The invitations are nearly assembled and I love how they turned out. Sure I would have liked gorgeous letterpress invitations on creamy thick paper … but the price was too dear. My favorite part about these invitations is that my fabulous friends / wedding elves helped me make them over a few evenings, some wine, some beer and lots of chatter. My second favorite part is how much money we saved. Have I mentioned how nice it is to have an almost vendor-free wedding planning process?
Here’s what we did:
- The invitation is crafted from two pieces of 80lb cardstock (cut in half so that one piece of paper made two invitations) tied together with raffia. The background is metallic lagoon and the text overlay is aquamarine metallic. Both pieces have just a bit of shimmer. The text was laser printed two per page onto a regular sheet of printer paper and then photocopied (!) onto the invitation. We used a paper cutter we already owned to cut the darker blue sheets in half and then trim a quarter inch all around and cut in half the lighter blue. Two small holes punched into each piece allowed us to thread a thin piece of natural-colored raffia through and make a simple bow. Just below the bow we glued a tiny starfish.
- The response card was designed as a self mailing postcard. On the front is a color photocopy of a vintage postcard from Ocean City. We used Photoshop to change the text from “Greetings from” Ocean City to “A Wedding In” Ocean City. The vintage image was printed four per page on some leftover cardstock from some long-forgotten craft project. The back is the actual response portion. There are three events that require responses for our wedding and we decided to include all three events on the same response cards without issuing separate invitations for each event. We added “Number attending” to the Welcome Dinner and Bagel Brunch events because children are invited to attend those events, but not the actual wedding and reception. Again, I printed the response cards four per page on the darker blue cardstock. Everything was trimmed on the paper cutter.
- The insert is a half sheet of the lighter blue cardstock printed and photocopied like the invitation and response card.
- The envelope is the same aquamarine metallic. The paper and the envelopes were ordered from www.actionenvelope.com which has a lovely assortment of colors and decent prices.
- I ordered an address embosser from www.expressionery.com to stamp the return address onto the envelope flap. It has not come yet – I selected the 10 day free shipping method and had a 40 percent off coupon. Wahoo!
- I am going to make address labels that coordinate with the colors and design of the invitation for the outside of the envelope – we aren’t actually addressing for another 6 weeks, though (in case anyone moves, etc.).
As I mentioned, the cost of these DIY invitations is pretty hard to beat. We made 76 invitations for the following costs:
- Lagoon invitation paper - $15.96
- Aquamarine invitation paper - $11.36
- Lagoon response card - $7.96
- Aquamarine insert card - $11.36
- Envelopes - $15.92
- Starfish - $12
I already had the raffia and the plain white cardstock used for the vintage postcard image. That brings the total cost for the invitation to $74.50 – or about $.98 per invitation.
That’s right – less than $1 per piece for custom-designed, handmade invitations.
The labels will increase the cost a little (not significantly), and of course there is the postage that has to be accounted for ($.59 per invitation and $.27 per response card). We could save money by hand addressing all the invitations, but I love the idea of creating a label that works with the overall theme and design elements. Miss Sushi, one of the WeddingBee bloggers, made some that I just loved and I decided it would work well for us, too. I plan to use the address embosser for the Thank You cards and next year’s Christmas cards as well (provided we do not move I’ll emboss every item we send in the mail!) – so the $16 I spent on the embosser can be shared across multiple projects. I had to order the paper and envelopes in quantities of 50, but I have other projects that require the same paper, so it will not be wasted.
Here’s the working idea I have for label right now. I am going to keep playing around a little, but I like the way it’s looking so far.
