The second installment of “stuff from my own wedding” – our invitations!

The invitation in its lined envelope

The pocketfolder was handmade from leather-textured paper with a satin ribbon bellyband and monogram.

The inside of the pocketfolder, with three inserts and a double-matted invitation panel with a rhinestone accent.

Closer view of the panel and inserts. Two of the inserts were matted on chocolate brown cardstock; the RSVP card used the chocolate brown envelope as a backing piece.

All the pieces of the invitation. The Directions card included a map created in Photoshop; the RSVP cards were personalized for each guest attending. and the RSVP envelopes were lined with the same paper as the outer envelope.

I put some serious blood/sweat/tears into the invitations for our wedding, and the response from our guests was overwhelmingly positive.  People wrote notes on our RSVP cards raving about how gorgeous they were, and I had a number of friends ask if I could design items for them.

I never intended to make my own pocketfolders, but I found paper that I just couldn’t resist.  The pocketfolders were made from a double-sided, leather-textured 12″x12″ sheet of scrapbooking paper; the panel and inserts were printed on text-weight ivory linen paper and mounted on chocolate brown cardstock.  I added one Swarovski crystal accent on each invitation and closed the whole thing with a satin ribbon bellyband and a triple-layered monogram square.  The envelopes (both the outer and the RSVP) were lined by hand.

I spent a LOT of time on theknot.com’s message boards while planning my wedding, and I got a lot of inspiration and assistance from the fabulous ladies on the Los Angeles and DIY boards.  In light of that, I created a “married bio” that included templates for the vast majority of the paper products I created for my own wedding.

The templates for each piece of my own wedding invitation (as well as many of my other projects) are still available for free download in my bio for anyone who wants them, and I am going to leave it that way as a sort of thank-you to the community who provided so much inspiration when I was starting out.  If you don’t have Photoshop and/or don’t want or know how to customize these files, I can very easily do that for you for a small fee and send you the customized digital files, or I can go the full-service route and print, cut, and assemble it all.