If you’re interested in making your own watercolor wedding invites, we’ve got the tips for you. Follow these steps and you’ll be on your way to saving money, and feeling incredibly proud that YOU made these beauties yourself!

How to Make Simple DIY Watercolor Wedding Stationary

Designing and making these particular wedding invitations takes a lot more time than it takes skill. Once you have the materials and a plan, you can easily complete these over a period of weeks working on each step for some time each day. By the end you wont believe that these were a DIY project!

Step 1: Design the Print Part of the Invite

There are a lot of small details (think: spacing, font, size, etc.) that make an invitation look polished and clean. The bad news is that when you are designing your own wedding invitations, you’ll need to make those decisions yourself. The good news is that the internet is full of examples to look at and use as inspiration.

You can totally use a simple program like Microsoft Publisher. If you are a designer, you will cringe, but at the end of the day, you can make something that looks pretty legit without having expertise or expensive tools.

**IMPORTANT: If you plan on adding color or designs to the edges of your DIY invitations, be sure to leave space at the top and bottom, and potentially on the sides.

**EVEN MORE IMPORTANT: Have at least 5 people read through the invitations before you deem them complete and ready to print. Typos happen and they are the worst!

Step 2: Gather the Crafting Materials

Once the invitations are designed on the computer and are ready to be printed, you’ll need to gather the rest of the materials for printing and painting.

The four most important supplies for watercolor wedding invitations:

1. Watercolor Paper
2. Watercolor Paints
3. Watercolor Paint Brushes
4. A Paper Cutter

Step 3: Print the Invites

The next step is some pretty tedious printing. If you need to, trim your watercolor paper so it fits into your printer, and be prepared (unless you have a really nice printer) to feed the paper into it only a few sheets at a time. If you’re printing on the front and back, you’ll have to do this process twice!

This is definitely the least exciting and most time-consuming part of the whole process—if you can get through this part, you’re good to go!

Step 4: Paint the Stationary

It might seem natural to cut out the invitations after they are printed, but don’t do it! The key to the watercolor look is to take the paint across the paper and right off the edge. Leave the invitations (2 per sheet) on the paper and paint the swipes of watercolor across the top and bottom, before setting them aside to dry.

if you have any pieces like a menu or RSVP that don’t have writing on the front and back, you can use the same method to pant swipes across the back for added color.

Don’t focus on making things look perfect. Just swipe back and forth—you’ll love how it looks once you get to cut them out!

Step 5: Flatten & Cut the Invitations

Once the individual sheets have dried completely, you may notice that they are a little wavy (or more than a little, if your paper was on the thin side). This is no big deal, but you’ll want to flatten them out before you cut them. If you don’t want to spend a lot of time worrying about it, you can totally just stack some invites and set some heavy books on top of them for a couple days.

After you take the flattened, water-colored sheets of invitations out from under the books, it’s time to cut them out. It’s all about carefully lining up the paper cutter’s blade and taking the excess paper off from around the invitations. This is where the watercolor swipes will really start to look gorgeous!

Step 6: Assemble the Invitation Pieces

After all the invitations are cut out and stacked up, take some time to consider how you’d like to assembled them. Some people tuck them into pockets, but I love the idea of wrapping the invitation pieces sheets with a ribbon, using a stamped piece of paper as the “belt buckle” holding the ribbon together.

Step 7: Address & Send the Wedding Invites

Finally, it will be time to stuff the envelopes, put on the stamps, and address them. If you are not confident in your own handwriting, find a friend or family member to help you write out addresses. To save time, you might consider having your return address made into a ready-ink stamp!

In the end, you can save some serious cash by spending your own time and energy to put invitations together. It may be a huge project, but it will be so fun to send guests something unique and handmade.

7 Tips You NEED to Know if You’re Making Your Own Wedding Invites

Hey, it’s Em! These are my additional tips for those of you considering making your own wedding invites. It’s not a difficult process. It’s mostly time consuming. If you’re lucky there will be people excited to help! Here are 7 tips for DIY wedding invitations that I’d use if I could do it all over again:

1. Keep it Simple: When it comes to details on a wedding invite, remember that the information is the most important part. Keep the rest simple and you’ll decrease your stress and keep yourself from an over-the-top look.
2. Don’t Focus on Perfection: When you’re making something yourself, you shouldn’t aim for perfection. If it looks like you made it, that can be a great thing! It means so much more to receive something handmade, and any small imperfections make it unique.
3. Be Flexible: If you get to a certain part of the project and run into a problem or have to change direction a little bit, don’t lose your mind. It’s all good. Find a solution that works and run with it. Nobody will know it wasn’t the way you wanted it to be and it might even turn out better than you planned.
4. More is Better: Make a few more than you need, order a bit more paper than you need, have extra paint brushes on hand, etc. You never know what will happen and it’s better to avoid last-minute orders or runs to the store.
5. Avoid Comparing: One of the great things about invitations is that you’re usually only sending one to each guest household. This means that if some are cuter than others, or your paper cutter took a little too much off an invite or two, nobody will know. People don’t compare their invitations. So don’t worry if a few end up a little wonky.
6. Enjoy Your Style: You might look at your invitations and think that they are less stylish or trendy than some of the ones for sale online, but they are uniquely yours. Enjoy that what you made fits your style. Do yourself a favor and stop looking at the trendy options online. They all start to blend together anyway!
7. Remember Retro Weddings: At the end of the day, wedding stuff will look dorky in a few decades. Old wedding photos and invitations look retro and goofy to us now. Everything we do now will have that same appeal to future generations. Relax and enjoy the fun of planning your “big day” without worrying about what anyone else thinks.

Are you considering making your own wedding invitations? Do you have any questions about how I made these? I would love to hear from you in the comments!