Cardmaggedon

How was everyone's weekends? In LA we had a little city-wide freak out known as Carmaggedon, which was in fact a dissapointment to those who were predicting mile-long backups and a traffic jam of epic proportions due to the closure of LA's clogged lifeline, the 405 freeway. But for the rest of us, it was in fact Carmaheaven. I made a record drive from home to the Santa Monica 3rd street promonade in 10 minutes on miles of clear freeway and I thought to myself, they should shut down the 405 more often! I never imagined driving in LA could be so wonderful. The real carmaggedon in fact took place this morning and takes place every morning and afternoon in Los Angeles during rush hour.

The true adversity this weekend was actually our wedding invitations-- Will dubbed our weekend Cardmageddon. It was truly a long weekend of printing, cutting, and glueing and things are just getting started... We wanted to make our invitations personal and special but it's turning out to be a lot of work. It is quite literally our sweat, blood, and tears. It's going to be a long and busy week...

All we need is love, and a few paper cutters.

Paper resources

Just thought I would share some of my great finds for specialty paper and envelope retailers. These are great resources for card making, crafts, and of course DIY invitations, programs, seating escort cards, menus, and pretty much all other wedding stationery on a budget.

Cards and Pockets

Cards and Pockets was the first DIY paper materials site I came across that really inspired me to make my own wedding invitations. Will and I really like pocket fold-style invitations because they are elegant and keep everything neat and simple...but ordering them through an invitation designer typically runs more than $5.00 per invitation. Cards and Pockets, on the other hand, has all of the materials for pocket fold invitations for under $2.00 per invite. Their color selection in pretty basic so they didn't have exactly what I was looking for but its a pretty fair selection and a great place to start when thinking about DIY invitations.

Paper Presentation

Paper Presentation is a wonderful boutique paper shop without snobby boutique prices. Their website is adorable and they have a great unique selection of pretty paper patterns and unique styles and shapes for their pocket folds. There's also pre-cut cardstock in many useful shapes like tags, circles, squares, and hearts. Makes putting together designer-looking invitations super easy!  

Paper and More

Paper and More is like a paper wholesaler but you don't have to buy in ridiculous bulk like some of the other online retailers where the minimum order is 250. I like their collection of recycled paper products, the colors are nice and earthy and they are made from 100% recycled materials so its perfectly green! Also, pretty much every product I've browsed on their site has rave reviews from customers about the high quality items for affordable prices.

Paper!

I know its a little weird to be really excited about paper (and up past 1am in the morning writing about it)...but I've been searching all over the internet for paper goods and found some pretty wonderful things. It's just paper-- but with colorful patterns, scalloped edges, linen texture, luster finish...and in every imaginable shade of color. Well, not exactly every imaginable shade, which is why I've been doing an extensive online search just to find the perfect color combinations of paper materials for our wedding stationery.

via oncewed

These pretty cards are actually made of wood not paper but how cool is that? via thenewlyengaged and nightowlpapergoods

The above are all via parcelpost, a great blog resource for all kinds of lovely paper inspirations

So I've pretty much decided we are just going to dive head first into this DIY-our-own-wedding-invitations idea. It will be the most budget-friendly option and we will be able to customize and design all of our own stationery so it will be more special and personal. It's been fun so far....planning out potential designs and finding the exact shades of colors that we want for all the paper materials. That's not to say I won't regret my decision in about a month when we actually start putting things together and attempt to make over a hundred of these things....but right now I'm pretty excited and ready for the challenge!