Some say that you shouldn’t spend much thought (and money) on invitations. After all, guests will just throw them away after or even before your event. But others argue that your wedding invitation will give those invited a  foresight on the kind of wedding you will have. They say, to create a first impression is the second purpose of the invitation, the first one being to invite. Hand a sloppy card and it will reflect a sloppy event.

This is actually what’s going through my head as I was creating the design for our wedding invitation. D, having objected to my first few samples–because they were either too contemporary or has too much going on, said that it doesn’t have to look formal and conventional, just decent enough to make guests think they’re being invited to a decent wedding.

On my end, I also wanted our wedding invites to illustrate our romantic country-style theme and make use of our green and white color motif. But incorporating all those ideas was no easy feat. And coupling it with the desire to make the perfect design–because it is for our wedding–made it even harder.

We almost settled for a contemporary-country-birdie wedding template that I made months before. But it didn’t came out well with the new printer that we’re using and our choice of paper. So I sat back in front of the computer again and tried to wring out the last of my creative juices, hoping to create IT. December was fast approaching then and we barely had a month before we’re scheduled to hand/send out our invitations.

And that last attempt yielded the best result. Like pieces of the puzzle falling into place–the images, the fonts, the colors–everything came together wonderfully just as how we want them. We finally had our design:

wedding invitation

country-style wedding invitation

wedding map

country-style wedding invitation

(Notice the swirls that I used for the monogram were actually taken from the swirls I used in the first two pages.)

But designing was only half the task because we still had to make the actual invitations. We chose a shimmery paper board in lime green color. I experimented with some techniques on how to put the pages together (including hand-sewing!), and got frustrated with our printer and wasted more than a few papers. In the end, we agreed that tri-fold is the best layout and gluing is the best technique. As for the printer, we just decided to put up with it because we really had no choice. This is how it looks like when finished:

country-style wedding invitation

Of course, creativity spilled over the envelopes as well:

country-style wedding invitation

(I loved how our names were right on the center when I opened the envelope flap because it was just a happy coincidence.)

We distributed them last Christmas to take advantage of family gatherings and relatives coming over for the holidays.

Instructions on how we made our invites here.

And to cap off this invitation post, I’ll also share with you this simple wedding invitation video that we used for our friends whom we cannot personally give our invites to.