Do It Yourself Project #3: Wedding Invitations - Part 2

After what has felt like forever, the invitations are FINALLY ready to fly free! Printing them myself, while it has saved me a great deal of money, has also presented a vast array of DIY challenges that I had not expected. 


As I've mentioned before, I purchased pre-made invitation kits with the intention of augmenting the existing design with an addition of my own. This process took fucking shitloads a lot of time and trial and error to complete, so I would ideally suggest you find a pre-made invitation kit with a design you like. If you can't do that, try to add a design of  your own using photoshop that isn't borderless. This will be fairly easy. 


If you have to have a borderless design, like I did, make sure that your photoshop skills are up to the task and begin the tedious process of printing a borderless design onto teeny pieces of pre-cut paper. You'll find that while you at first appreciated that you didn't have to cut out your RSVP, Hotel Accommodation and Direction cards, printing is a LOT easier on a nice normal sized sheet of paper.  


Most little cards come in the "cabinet" paper size, which you then split in half, and to print borderlessly on them you'll need your printer to be capable of printing the "borderless cabinet" page size. If this size is not an option, most printers will not be open to printing a custom size borderlessly. After calling all of my friends and family, only one person had a printer capable of printing the borderless cabinet so I spent an evening camped out in her office until 4am printing all the insert cards. 


In the end, I'm very happy with the result. I had to let go of a little anal retentiveness and not obsessively measure the margin of each card, but the invitations look fantastic, certainly more expensive than the $170 I spent on them. Knowing what I do now I would still do it again, though I might invest in my own borderless cabinet friendly printer so I could take my time with the process :)


Part one of the invitation tutorial can be found here