Inviations: DIY or buy ready made?

I started looking for wedding dresses back in the summer of 2007. One of the results was to get uninvited advertisement in our mailbox regarding wedding invitations, tacky favors and suits rental.
As I glanced through the thick invitation booklet, it quickly became obvious to me that this was not what we wanted. It just didn't match us.
Therefore after talking with Hubby we decided to go the DIY way. We still needed some inspiration.

My first inspiration came from the little package a photograph gave me at a local Wedding Show. It was simple, square and brown with a little ribbon and a star sticker:
It open up as one of those pocket folders which looks great but seemed too complicated for me. However I liked the idea of the shape and the color matching my color theme.
With bit of paper left over available I drafter a first idea:My though was to use a card stock brown paper in place of the back one, have a copper colored ribbon in place of the raffia, and use a fake oak leaf in the middle to decorate. The outside two flaps would open up to a simple ivory square on which the invitation would be printed.

So I started looking around for paper I could use for our invitations. My first visits at Michael's and A.C. Moore were close to fruitless. They had a few things, but the price and size of the paper sheets would have made our invitations completely out of budget. I knew there were many more places to look at so I put the project aside and worked on other things. As time went buy I reviewed my ideas on the invitation and decided to turn it 90 degrees so the ribbon would actually keep the flaps closed. I couldn't seem to find the leaves I wanted and pretty much gave up on that too. All my ideas seemed more and more impossible, I couldn't find anywhere a chocolate colored paper that would be warm enough to say: party!
I even considered buying ready made invitations to print at home at that point, because I knew that if I couldn't find the right paper then it was worthless to take the time to work on a DIY project, however much Hubby loved my ideas.

I didn't think again about our invitations for a while and focused on other parts of the wedding planning instead. When I went back to it, I needed fresh inspirations, so I looked around the web for ready made products, which is how I came upon: www.invitesite.com/
I fell in love with their style, the natural looking invitation that fitted our theme so perfectly, the papers they used had texture and I was inspired again.
Not only that, but they had a link to a couple's FlickR album with what they made out of their Carmine product.
It was so beautiful. Had it not been for our budget I think I would have bought either the Beatrice or the Carmine invitations. However we could not afford it.
It did help though because not only did I found inspiration, but I also had names of papers to look for and knew that I wanted something with more texture than a simple cardstock. I was back on the DIY project.