Rehearsal Invite Reveal...

Well, I’ve heard from one or two people regarding these, so I know that it’s safe to reveal them to you now. Without further ado, may I present to you our rehearsal dinner invitations? These were SO much fun to work on making. Really they were. I don’t know if they were just more fun, or if the pressure of having beautiful invitations was done and over with so these felt like more fun. Either way, I had a blast designing and creating these. And they really weren’t that much work.

As far as the design? I knew that I really wanted to use a belly band, since B won that one and we went without a belly band on the wedding invites. So I just didn’t ask him about having one on these...sneaky, I know. Other than that, I was WIDE open with what I wanted. I had a lot of envelopes (or so I thought) left over from our STDs and thought that if I did something in a size that would fit those, then that would be cool. Other than that? Wide open for suggestions.

And that’s when I remembered kind of liking Mrs. Apple Cider’s invitations for her rehearsal dinner...so I hopped on over to Weddingbee to check them out again and see what I thought. I realized that what I liked most about her invites was 1) the font that she used and 2) the graphics that she put in...so I started doing some searching using the links that she provided. I liked what I saw, but the doilies weren’t exactly right. So I kept looking, and eventually fell into the world of Photoshop brushes. I was hooked, and had the design done with only one evening spent at home working on it. Love at first sight? Possibly!

So here they are up close and personal...

The invitation itself... The Menu card (which I already showed you)... The RSVP card... The Map – I cheated and used my wedding map as a template and just moved everything a little more North and included the necessary information for the rehearsal dinner. In the end, I liked that I did that, since guess could see the proximity to the wedding venue, the hotel where they were likely staying and the rehearsal dinner restaurant. I forgot to make an extra map...so here's some screen shots of the file so you can kind of see... Like our wedding invitations, there were printed directions on one side, and a map that I made on the other.

All tied up with the pretty purple ribbon (image shown above).

And then, just because I could, I designed another graphic file to put my “stamp” on the outer envelope too. Yeah, I’m just that cheesy!

I ran the envelopes through the printer for all addressing needs... And then they just needed a stamp. I didn’t even have to ask B to get nice stamps when I sent him to the Post Office for stamps...he brought back the popular King/Queen set and they were gorgeous. I thought that they looked cute.

When my Mom got hers in the mail, she actually called me to tell me that she had no idea the depth of my creativity. And she thought the flowers on the outer envelope was a stamp...not a graphic that I designed in Photoshop. She loved them, to say the least. Even told me that I should open a business doing this...I agreed with her! I would love to do this for a living!

I don’t really have an accurate cost breakdown to share with you. I already had most of the materials that I used, or I used materials in conjunction with other projects. What I know that I specifically bought for them totaled to about $16. That doesn’t include the big pack of paper that I bought to do these and the programs on, but that will fall into my total paper projects budget. I made 20 invitations, so that makes them less than $1 a piece. Nice for this bride’s budget!

Are you going to DIY your rehearsal dinner invites? If you are, and you did your actual invites as well, did you have more fun doing these? Just wondering if I’m the only one that didn’t feel the pressure on this project.