You're invited!

Photos | Jackie Santana Photography (unless otherwise noted)

Not gonna lie, one of my favorite parts of wedding planning was creating our papercrafts. Save the dates, invitations, menus, programs... you name it, I love it. It's one of the easiest ways to incorporate your personality as a couple: fun and bold, soft and romantic, or somewhere in between. It's also one of the easiest ways to start racking up costs, with options like letterpress printing, high-quality paper and gold-foil accents. 

With a little bit of InDesign experience from college, I decided to save some money and make our papercrafts by hand (and computer). Of course, I'm not an artist or calligrapher, so to create our signs and invites, I enlisted the help of some amazing independent artists and cheap DIY products.
​​

photo above by me

​photo above by me

Save the dates

The best part of save the dates? They're super simple. All you need is an awesome engagement photo (thanks, Jackie!), your names, the date and location, and boom! You're done. We kept it casual with these square prints from Artifact Uprising (sturdy with a textured matte finish; come in packages of 25) and picked up coordinating envelopes in Persimmon (sold in packages of 10) from Paper Source. 

TIP: If you go the "Instagram" route and use a square save the date or invite, be prepared to pay extra in postage. 
​

photo above by me

Invitations

With a romantic, nature-based wedding theme, we went more traditional with the invites. Pennsylvania-based Etsy artist Elizabeth Thogerson of The Pastel Pineapple painted Mustard Seed Gardens' 19th-century barn for us, which we then turned into a digital image using a high-resolution scanner. (Elizabeth's work was so beautiful, we used her art in our menus and favor cards, as you'll see below.)

I also hired my friend Evey Hornbeck of Hornbeck Hand Lettering for calligraphy. (Her calligraphy is gorgeous!) Because she lives in Canada, it was cheapest for her to scan in the calligraphed wording so I could print it as many times as we needed and at different sizes. Printing was handled by Printing Partners on the northwest side of Indy, and we used Paper Source's envelope liner kit ($13.50) to make our own envelope liners out of our favorite luxury papers, as you can see in the top image on this page.

Want to save money on calligraphy? Ask for high-resolution digital scans of the calligraphy you need for invites and signs, then add them to your design and print them.

Programs

Don't have fancy design software? No worries, because neither do I. For most of our printed materials, I used Canva, a free online design program. If you have no design experience, you can pick from a bunch of templates; if you do have some experience, you can design from scratch like I did. To keep our printed suite of items looking cohesive, we reused Elizabeth's painting of Mustard Seed Gardens' barn and some of Evey's calligraphy from the invites. It's a simple way to make your papercrafts look like they were done by a pro. 
​

​Menus and favor cards

Once we knew our reception details, like our table linens and decorations, we sent photos to Elizabeth to paint what the inside of the barn would look like. That painting became the focal point of our menus and signified the change from ceremony to reception.

​She also painted (Princess) Jasmine, our rescue cat, for our favor cards (or non-favor cards, I guess). Instead of buying kitschy personalized items that would probably wind up at Goodwill, we used our budgeted money for favors on a group donation to the Muncie Animal Rescue Fund. (Evey did the calligraphy for both the menu and the "in lieu of favor" cards.)
​