It’s official. The Wedding Invites are out and the countdown to the big day is on… (We even have a tiny clock on the sidebar that tells you how much time is left.  So get your song requests in!)

Now that most of the invites have been delivered (or should be arriving shortly), we thought we’d give you a bit of an explanation as to how we made them.

In case you are wondering, these baby’s are hand-crafted by Caitlin and myself.

I know, kinda crazy. Let’s just say we’re crafty.

The basis of the cards comes from a template card set that we found at the most unlikely of places … which we are keeping a secret. The packages came with an easy to use Word/Adobe template that we used to compile the text for each invite. Which might seem wonderful until you get into the business of customizing each invite with a individual access codes for the RSVP site.

The ornate decorative accents on the invitations are courtesy of some scrap-booking stamps and a whole lot of purple ink, patience, and Caitlin’s steady hand.

If you’ve seen the web site (which you’re looking at right now) you’ll know that we’re going with a dark purple, black, white and  grey color scheme for the wedding and we wanted our invitations to reflect this combination as best as we could. We also added a unique floral elements to invitations, which were courtesy of our local neighborhood scrap-booking store. We decided to add these flowers to really enhance the ornate nature of our invites and give them a bit of a special feel. Truth be told, Caitlin just thought they were cute and wanted to put them on stuff – I said no to covering the fridge in them, so they went on the invites instead.

So that’s the gist of how the Invitations were created. It took a couple evenings of drinks, printing, stamping and patience. And there may have been an incident where someone stuck their forearm in the purple ink, but we won’t talk about that. But overall we are more than proud of the outcome.

We’d also like to thank Ryan Boley for his help with developing the WP-Plug-in that handles all of our RSVP needs. It’s a fantastic little app that allows us to track all of the responses online and in real time. So a big thanks goes out to him.