Tuesday, November 19, 2013

THE | INVITATIONS

All of the stationary for our wedding, including invitations, programs, menu cards & name cards were designed & printed by me, and then cut, folded & stuffed by me & my family or bridesmaids.  I can't even express how much this helped us to be able to stay in our budget - and make sure that every piece of stationary fit our theme and personalities as well.

THE | INVITATIONS

I used Photoshop to create my documents, but there is a similar program that you can use online for free called PIXLR that can really help out with projects like this.

Most of the items were printed myself using my home laser printer - I only used an outside source for our invitations and went through staples via VistaPrint.  Keep an eye out for online deals for VistaPrint - they usually have 25-40% off on orders and for some products, free matching envelopes!


FOOD | FOR | THOUGHT:

Here's something I've never understood.  What is with the square shaped invitations that seem to get thicker every year... with tissue paper, engraved print and an unnecessary amount of inner envelopes with hand printed calligraphy?  Honestly I feel like this is just an excuse to make brides pay too much money to invite the people they love to come to their wedding.  I think they are beautiful and elegant, don't get me wrong - but I would just rather use that money for a bigger part of my wedding.

According to the US Post Office, you'll incur an additional $0.13 surcharge on one oz. or less envelopes if any one of the following apply:
  • It is a square letter
  • It contains very rigid items such as wood or metal
  • It has clasps, string, buttons, or similar closure devices
  • It has an address parallel to the shorter dimension of the letter
  • It contains items such as pens that cause the surface to be uneven
  • The length divided by height is less than 1.3 or more than 2.5

OUR | DESIGN

OK.  Here is what your guests absolutely need to know:
  - who is getting married to who
  - when the wedding date is
  - what time the ceremony is & the location
  - is there a reception to follow?  when & where
  - RSVP by date & contact person
  - hotel accommodations?
  - RSVP card & stamped return envelope
  - directions  (optional... 99% of people will just use GPS anyways)

What I decided to do was create an 8.5 x 11 image that could be printed on one normal sized sheet of (nice) cardstock paper, with cut lines so each sheet of paper included our invitation information, reply card, hotel information, directions - and even had room for an "attire card" since we encouraged all of our guests to dress to our 1920s theme.

Here's what it looked like:


HOW IT WAS PRINTED

HOW IT WAS CUT OUT

And here's the kicker - because I designed the invitations in thirds - once all the parts were cut out, they all compacted down to fit in a regular, #10 sized envelope... which means only 1 stamp per envelope!  YAY!

You can find "fancy" #10 envelopes at most office supply stores.  I found ours at Office Depot:





I also found "reply card" envelopes from Office depot that fit inside the #10 envelopes.  If you are choosing to do this for your invites, make sure you design the reply card to fit inside the reply card envelope!  They were just plain, ivory colored 4x6" envelopes.




The hardest part was printing each envelope.  However, I was willing to put in the extra work to make them look nice because I knew it was helping us to save money to put towards another part of our wedding.  I created a 4 x 9.25" image using Photoshop, and then only had to change the name & address and then save each one as a separate file.  Once I had them all saved, I selected all the files, went to print and set my paper size as a #10 envelope!  Boom!  Done.






PS - we had so much fun reading through our reply cards!!  I would definitely suggest sending something with personality - we got a ton of compliments from our guests about our invitations.   Here are all the pieces close up!










Next on the list:  THE | PROGRAMS

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