When I started doing our wood slice save-the-dates for the wedding, I began this project with great enthusiasm and excitement and hoped it would only be the starting point of all the great things I would go on to create for the wedding. Unfortunately, I realized very quickly how time-consuming and pricey DIY projects can be.

I guess I already knew this though.

Who doesn’t start a DIY project without finding themselves buried in mounds of card stock and glue exclaiming, “What was I thinking!”? Ok, maybe I’m the only one because most people are smart enough not to start such ridiculous projects to begin with.

After dealing with this first crafting nightmare for our wedding, I lost of little bit of momentum for crafting. I decided that I wasn’t going to go through that same time-consuming DIY mess for our wedding invites, so I picked an Etsy seller whose adorable calligraphy and designs would fit right in with the playful image we had of our woodland wedding.

I thought having someone else design our invites and RSVP cards would be a simple process, but it ended up feeling like a daunting task to brainstorm design ideas and find just the right design that was original, fresh, and matched our woodland theme without looking too childish.

This is just one of the many design proofs we looked over and played with before deciding on our final design. I lost A LOT of sleep over making design decisions on our invites.

In retrospect, if I had wanted simple, our best option would have just been to go with a pre-designed wedding invitation suite from Minted.com, however, this would not have given us the fresh, original, and memorable wedding invite we had in mind.

But what’s done was done. We created our design and waited about two weeks for our invites to come in the mail. Ironically enough, my wedding dress arrived the same week in March that our invites arrived, so it was a pretty exciting week!

Even after the design process was over and the invites in hand, there was still a lot of work to be done. Since I wanted to carry on the woodland theme I had started with our wood slice save the dates, our naked invites and RSVP cards had to be dressed up a bit.

I created maps using this technique and searched high and low for the perfect postage stamps that would match our woodland theme (hey, what bride doesn’t become obsessed with such silly details like postage stamps?).

Then I created belly bands from tindalo woodgrain card stock, which I used along with jute twine to hold together our three-piece invitation suite. I finished off the design with a simple (tediously hand-cut) grey cardstock heart attached to the jute twine to display our wedding date.

And yet, my work still wasn’t done there.

It was a no-brainer that we had chosen our Etsy designer to do the calligraphy for the address labels on all our envelopes in order to match the invites, but we failed to consider the calligraphy for our return address on the back of the envelope until the envelopes arrived with nothing on the backs of them. I ended up doing the calligraphy for all the return addresses on my own after discovering this missing detail.

Doing the calligraphy for the return addresses took longer than expected and was surprisingly a lot of work, but it also turned out better than I expected it to look. Maybe I should have just done all the calligraphy myself?

I was so thrilled and proud to send these puppies off to their owners, but it sure was bitter-sweet saying goodbye to them after all that work!