Puttering Along in the Land of DIY

When DIY-ing 100% of your wedding, I have found that it gets tedious sometimes. I designed our invitations about two weeks after we got engaged and still haven't printed them out or finished them completely. Why? Because of the envelopes.
Here in Nelson, there isn't a lot of choice for paper products. Warehouse Stationary is pretty much it. I went in there on a whim to look at their paper and envelope selection and found plain white envelopes on sale. Without thinking about it, I got 100 envelopes for a fraction of the cost.
Now that I had our envelopes, I thought my troubles were done. And then I read This Post by Miss Beanstalk on WeddingBee.com. Now all of a sudden, I thought I needed to have nicer envelopes.
With an inner liner.

Picture Source:Wedding Window

So I went back to the stationary store to look for these kinds of envelopes. Why couldn't I use what I bought? Because they were these:

Picture Source: Warehouse Stationary

My envelopes weren't the kind that lent themselves to inserting beautiful liners. They were the kind that seal straight across. I looked online to see what I could find since the stores had NOTHING in the size I needed. Everything online cost too much money, plus what was I going to do with 100 envelopes that I already had?

So I had a mini-meltdown and then realized that I couldn't get fancy envelopes, that I wouldn't change the size of our invites to fit regular card-size envelopes and that I would just have to fancy up my envelopes myself. (It's always nice to come to these realizations without your FI pointing them out. I think he had no idea why I was so upset about this and decided to be reassuring and supportive while I was being crazy). So I stopped freaking out about it and got to work. I have stamps, ink pads, fonts I downloaded for our invites (don't even get me started on free fonts), an old B/W printer and endless pages of inspiration courtesy Etsy. 

It took awhile and several trial prints to get it all aligned correctly, but here it is. My DIY invitation envelope.

I also ordered this awesome custom address stamp for the envelopes.

Stamp Source: My Clear Stamps

So what have I been doing for the last month on our invites? Printing each and every envelope. We made our guest list, hunted up addresses for all the OOT guests, checked spellings, partner's names and I've been working on printing them all up.

This printer is chugging along, doing all the printing that we need it to do for our invites. There are times I wonder if it's going to die on me.

I am glad to say that I have only one more batch of envelopes to do. A few names/addresses still need to be double-checked and then I can print the final 10 envelopes. Then I can do all my stamping. I'll follow up with a post on our complete invitation package once I get them sorted.

It's hard work doing invitations yourself. In the end though, the envelopes were $30, the paper for invites are $40 and the address stamp was $15.

Did you find DIY to be as challenging and time-consuming as I have? Would you have willingly tackled invites yourself? Have you fallen in love with downloadable free fonts like I have?

All photos are personal unless otherwise noted.