How I DIY'd My Wedding Invitations for Under $150

I'm planning my wedding in two months, which means I've had to get picky about where our money goes. Invitations were one of the first places I decided to cut.

Here's the whole breakdown of what I spent:

• Printing the invitations: $47. I designed them in Canva and had them printed front and back on one of the more expensive paper options so they'd feel a little nicer in someone's hands.
• Gold stickers from Amazon: $12.99. These seal the envelopes.
• Envelopes from Amazon: $9.99.
• Invitation jackets from Amazon. I found some really pretty ones that wrap around the whole suite.
• A little photo piece from CVS to tuck inside.
• Stamps from Costco: $38.50. A book of 100 was $77, and I only need half of them for the invitations, so I'm counting half the cost here.

Add it up and it came to $149.50 for all of our wedding invitations. I think they turned out really pretty, and it saved us hundreds compared to a traditional invitation suite.

Spending a lot of money on invitations just feels silly to me. They're literally pieces of paper that get thrown away. Maybe one person tapes ours to their fridge for a few weeks, and then it goes in the recycling with everything else.

That's not me saying nobody should splurge on them. Some people genuinely love beautiful stationery, and if that's the part of the wedding you'll remember, it makes sense to put money there. For me, the invitation was never going to be the thing I looked back on, so it was an easy place to save.

With a two-month timeline, I also didn't have the runway for a long back-and-forth with a stationer. Doing it myself meant I could design it, print it, and move on to the next thing on the list.

I didn't design anything from scratch. I opened Canva, picked one of the wedding invitation templates I liked, and customized it with our details. That was the whole process.

I did them front and back, which is what let me keep the design clean:

• The front has very little information on it. Names, the essentials, and a lot of white space.
• The back has the schedule of events for both Friday and Saturday, plus a QR code that goes to our wedding website.

The QR code did a lot of work for me. Instead of printing extra inserts for directions, dress code, registry, and hotel blocks, all of that lives on the website. One small square on the back of the card replaced a whole stack of paper I would have had to design, print, and pay postage weight for.

A single flat card can feel a little thin when someone opens the envelope, so I added two things.

First, a small photo piece from CVS. I didn't put any of our engagement photos on the invitation itself, and I still wanted people to see them, so I had them printed separately and tucked inside.

Second, the jackets from Amazon. They wrap around the invitation and the photo, so everything comes out of the envelope as one piece instead of loose cards. Between the jacket, the heavier paper, and the gold sticker sealing the envelope, it reads as a put-together suite rather than a printout.

Stamps are the cost people forget. I bought mine at Costco, where 100 were $77. I only need half of them for the invitations, so I'm counting $38.50 toward this project.

I'm also addressing all of the envelopes by hand myself. Calligraphy services exist and they're lovely, but I don't think anyone we're inviting cares whether my handwriting is professional. That's an hour or two of my own time instead of another line item.

If you're weighing DIY against ordering a suite, the things I'd actually think about are how much time you have before the mailing date, whether stationery is something you personally care about, and how many inserts you can replace with a website link. Those three answers decided it for me. They might land somewhere completely different for you.