The Invitations – Part Two

Today I’ll describe how we made our invitations. Do-it-yourself wedding invitations may be found online, in office supply stores, and even in some “big box” stores. We found a decent selection of DIY invitations in craft stores too, and they had a variety of crafting accessories we could use to make our invitations completely unique. Again, we watched for sales and used coupons to purchase everything.

The invitations we used were produced by Gartner Studios. Each box of 40 invitations cost about $22 after we used our coupons. We bought four boxes so our total for 160 invites = $88.

The box of DIY invitations came with printable invitations and response cards, a backing piece with die-cut invitation holders, ribbon, and envelopes for both the invitations and response cards. My daughter did not want to use the ribbon which made assembling the cards that much easier. While I thought the ribbon would’ve looked lovely, and there are many ways to add ribbon accents to an invitation besides tying a bow, it was one less thing to thread through tiny holes and one less bulky thing to try and stuff into an envelope.

Using the online templates provided by the manufacturer we filled in our invitation information and printed up the invites on my home printer. When all was said and done, we had only about a dozen invitations that were not usable due to smudging or misalignment. I’ll estimate the cost of ink at $75.

We also purchased a die punch for $18 and die-cut an oak leaf in the bottom left hand corner of the invitation. We backed it with a small square of marbleized, hunter green scrapbook paper to add a little three-dimensional look. We’d seen this done on the fancy professionally made invitations and liked the idea. The paper cost $4 each and we used two of them. The tape we used to tape things in place cost $4. Total for invitations so far = $193.

Creative note: there are so many beautiful die punches and stamps available in craft stores these days a bride can customize her invitations in many ways and it’s neither difficult or expensive to do. There is also a wide variety of craft paper, foil, and vellum that she can use to back a die cut or overlay an invitation. Ribbons, stickers, and press-on jewels are other things a bride might consider to add distinctiveness to her invitation.

We had limited space on the invite in which to fit the wedding ceremony information and a Bible verse chosen by the couple. It took an hour or so of playing with font sizes before we arranged all the information onto the invite so that it didn’t look cluttered or cramped.

Happily, since we didn’t intend to include response cards, we took the blanks provided and printed the reception and R.s.v.p. information on them instead. We included this card as an insert along with the invitation. It looked like this:

For the most part our guests knew exactly what to do with the R.s.v.p. information included here.

Even at that a couple of folks wrote over the top of the reception information and mailed this informational card back to us as a response card. We scratched our heads and got a chuckle out of that.

Bottom line: postage to mail the 137 invitations was $60.28. Total cost to create and mail 137 invitations = $253.28.