There’s a common misconception that you have to have good drawing skills to make your own amazing invitations, but that’s not necessarily true. I *sheepishly* did absolutely no drawing for these invites. First I’ll take you on a little tour around my invites, then I’ll tell you how I got around drawing (and why I’d want to get around drawing since I usually love it so much).

My Invites

I was really inspired by the idea of a train ticket book, so I chose some old time fonts and tried by best to lay it out in a way that felt “vintage”. I used a matchbook binding to put them all together, which I’ll be showing you how to do on Friday. I decided that would be this week’s how to, I’ll link up here when it’s up.

I ordered all my paper and envelopes from Action Envelope. I printed my rsvp post cards on chip board that I purchased from the local copy shop–while this is awesome for printing postcards, it can be a little tricky.

The local copy shop here is really great and they ran them one at a time for me so they would come out okay. Just ask and do a test run of like 5 before buying all the chip board to do them all. Another option for RSVP postcards is to order them from a postcard printing website like Overnight Prints.

Here’s what the insides look like:

You can see on the right hand side of the flap that I took the map image from the cover, converted it to gray scale, and lowered the opacity even more so it subtly filled the background with a great image without being overwhelming.

I also continued the feel of the Save the Date cards through use of fonts, the date “punch” card, and design motifs.

Each “ticket” spread is a map and directions to each part of the wedding. Personally, it drives me crazy getting lost. We also have a wedding website where all the addresses, maps, and etcetera will be located. I was inspired by silent film “speak” screens for the directions. Not sure why, but that image just stuck with me. I used google maps to create each map, then used Adobe Illustrator to make a line drawing of each.

For the save the dates, I had used a stamp to mark the date and month on each card, but this time around I had the much smarter idea of just using the blunt flat end of a prismacolor marker! It did bleed through the back a little, but I can live with that.

So you can’t draw OR you are crazy rushed for time

No problem. I myself fit into the crazy rushed for time category and was feeling pretty overwhelmed about having to draw out a bunch of motifs and worrying about if they would fit. Here’s what I did.

Now, all of these options are all non-commercial use licenses, so don’t be scammy and use them to make invites to sell on etsy or some silliness. Personal use only please.

1. You can get great fonts for free that will make any single page invite look amazing. Just google “free font” and you will get a million search results back.

2. You can also get really great packages of free vector images too. Do the same thing, google “free vector graphic + whatever you are looking for”. I was looking for “vintage scroll elements” and “floral motif” and there were well over 2000 options to choose from.

3. There are many great copyright free images that kind scholars have uploaded to free databases, like a database of maps or this great database of plant slides. University department and research programs are a great place to look.

The cover to my “matchbook” is an amazing hi-res image of a 1700′s map of France. Perfect for Jason and I because, well, France has a special place in our history together. And it looks cool.

And that’s pretty much it. If you have any questions about how I made my invites or my other wedding craft projects, just let me know by leaving a comment and I’ll try and answer you as quickly as I can.

Happy crafting!

Kristin M Roach