: A7  (Cut 1.5 inches off the bottom, 1″ off the right side, and in half vertically)

Get all the supplies you need to make these here:

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