After months of dabbling, sketching, and designing, our wedding invites are finally printed, stuffed and on their way. With the help of Bold American in the wedding decor department, our wedding DIY projects have been quite minimal, which for this self-proclaimed DIY addict was a bit of a surprise. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been without any DIY-ness. I decided pretty early on that I wanted to take on our invitation suite myself. This escalated into a multi-month love/hate relationship with hundreds of envelopes, ink and hours in Adobe Creative Suite. Last week it all paid off, when these beauties arrived from Wedding Paper Divas. I’m still gushing over here as to how they turned out. For the script, I knew I wanted to use my own calligraphy, as I had already invested in classes, practice and all of those envelopes. So how hard could digitizing handwriting be? Well, it turns out very. Basically, it goes from scanning at a very high resolution, cleaning everything up in Photoshop and finally vertorizing the image in Illustrator. I found a few great tutorials online, including this one, but it turned out Molly Thorpe’s Skillshare class was my saving grace. I already have her book, and swear by it for letter variations, so it didn’t come as a surprise that the class did not disappoint. Here’s a handy dandy gif to show the difference in each step. It took some getting used to, but I found the more time spent in Photoshop, the less I spent in Illustrator. To get the thicker downstrokes I was looking for, I found it required a very flexible nib and then a setting in Illustrator that would allow me to use the live paint bucket tool. For the actual design, I knew I wanted to compliment the navy envelopes I had ordered from Paper and More months earlier (to give myself time to actually hand address 250 envelopes for the first time), and I was thrilled when I came across this Photoshop brush set from Creature Comforts that was exactly what I envisioned to pull in our gold, navy and fall theme. From there, everything came together pretty quickly and while I already adored Wedding Paper Divas from our Save the Dates, I was excited to learn they have an upload your own design service in addition to their beautiful designs.

Whew, mark this one in the done category. A very big, flourished and inked check mark. Two months to go!

Disclaimer: a big thank you goes out to the team at Wedding Paper Divas for providing me with the printed invitation suite free of charge. However, all opinions, excitement and love is 100% authentic and my own.