Wedding Invites: to DIY, or not to DIY?

Good morning!

Well, I hope you all will bear with me over wedding posts-- I'm still chipping away with glacial speed at some of the minutiae and blank spaces still left on my "To Do" list for the big day this fall. It's on my mind! Invites are the top of the priority pyramid at the moment. Even though a late September wedding would warrant a mid-to-late-August invite, if the last couple of months have been any kind of indicator, that mile marker will be upon us before I know it! One of the questions I've been grappling with lately with regards to decision making on that front-- do I DIY? Do I dare?

While I'm not looking for anything this elaborate,
OH MY GOODNESS, what a cute wedding invitation! (source)

I know the key mantra to keep in mind is the "It's your wedding, you do it the way you want". But what do I want?! I am reminded of the thunderclap like moment of realization I had in the greeting card aisle at Kroger, several mother's days ago, that there were as many different kinds of cards as there were kinds of moms. In the winnowing of the candidates, cards about booze, farm humor, male strippers, were all out. Cards with weird, treacly sentiments splashed across a background of glitter were out, and ditto on the singing cards (she would hate how much I spent on it enough to hate the card!)...how long would it take me to negotiate my own schema of my mom into Hallmark's idea of moms, standing two aisles down from the cleaning products and about ten minutes from being late to a family gathering on the holiday? This is a lot like what I'm doing now with the wedding planning, except on a GRAND scale. So many different types of brides! I know who I am and what I like, but how do I incorporate that into this big stakes wedding thingamado?

I lo-o-o-ove this....I honestly lo-o-o-ove this..imagine a less tree,
more twenties'/thirties'  novelty vibe with this one. (source plus DIY instructions!)

I'm torn between wanting some firecracker of an invite, something people would do a fist pump and a Kool-Aid man "OH YEAH!" to, and something just as plain and formal as one's grandmother's stationery. Oh, the dichotomy in this beating heart. Secretly, I should leave it up to Matthew and it would probably be a series of vintage robot trading cards with our event info scribbled on the back. The more I think about it, the more I unsecretly love this idea:

Maybe I could do this for a boys'-night-in retro video gaming night...
wouldn't that be cute? (source)

Can I incorporate these into the design somehow so's I can justify buying them? File this under "how I am effectively distracted from looking for more vintage-inspired wedding invites". (from this shop)

Here's a sample of the kinds of things I've been kicking around the old idea ranch. My mom saw these, complimented me on how cute they were, and then offered to pay for "real" invitations. She loves me, but I think she's worried people will think we're throwing a kegger rather than a real wedding with invitations likes these. What are your thoughts? I think these images, on a really nice cardstock of my choosing with the help of the Rivergate Fed Ex Office Store staff (they helped me make my Save the Dates, a tough act for the wedding invites to follow!), this could be chic enough, right?

You may have noticed on the sidebars and header of this blog that I love, LOVE, LOVE cut-up style collages. The flip side (minus the parents information and the address and some other miscellaneous text) would look like this:

And the RSVP would look like this (the other side with our address and the return address is in a similar black and white mode):

The flipside text part I'm nuts about, the RSVP card I'm nuts about...I haven't quite decided if the front of the invite lives up to the wow factor of the other pieces. It might yet need tinkering. I may replace the photos of Matthew and I with illustrations of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. I may take some special photos of us in scandal-sheet/tabloid style looks of surprise in black and white. For the meantime, those photos serve as place holders for the real deal.

Now seriously! I need your opinion! If you were me, would you use these cutup pieces? Are these too "informal" for what I'm going for, or do they kind of capture the spirit of my goofy little aesthetic? What did you do/have you thought of doing for your wedding invitations?

All right, all right, I promise to shuddup about wedding worries for the rest of the week at least. But that doesn't mean I won't be thinking about it! :) Have a great Wednesday (we're halfway to the weekend!) and I'll see you tomorrow.

PS: I forgot to mention yesterday, in talking of Tammy and George, that I suggested we perform "The Ceremony" at our wedding in lieu of a traditional vows. Now, THAT would probably put my mom over the edge, but it cracks me up every time I think about it, so I thought I would share: