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



Wedding Invitations:


Product: Brides Collection Invitations - black and white
Company: Michaels
Coupon: 40% off coupon - check your local paper, it's one per item per person so bring a lot of friends!
Cost: $87.76 for 120 invitation kits


Product: Brides Collection All Purpose Cards - black and white
Company: Michaels
Coupon: Same 40% off coupon
Cost: $24.69 for 120 additional insert cards with envelopes

Product: Cornflower Blue Satin Edged Ribbon

Company: Michaels

Coupon: Same 40% off coupon though we didn't use them since the purchase was so small
Cost: $8.17 for 5 spools

Product: Blue Feather Outer Envelopes, size 5.5 x 7.5

Company: Paper Presentation 

Coupon: Sadly None
Cost: $42.69 for 125 envelopes with shipping


Product: Pacific Blue Tissue Paper

Company: Paper Mart 

Coupon: Sadly None
Cost: $3.60 - we bought a HUGE box to make pomanders and used just a handful of sheets for the invites. The entire box (480 sheets) was $30.58

Invitation Total: $170.00 plus postage (which was a whopping $108.00)


As you already know, this is what the kit comes with:

(Source)

Before you buy your kits, inspect them! Open them up in the store if you have to and make sure EVERYTHING is included. I've heard that sometimes things can be missing or the paper might be different. However you do it, make sure your boxes are all the same and have everything they should.

The Invitation Assembly Line

Once you have all your pieces printed, allowing for about 10-20 test pages/duds, you're ready to assemble. Recruit as many slave laborers friends as possible and have them assemble, tissue, stamp, and stuff the invitations. I used the knot guest list manager to keep track of all my guests and mark whether their invitations had been sent.

The completed suite with tissue paper 

As you can see, we added tissue paper to prevent the black pocket from rubbing off on the white invitation. We just used the same tissue we bought for pomanders. 

The completed suite with tissue removed 

The insert cards

You'll notice upon careful observation that we have committed a MAJOR wedding faux pas. My mother sent out my bridal shower invitations and accidentally forgot to include the registry information (or an RSVP date for that matter....). Because of this, we've received numerous angry phone calls from people requesting that we include the information in the invitation to make it easier for them. Although this was previously a HUGE no no, times are changing and at this point I feel like it's a crowd specific decision. I've heard the argument "times change but etiquette doesn't" but I don't feel like it applies here since we no longer live in a society where people will call your mother/grandmother/maid of honor to ask which of the two stores you're registered with. We no longer pick out our china patterns at twelve and the big ticket item on our registry is now a vacuum not a hope chest. So, aside from that moral dilemma, our invitations are done and they went to the post office today!

Somehow sending the invites out makes everything feel more real. People will actually be coming and we will actually be getting married.  Who knew all this work would have a pay off!