Once engaged, we knew that we would be creating our own wedding invitations to both keep costs down and to create a truly unique wedding invitation. Now that we have finally sent all our wedding invitations, we have come to the conclusion that making our own wedding invitations was a really bad idea.
We started making our wedding invitations in October, and it took until the end of January for every invitation to be printed, backed onto card, addressed and posted (or hand delivered). I don’t think we saved any money by doing it ourselves, and it was an incredibly stressful process.
The process
We started by hand drawing a few ideas and then popping onto Photoshop to create them. If you don’t have Photoshop, then Canva, a web based program, is really useful – and they have templates available for you to choose from. Once we decided on a final design, we printed an example – and found that our sizes were wrong, the quality wasn’t good enough and some text was chopped off. So back to the drawing board, we finally created something that we were happy with.
I was extremely adamant that we would not hand write guests’ names on the invitations, which meant having to create individual image files for every guest, couple or family. In hindsight we should have just hand written the names, as this took a lot of time.
We created 4 different things – the main invitation (with a slight adaptation for evening guests), the RSVP and our address to create a postcard and useful information, which contained information about nearby hotels and taxis. Once printed, we began the lengthy task of cutting them to size (a5 and a6) and then sticking them on to coloured cardboard. We also stamped each envelope with a heart and hand wrote the addresses.
The tools & costs
We thought that making our own wedding invitations would save us money. We had to buy the following materials:
Printer ink – £25
Printer paper – free (we had some good quality paper left over)
Coloured cardboard – £10
Envelopes – £7.50
Heart stamp – £5
Red ink – £4
Distressed markers – £11
Pritt – £2.77
Guillotine – £16.56
Total cost: £81.83 – plus a lot of stress. This made 36 day invitations and 30 evening invitations, making them just under £1.24 each.
The positives
Although I remember it as a really stressful time, there were still lots of advantages to making our own wedding invitations:
- Completely customised – we were able to incorporate our wedding theme and an element of “us” into our wedding invitations – as you can see below with our RSVP cards.
- The fun – yes, it was stressful, yes, it took a long time. But we did it together, and that was fun.
- We were able to include extras like an RSVP card and useful information (hotels and taxis).
- We were able to print any more when needed – our guest list changed a bit throughout the process, and being able to easily change evening guests to full day guests or vice versa was great.
Wedding invitations
There are some stunning wedding invitations out there. Here are a few affordable ones I have found.
Ticket to love – £1.18 at Paperthemes.
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Leanne Cornelius says
Sorry to hear you found it so stressful, they look great though!
We made our own, but I say ‘we’ very loosely. Hubby’s friend is a graphic designer so I roughly designed what I wanted and he edited them. I then asked a guy who does the printing for the office where I work for a quote and he printed them for us free of charge, all cut into size ready.
I decided to hold the invite, RSVP, hotel details, etc together with a luggage tag, I used address labels to print out the person’s name and stick it onto the luggage tag. The only effort I really had was punching all of the invites (I used a small heart shaped punch and it was tough getting it through the quality card!) and writing addresses on the labels.
I was pretty lucky with who I knew though!
Leanne – A Slice of My Life
Katy @ Katykicker.com says
Shame that you didn’t save any money really but they look lovely anyway!