I know I am a bad blogger and I still haven’t told you about how we made our own wedding invitations, but that DIY project was a HUGE undertaking. Honestly, I’m not completely sure how to walk you through the process step by step … YET.  So instead I started thinking maybe I would just begin by sharing our DIY rehearsal dinner invitations.

After determining the location, invite list and all that fun stuff for the rehearsal dinner I decided we (the husband and I) should DIY own rehearsal dinner invites.  We had left over card stock from the wedding invite inserts as well as extra envelopes (from our DIY Calligraphy).  I mean it would have been such a waste not to take advantage of the left over paper materials, right?!?!?! ;)

Early on I found Wedding Paper Divas. They have fabulous invitations for various occasions, in fact it is the website we purchased our save the dates from.  I quickly found this rehearsal invitation, which served as my inspiration for our DIY invites.

Image Credit: Wedding Paper Divas

What you need:

Photoshop has a 30 day FREE trail you can download.  We used a 30 day trial to create the initial draft of our wedding invitations. In the end we ended up purchasing Photoshop.  We planned to use it not only for wedding stuff, but also for my budding photography hobby!  If you plan to go the 30 day trial route, make sure to save the final version of your invitation as a PSD, JPG and TIFF file. This will ensure you are able to print the design even after your trail expires.

To ensure we could use some of our left over envelopes, I knew the invitations would need to be 5×7.  Once I had the size I found a free image online of a chandelier and downloaded it. From there I Googled rehearsal dinner text and placed it on the initial version of the invite.  After that it was just a matter of finding a layout we liked as well as fonts.

The majority of the text is in a renaissance font, which is free to download!  Then for our names I used the same font we used on our invitations for our names, again a free font you can download.  I felt using a little of the same font as the wedding invitations tied everything together.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the process, which is a bummer, so I can only really describe what I did.  I printed two invites on each piece of card stock and then used my handy dandy paper cutter to make them 5×7. I printed a number of test versions on plain paper before using the card stock.

This is one of the test versions, please excuse the crappy blackberry camera shot:

I had printed almost all of the rehearsal dinner invites when I remembered I had purchased a paper rounder punch. I decided to go ahead and use one of my test invites and round the corners to see how it looked.  I ended up loving it and the husband was in agreement.  A bunch of punches later we had rounded edges instead of sharp corners.

Here’s what the rehearsal dinner invitation looked like totally finished:

Here are a couple of extra tips:

  1. SPELL CHECK!
  2. Print test versions on plain white paper before doing a sample on your nice card stock.
  3. Print using High resolution.
  4. Make sure you have enough paper.  You will need extra for test prints as well as if you detect a mistake. Or if like me your ink cartridge starts to die so some invites are better than others.
  5. Start early.  Even though you don’t have to print as many rehearsal dinner invitations as wedding invites (usually) they still take time.  Better not to be up against a deadline.

Happy Planning!

Don’t forget to leave your tidbit by commenting below :)

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One of my favorite things about my husband is he always says “babe we are a team”, which is his way of telling me we will get through whatever it is going on big or small together.  I think the team mentality is part of what makes our relationship so strong.  We referred to ourselves, long before we got engaged, as Team Bowen.

We would joke about wearing matching sweatsuits to brunch the morning after our wedding.  The plan was to get bride and groom embroidered on the sweatpants.  On the jackets we would have Team Bowen version 3.0.

Although it was always a joke, in the end we followed through with our plan and had sweatsuits made.  And let me just say I LOVE(D) THEM and so did our friends and family!!!

Photo Credit: My Dad :)

I bought my sweatsuit from Victoria’s Secret and then got his from Amazon.  VS is constantly running specials so I strongly suggest waiting for a sale like I did.

My husband was kind enough to run this very important wedding errand.  He took the sweatsuits to a local chain and worked with the associate to correctly place the wording.  He also successfully chose the purple colored string for my sweatsuit that was almost the same as our wedding color purple.  Serious props to my husband, because he made the perfect choices for the embroidery without my help!

I remembered to pull out the sweatsuits the day of the wedding and asked our photographer to capture a few professional shots.

Photo Credit: Korie Lynn Photography

Photo Credit: Korie Lynn Photography

If you are wondering about the 3.0 reference it comes from us both being tech geeks.  Think of the stages in our relationship like a software release. Dating version 1.0, engaged version 2.0 and married is our latest release.  I suggested to a friend who’s getting married this summer to do Established in YYYY instead of the “versions” for her sweatsuits.

It was nice to have something special to wear the day after our BIG day! I even wore the outfit on the plane ride to Italy for our honeymoon. :)

What do you plan on wearing the day after your wedding?

Happy Planning!

Don’t forget to leave your tidbit by commenting below :)

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