Wow, what can I say about these invitations. Many hours and much love went into the design and creation of these invitations that we did entirely ourselves–well, all except for the envelopes–we already had enough experience making our own envelopes from our Save the Dates. :)
We cut, printed, and assembled all the pieces at home on our printer, and saved so much doing it this way. Here’s a breakdown of the materials we used.
- Paper: I was dead set on having really premium paper for our invitations. This fact alone almost stopped us from going the DIY route altogether, since cardstock you can find at stores like Michael’s, etc. just wasn’t thick enough and didn’t have that luxurious texture we were going for. I’d looked at buying paper online, but premium paper + shipping was just about as much as just printing from a place like CatPrint or VistaPrint. I ordered paper samples from both of those companies, and just wasn’t sold on either. But one day, we just happened to walk into a local art supply store, and I landed on the best paper ever: Strathmore Mixed Media Paper. It’s HEAVY at 140 lbs., with a vellum surface. One of the best things about the paper was actually the size. it came in 9×12. I’d already designed a prototype of our invites with Adobe InDesign and I knew I wanted it to be 9×4 to fit in a business size envelope (this size is called tea length). So, we could get exactly three invitations out of each sheet of paper with no waste (actually doing this was easier said than done–hence the many hours of creation time!).
- Ink: Erick found inexpensive ink for our Epson printer–about $20 for a bunch of black cartridges and a couple of sets of cyan, magenta and yellow. We didn’t even use half of it printing all our items for the whole wedding! And the quality was just as good if not better than the manufacturer’s ink that came with our printer.
- Envelopes: We went with Envelope Mall after a recommendation from my wedding coordinator, Courtney, and we couldn’t have been happier with the quality and the price. The color we chose (Carnival Pine) was exactly the color of the text we had already chosen for the invites. I’m so glad I didn’t have to spend even more time color matching inks! I also like the Envelope Mall allows you to order in smaller quantities than other bulk suppliers. We did have to over-order since we didn’t need 200 envelopes, but at least it wasn’t 500 extra or something!
- Baker’s twine: I did a lot of research on baker’s twine since I heard that some have oils or waxes in them that can stain paper. I found this great 3-ply, 100% cotton gray and white striped twine on Amazon, and it was perfect for the job. I even had a good amount left over, which I used to tie bows on our ceremony programs, really tying the whole suite together (get it? tying? lol).
Here’s what the invitation looked like all assembled. I tied better bows than this, I promise! And the RSVP card isn’t the final one, either (see above)–blah. Okay, I’ll update this photo with a better one, eventually.
As I mentioned before, we did have some issues with the actual production of these. Surprisingly enough, it was not a problem with the paper itself. Many people wonder how we printed on paper so thick, but with the rear feed option on our Epson, it was no problem to print these at all. The issues actually came from getting the art to center properly on the 4×9 paper. We couldn’t run the whole 9×12 sheet through the rear feed since it can only print up to 11 inches wide, so we had to cut the paper to 4×9 first… and that’s where the issues started. I’m too much of a perfectionist and had to have the border properly aligned–but when the printer bars grabbed the paper, somehow it kept changing on us. It took hours–actually days–of adjusting settings both on the computer and physically on the printer for us to figure this out, but eventually we got it to work! I loved the way they turned out in the end and am so happy with how much money we saved and that we got to use our custom design.
One more note I want to make before finishing up this post, and that is about a little process called hand-cancelling. Because of the baker’s twine and the little knot that formed in the center of my envelope where I tied the bow, our invitation got bumped up into the next category of postage (70 cents) since it can’t run through a standard machine. Bummer–but I was already pretty certain this would happen to us. We’d saved enough everywhere else in the process for this not to be too big of an issue. What was an issue was what our invitations looked like once they ran through the standard machine. We sent one to ourselves and the result, while not horrible, was not what I had hoped for. Running the envelope through the machine compressed everything together and dented our beautiful, thick paper with the twine–vertically, horizontally. Ugh. I had read about getting post offices to hand-cancel your postage, meaning one less trip (hopefully) through that machine (apparently you can’t do much about how the receiving post office processes mail). However, when we asked our local post office if she would do this for us–even offering to pay–the attendant flatly refused. “No one does that kind of thing anymore,” she insisted. So, I was paying extra postage because it couldn’t run through the machine, but… then they were going to run it through a machine anyway? I didn’t really get that, and she didn’t really care to explain. Maybe she was just having a bad day, or maybe it was their local policy, but I wouldn’t give up. I sent Erick to the next town over to see what he could find out, because I KNEW people still got this done. Fortunately, that post office was more than happy (and actually excited about) hand-canceling our invitations so they wouldn’t get munched by their reader. Of course, some may still have gotten damaged at the delivery location, but we saw several come through the mail just fine. Moral of the story: Make the extra effort to find a post office that will hand-cancel for you. It’s worth it to make sure your hard work doesn’t go to waste and your guests will receive the invitation the way you sent it!
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