With The Master Wedding Planning Guide your day is GUARANTEEDDo-It-Yourself Wedding Invitations Save Money
January 4, 2011 by Wedding Gal
Filed under Featured, Wedding Invitations, Wedding Planning
Your wedding invitations are crucial. They create your wedding’s first impression to family and friends and set the tone for the festivities to come. They should reflect your wedding’s theme and level of formality. Ideally, they impress and intrigue, and kept in a scrapbook or album can continue to do so for many years.
Start at your local craft store. You’ll find tons of ways to express your chosen colors and motifs. Wedding invitation kits are widely available and will save you the time of buying components separately. If you wish to choose your own elements, check out the specialty paper selection – elegant invitation papers include vellum, linen paper, mulberry paper, and parchment. For card-style invitations, pick a heavy weight paper like cardstock for the outside card and a thin paper in a complementary color for your inserts. Be sure that whatever you plan to print on will work with your printer’s ink type and fit in the feed tray. Buy more than enough sheets to complete your project, inevitably you’ll have to trash a few. And don’t forget the envelopes!
Another option is to have your designs printed and cut for you at your local copy shop. You can print your design on a sheet of white paper (called a “proof”) for copying, or you can burn it onto a data CD as an Adobe file (.pdf) and have it printed digitally for better clarity. Visit the copy shop before you start designing to familiarize yourself with their paper options and find out about prices, completion times, and any guidelines concerning your chosen format. Keep in mind that color copies are more expensive than having a black-and-white design printed on specialty paper – which you can take home and customize with stamps, punches, and cutters.
Paper punches, stencils, and rubber stamps can be used on invitations, RSVP cards, and envelopes, re-used for matching programs, placecards and favors, then re-used again after the wedding to make photo albums. Choose two or three that compliment your theme and each other, including one for edges and borders.Be advised that these wear out, some more quickly than others. If you find something that you must have on all 75 invitations, 200 programs, 200 placecards etc, it’s a good idea to buy several, especially if they’re inexpensive. Inkpads, paint, and fabric paint are available in a dazzling array of colors and finishes. If you plan to reuse rubber stamps, pick up some stamp cleaner too.
A paper trimmer makes quick work of multiple cuts and can be fitted with a scoring blade for straight smooth folds, or blades that cut decorative edges. It’s an invaluable tool for any desktop publisher. How about waves along the edge of your turquoise or sand-beige beach wedding invitations? Use a gold inkpad to stamp a sun in the upper right corner and a shell-shaped paper punch in the bottom corners (save the paper shells as they are punched out, to sprinkle around or glue onto stuff).
Use the same edge cutter or rolling stamp to make matching envelopes! Embellish the edge and/or corners of the adhesive flap before sealing, leaving plenty of adhesive in place to ensure a secure seal. Keep the cut-off pieces to adorn something else.
For the text, choose a font that compliments the “feel” of your theme. For contemporary, pick a sleek, clean font, maybe one that’s all capital letters. Use script for a more traditional or formal impression. There are even fonts that look like calligraphy. If you don’t see one you like, look online for free and low-cost fonts you can download. If you choose an ornate font, ensure that it can be read easily by asking a few folks to read a sample.
Look at other wedding invitations to determine the wording you wish to use. There are lots of ways to say “please come to our wedding”–find one that feels right to you and complements your theme and the mood you want to evoke. Vary the font size and character spacing: use bigger text and/or wider spacing for the info you want people to see first, like your names (full, including middle names and any suffixes like “Jr.” or “III”) and the date and location of your wedding. It’s traditional to spell out the numbers, as in: “on the sixteenth day of December/two thousand and ten/at seven o’clock in the evening”. (The slashes represent line breaks.)
If your ceremony and reception are at the same location, put the words “reception to follow”. If you want guests to sport any specific kind of clothing, such as formal black-tie attire (tuxes and gowns), say so. Have someone read the invitation aloud to you to make sure your text sounds appropriate, natural and gracious.
Repondez s’il vous plait! It’s French for “respond if you please,” better known as “RSVP,” and it’s “de rigeur” (expected) for wedding invitations. You will probably want to include this at the bottom of your invites, along with your specified reply deadline.
Design your RSVP cards small enough to fit inside your invitations. Give guests options of “Will attend” or “Regretfully decline”. Designate spaces to specify number of attending guests and meal preferences if needed. Be sure to include small stamped self-addressed envelopes (use your printer to put your address).
An alternative to RSVP cards is online RSVP via e-mail. Many wedding websites offer it free, and they can automatically track guests’ responses and compile a guest list for you. If your family is “techno-savvy” it saves a whole lot of time, money, and paper.
A stamp or seal on the envelope’s flap after sealing is an elegant finish, ensuring that your invites will be received with due excitement. When you have completed a prototype invitation, take it to the Post Office and have it weighed to determine how much postage you will need. You can buy wedding-themed stamps or have custom stamps made with your own image for additional cost.
Photo by Jonathan Vo
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A friend of mine thought DIY invitations would be a great idea. Turned out to be a giant cluster. She couldn’t center the wording, the wording flaked off, and she bitched all month about how hard it was to cut out all the cards. And then the response cards kept getting returned to people because they weren’t big enough. Glad I bought mine.
DIY invitations are a great way to save money if you’re on a tight budget but you also have to consider the drawbacks. DIY invitations may seem like a good idea but you have to consider the time it will take to finish the project and the cost of supplies. The cost of paper, ink, envelopes, embellishments, etc can really add up and before you know it you end up spending as much as you would have if you outsourced the work to a professional.