Simple Steps to Keeping Your Sanity While Doing DIY Invites

Step One: Make him do it.

Just kidding, but more power to you if he agrees! DIY invites are great, they're reasonably priced and they come in a wide variety. While you may be patting yourself on your back for saving a few hundred bucks, and you totally should be because come on that's awesome, don't celebrate too long. The reason they're so cheap is because the labor of printing, assembling and tying 100 tiny bows is not included. which brings me to...

Step Two: Have a small army of assemblers.

It took me, Mike, his mom and my mom a week straight of doing nothing but printing, assembling, stuffing, un-stuffing, re-stuffing, printing address labels, sticking on said labels, sticking stamps and shipping. The more people you have the faster it (should) go.

Step Three: People don't read the fine print so have backups.

Case in point, when we printed out the response cards we put on them "please initial by your food choice". So far, we've had two cards out of thirty come back with initials and some didn't even come back with names... It helped that we put a number on the back of the card and recorded it on a guest list incase they didn't write their name on the response card. Props to Mike's mom for that idea!

Step Four: Once you have an invite put together, take it to a post office.

This one's an oldy but a goody. Our invites weren't that heavy, but they had a bow on them. When we took them to the post office we found out that because of said bow, our invite couldn't be "machine processed" which meant we got to pay for the 64 cent stamps. You never now what weird rule there might be so check before you put stamps on!!

Step Five: If you're invite doesn't have an inner envelope try to find one (even if it looks like poo).

You may think it's kind of wasteful or stupid to have two envelopes, but they will help keep you sane when you get a few returned invites that aren't beaten to death. We searched five different stores to find some but no dice. We decided to send them without a second envelope and when a few got returned to us they were war torn. Some had survived with only a few bruises but some came back with the ends totally torn and that's with them being "not machine processed".

Step Six: Invest in some good tequila.

Because by the end of this you're going to need it ;)