How to make amazing DIY invitations

My fiancé and I did a ton of DIY stuff for our wedding (it's coming up in a couple weeks, super excited!) including our invitation suite which came out great in my opinion. I've seen a few reddit posts about this and had some friends ask me about ours, so wanted to share a bunch of advice in case it's helpful for anyone else. Our suite included RSVP cards, the formal invitations, a schedule, etc and it came out to be a couple bucks per envelope including postage. It does take some effort but that's to be expected with DIY.

NOTE: I'm going to mention some vendors/products in here that we used but I am not affiliated with any of them!

We made the designs ourselves, mostly using Canva (we have a pro subscription or whatever because my fiancé does other design stuff but I'm pretty sure the free plan is fine for this too). This was honestly pretty time consuming even with my fiancé being good with canva/design so I would only go this way if you're similar or you really want full control. I know reddit is pretty anti-AI but I have to say the ChatGPT image generator was super helpful for getting inspiration and visualizing stuff before spending the time to actually make it in Canva - wouldn't recommend just using the AI images on your final invitations though!

We did the printing through Vistaprint. Be sure to check for first order deals before ordering! Also, I would recommend you not directly order "invitations" because they're upcharged - we ordered 5x7 postcards instead which are cheaper. We did however upgrade the quality to premium matte which gives a much more professional feel (IMO this was worth it). If memory serves they'll also address your envelopes for free which is nice.

We ordered belly bands, vellum jackets, and sticker wax seals (you just peel and stick) off Amazon. I don't have the links handy but just pick cheapish options that look legit. We also got an embosser from Simply Stamps (customized with our return address).

After that it's pretty much just a matter of doing the assembly and mailing. My only real suggestion on the assembly is just to get the belly bands w/ wax seals as tight as possible to hold everything in place when taken out of the envelope by the recipient. For mailing, you should be aware that you may need to pay extra for postage if you included all these components (especially wax seals). Ours ended up slightly over the weight threshold and required a 2nd stamp. Regarding hand-canceling, I personally would skip it. We did it and it did not prevent us from having ugly machine marks on our invitations haha

If you made it this far you should have some professional looking invitations that didn't break the bank! I hope this is helpful to some people and let me know if you have any other questions