CACTUS WEDDING INVITES

Today was the day Robin & I handed out pretty much all of our wedding invitations! It’s so crazy to think that in 11 months time it’ll be the big day! So because our invites are out now, I thought I’d share with you how I created them. I came up with the concept myself, designed them and even got them printed.

Pinterest came in handy when trying to figure out what we wanted to do. We obviously had to decided on our colour scheme and wedding theme first before even contemplating how we wanted our invites. I will write a blog post on our theme and why we chose it soon, but I think from the invite you can guess what it is… CACTI & SUCCULENTS!

LAYOUT

I spent days trying to decide on a layout. Pinterest was really helpful as I wasn’t 100% sure on what the invite needed to say. I’d seen some invites that were about 4 separate pages! But after going through what we needed, we ended up having our invite on 1 piece of A5 card, double sided. I found a few designs I liked from Pinterest and began playing around until I found a style we loved. We much preferred portrait as it meant we could fit all of our information on a lot better. But landscape invites do look lovely still. Because we have a wedding website which we created using gettingmarried.co.uk, it meant we didn’t need to have an extra slip of paper for an RSVP. The website allows you to create a password and have guests RSVP via an online form, which I thought would be much easier for us and involve less printing and paper.

DESIGN

So we knew we wanted cacti and succulents on our invite, so my next job was to find an image or illustration of some. For this I went to Shutter Stock. They have a huge source of imagery and some amazing cacti illustrations, the only downside is you have to pay, but if you’re like me and am horrific at water colour painting it’s your only choice! I ended up deciding on a succulents illustration which had blue and green tones as it fitted our colour scheme for the wedding and as you can see used the main design to create a border at the top and bottom of the A5 card. I still felt like something was missing after placing the succulents on the invite, so I then went on the hunt for hanging cacti and came across the perfect illustration on Shutter Stock. I placed these hanging down from the top of the invite and it filled the space around the text well.

COLOURS

Our colour scheme for the wedding is blue, green and pink; mainly in pastel shades. When it came to picking which parts of the invite were in certain colours it was difficult. I tried so many different options but the best background colour seemed to be a pastel pink. We then added in the green and blue shades with the succulents and then a little blue banner on the front of the invite. For the text we opted for white as black looked too bold; but we added in a few drop shadows on some of the text to make bits stand out, rather than it looking quite flat.

FONTS

For the fonts we downloaded them from dafont.com, absolutely love that website! I downloaded quite a few and spent hours trying out different combinations, but I eventually got there. I opted for bold text for key information and calligraphy styled writing for the sentences like: together with our families.

PRINTING

When it came to printing I looked on a few websites, but none of them looked that great to be honest. But then Robin’s sister mentioned papier.com to us and I checked them out and they looked perfect. Such a simple site where you can upload your own design to print. They also do some amazing wedding invite designs if you didn’t fancy creating your own. They had an offer on when I went to print so I think for about 85 invites printed double sided with cream envelopes cost around £100. Not sure if that’s good or not, but I know the invites is pretty costly.

PUTTING THE INVITE TOGETHER

So to finish our invites off, I had the idea of delivering them with a cactus! I’d seen a lot of people giving mini cacti away as a wedding favour but I loved the idea of giving one with their invite. Finding cheap cacti was hard, but then I saw Ikea sold 3 in a pack for £4.50 so we purchased quite a few packs of those to complete our invite idea. I then had to attach the invite to the cactus so purchased metal photo clip holders from eBay, £9.99 for 100 of them. We managed to hand deliver about 75% of our invites but we also had to post some too. When it came to posting I purchased those silver metallic post bags, bubble wrapped the cacti and popped our invite in! So simple! We made sure we posted first class so the cacti wouldn’t be in the dark for too long.

And that’s it! Our invites are out and I’m so excited to see what people say about them. I loved what I put together and really enjoyed getting creative. You might be wondering why they’re blurred but that’s because I wanted to keep the details hidden until the big day!

Peace
x

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