It was inevitable that our wedding was going to have a vintage theme of some sort if I had anything to do with it. I feel like I’m trapped in a time warp that I never lived in. I’ve always been fascinated by the 1950’s and everything relating to it like the cars, the music, the fashion and just the simplicity of life back in those days. Vintage weddings seem to be quite in vogue these days but I don’t like to go with the norm and wanted to do something a little different plus save some money in the process. We’ve set ourselves a very tight budget and so far, so good, in sticking to it. We just can’t justify the amount of money that’s spent on weddings.
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With no offence to the wonderfully talented person who made the above ensemble or the brides to be who like the above type of invitations etc, I just didn’t want to spend the money having something like this made and anything I saw really didn’t seem to fit in with what I wanted.
Without having a ‘theme’ as such we wanted to feature things we liked and what we’re all about. Me, I like all things vintage and any kind of rock music from the 1950’s to now and Damien loves all genres of music, in particular, heavy metal. I found the ‘shabby chic’ looking background by Googling an image. My fiance is a musician (a heavy metal guitarist in fact) so I used an image of one of his favourite guitars in the background. We wanted to make it feel like guests were being invited to a ‘rock concert’ so I tried to create a music event poster. Using Picmonkey, I created the document to an A4 size image, inserted it into a Microsoft Word document and had them printed at a local office supplies store. They were 88 cents each (which is a lot in my book) but I would’ve used up nearly all of the colour in my printer and for the price of printer cartridges these days, it was more cost effective.
I found this really cool, online concert ticket generator called Fake Concert Ticket Generator from which I created a “Save the Date” so guests could stick it onto the fridge or put in a place to remind them.
I picked up these small adhesive magnetic strips and stuck one on the back of the ticket.
We also didn’t want or need any gifts and would much prefer people to come and help us celebrate but if they did want to give us a gift, we would much prefer a small donation towards a honeymoon, not that we’ve really planned on going anywhere as yet. With two elderly small dogs and four children between us and work commitments, we are leaving that until a bit after the wedding to organise. I bought a pack of pretty paper from the discount store and just typed these little notices up and popped one into each invitation.
I’m not sure why I chose purple as a main colour throughout the wedding. Maybe mixed with a vintage green it looked good so I stuck with it. I picked up the envelopes and heavy card to adhere the invitation to from the local office supplies store, which was probably the most expensive part of the whole exercise. I only needed about 23 envelopes but they sold the card only in packs of 50 so I’m stuck with the remaining but they’ll always come in handy for other craft projects myself or the kids will do in the future.
I also had a supply of these oval shaped stickers so I created a sticker to close the invitation once folded, again, using the image of the guitar. (I used the Avery online sticker generator to create these and it was really easy as is the label creator in Microsoft Word.)
Time to put it all together. I did a strip of glue along the top of the card, adhered the invitation to it, folded it in thirds and cut two small slits in the bottom third of the card to insert the Save the Date. I closed it and sealed it with a sticker. I used Microsoft Excel to store all the guest’s name and address details and used the Microsoft Word ‘label feature to produce name and address labels which saved me having to hand write them all. The label wizard is really easy to use in Microsoft Word.
So there you have it. The whole lot cost about $70 to produce. We’re both really happy with them. Nothing fancy, a little bit of the things we love and we hope to be really ‘rockin’ it’ on the wedding day, which I’m sure we will.
