Weddingbee boards

Hi yeehaa,

I did DIY mine and I loved how they turned out, and people have come up to me since we sent them and asked did you seriously do these by hand!  But I will be honest I dont think I saved myself any cash doing it and it was very time intensive. I also lucked out because my fiance's brother manages a Kinkos so he was kind enough to print all 100 and cut them down to size for me which was a huge help. That said if you still want the details they are below. I would say if you are going to DIY these allow yourself at least a month cause you are going to get seriously sick of them at points :).  Our colors are chocolate brown, red, and champagne so hence the colors of the cards.

 I used off white cardstock and cut it down so that it would fit into a business sized evelope so it was about 4 1/2 inches tall by about 8 inches long.  I used Lucinda Calligraphy (for both the card and the envelope) for the font and it looked really nice, but was still very readable. 

On the first inch of the card on the left I put Save the Date going vertically in one row and then the date next to it also vertical.  Next to that I took a piece of brown card stock about and inch and half wide and hand (embossed?) it (basically made a raised pattern on it that sort of looked like vines, using these blue plates you can get at target, 10 bucks for a pack of 5).  On top of that in the center of the brown strip, I put a three layered squares that got progressivly smaller so it looked like a little matted picture. The thres squares were made up of: off white cardstock (left over from cutting down the cards), red, and then off white again with a stamp of a really pretty cursive E in a metallic brown on it.  The outside square was about an inch wide by an inch and 1/2 tall and then the other squares got smaller from there.  On the right hand side of the strip, basically the other 5 inches of the card, was some info that said the normal save the date info (mark your calanders, when, where, more info to be found on our website and then our web address.)  Basically I put it all together with glue sticks (used about 4 total to do all of the cards).  Total cost not including the stamp and ink which I am reusing on several projects was probably about 50 bucks give or take a couple bucks.  I probably could hav e done them cheaper but I goofed up a couple things to start off.

 Sorry to write so much it is hard describe without a pic.  I will try to post one later. 

I also made my Engagement Party invites. I got a package of plain white wedding invitations from Michaels. The package was open so i got 50% off. :) Then I printed them myself. The colors/theme were red, white and black and hearts. It was last February, right after Valentine's day. I asked everyone to wear black and white and I accented the party with red. Anyway, after printing them my aunt and I set up an assembly line. I stamped them with red and black swirly heart stamps on the outside edges. At the top we had a rectangle of white cardstock on which I stamped our initials with a heart in between. my aunt glued those onto slightly larger pieces of red cardstock with extra space at the top. On the top I threaded black ribbon with white stiching at the edges by using a rectangular hole punch and cutting the edges at angles. They were cute and reasonably inexpensive.