Practice Makes Perfect - DIY Rehearsal Invitations

I love paper. I love paper products. I love how much paper I get to play with for our wedding. Our invitations were streamlined, simple, and graphic. I wanted a more fun invitation for our rehearsal dinner since it will be a laid back, fun evening. I took inspiration from this:

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Using Adobe Illustrator, I started playing with fonts and borders to create the invite. Then the fun stuff: the map. I have a love/hate relationship with map making. I hate doing it, but when it's done I feel so satisfied and proud of myself! Basically I just take a screen shot of a Google map, then trace it with the pencil tool in Illustrator. I nudge around the lines via the anchor points until it looks right and then add in the text for the street names. It some times involves a lot of swearing, but it gets done. I also copied the street directions directly from the venue website which helped a lot. So voila! Here they are!

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Of course, me being me, I can't stop there. I bought some rolls of craft paper super duper on sale and used my handy Martha Stewart Scoreboard with its envelope guide and made me some envelopes! Then I scored the folds into my invite and map pages, folded those bad boys up together and tied with pretty red bakers twine. 

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Before I sealed them up I embossed the back flap with our address and our wedding logo. I tried to address the front a bit funky and neat since the invites are so much fun!

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I'm loving the Roadside Attraction stamp series Canada Post has out right now. They're adorable and remind me so much of our roadtrip to the East coast that my dad Dan one of the men in my life proposed at the beginning of! All in all, this project probably took me a day between the layouts, fighting with the maps, and making envelopes. I think it's worth it :)