The Invitations Headache

If you didn't see the title of this post, check it out. If you did, read it again. Cause it's legit. Invitations to a wedding are fun enjoyable easy straightforward simple (aw heck no, 'simple' was a mistake to think of) challenging. There are a million paper vendors out there and just as many Do-It-Yourself tutorials. There are people saying they would never trust themselves to their wedding stationary and others that complain of the exorbitant costs of paying someone as a vendor for the stationary. I guess you could toss me in the second cohort? We plan to invite approximately 70 people to this shindig. That translates to about 50 real invitations, 70 programs, 70 menus, 70 name cards, and whatever else that people use paper products for in a marriagin'.

Some vendors will charge anywhere from $2.00-$6.00-$10.00 for an invitation. With some brilliant quick math in my head, that could translate to $500.00 on just the INVITATION! An invitation, that I know will eventually end up in the rubbish, because once someone writes down the date and time (which they may already know cause let's face it, I'm not the quiet type) what's the point of hanging on to the invitation? Oh, I should concede that the RSVP card comes in the invitation (which EVERYONE is sending back to me, riiiiight? Please? Pretty please?). So that's important. But even the RSVP card, gets sent back to me. So why should I spend so much money on that thing? People could as easily just send me a text, "hey, put me down for 3 peeps 2 moo moo's and 1 cluck" and be done!

So guess what I decided. Though I was not originally thrilled with the idea of DIY, we're going that route. Initially, I just didn't trust myself to design/execute such an operation. However, after some brilliant workarounds with MS powerpoint, I think I have the base design down for the invitations. Next comes researching all those DIY tutorials that will hopefully show me how to buy my cats' weight in cardstock and spend a lot of time folding and gluing. They will probably have to be professionally printed. I don't trust my relationship with the Canon home printer for this job. I'm not that smart. Hopefully people like them enough to send me back the RSVP card. Hopefully they do their job. Hopefully they don't make my wallet scream 'Shenanigans!' in the process. At least there's a lot of time until these bad boys have to go out. Any thoughts? Does anyone know of anyone else who did their invites themselves??