Invitations Last DIY Project Kate To Tackle. Ever Again.

After huge successes with painting the walls of our apartment, and various fix-it jobs around the house, we decided to save money by DIY-ing our invites. Now, while we love the final result, we have resolved never to DIY again!

I’m creatively inept, so my infinitely craftier sister Amy offered to help us with the designs. We rifled through the shelves of Eckersleys [eckersleys.com.au], Spotlight, Lincraft and Pepe’s Paperie [pepespaperie.com.au] in search of the perfect Art Deco inspired papers, finally settling on a gorgeous peacock design by Christina Re, and some textured navy card.

With Amy busy creating, I set about doing the design for the actual invite. I found some great Art Deco fonts, and a gorgeous partial wallpaper pattern that would have scared guests away had it been on my walls, but worked quite nicely as a border for the invites.

 The Knot art director, Chris, very kindly offered to tidy the invites up (like I said, my design skills are minimal!) and get them ready for printing. Thanks Chris!

As for printing, my boss put me onto a company in our business park – Sinnott Brothers – who very kindly did several test runs on various paper stocks so we could decide on the final layout. David, the branch manager, then surprised us by offering to print and trim the invites for free as a wedding gift. Unexpected & sweet!

Now while you might say that sounds so easy, with so many pitching in to help, amongst the other wedding to-do list deadlines taking responsibility for the invites would have been much less time consuming had we let someone D.I.F. (do it all for us!).

--- Kate Oliver