my 1st DIY: the invitation

I started making the invitations early in the preparations. I had so much time to kill while staying in Woodland, CA with my parents and decided to design the basic lay-out for the invites. I made 5 examples at first and emailed them to Tommee to get his feedback. When he made his choice, I tweaked it around a bit and ended up with 5 more. I wanted something simple and casual, Tommee wanted something simple and elegant and I came up with this:

When I finally showed this to him, I could tell he loved it. As you can see, this is where I first used the monogram.

Fast-forward to last month, after meeting with our printers (Tommee's tito), they suggested that we use a turquoise border instead of black because it's too elegant for a beach wedding. We loved the idea (a little embarrassing for me because I'm a graphic artist and I didn't even consider that point.. tsk tsk) and we also decided to have the monogram embossed to make it stand out more, and this is the final product:

Last week, the invitations arrived. I have to admit that the color they used as turquoise turned out more cyan, but it's ok.. no biggie.. it still looked good anyway. 

plus, we got free stickers for the envelope seal. A mini version of our monogram.

Photos courtesy of my Canon Ixus 60

*** I am so bad. I completely forgot to give credit to our printers. Thanks to Tito Bert of Txt & EMeydz.

UPDATE:

I've finally addressed all the invitations and have started to distribute them. Here's the final outcome:

our beachy wedding

Even before I knew our wedding was going to be at the beach, I knew that I would be using turquoise as one of my theme colors. 

Aquamarine is my 2nd favorite color and my birth stone.

I needed something to neutralize these bright colors, so I decided to add Ivory.

and because I'm such a nice fiancée (hehe), I wanted to incorporate Tommee's favorite color, too. (good thing this goes with anything..) 

so, our color motif is Turquoise, Aquamarine, and Ivory with touches of black..