DIY Wedding Invitations - Lessons Learned

After 9 hours straight (yes, nine long hours) of working on our wedding invitations, I finally decided to call it a night. And while brushing my teeth just minutes ago, ideas popped into my head all of the sudden of how I could have done things differently in an easier and faster way. Sadly, I'm already nearing the end of this invitation making process and won't get a chance to implement my ideas. But I thought I would share it here for other brides who are also making their own invitations.

1. Mounting the Mat and Main Invitation onto the Pocket Fold

What I Did

The design of my invitations is a basic 5 x 7 Pocket Fold with a left and right panel. Both panels have an accent base mat. The left panel has the main invitation on white paper that is mounted on the top of the base mat (the main invitation measures about 1/8" smaller on each side than the base mat) The right panel of the pocket fold are the inserts. Once my invitations are mailed, I will definitely upload a picture so you can get a better idea of what I'm talking about. Anyway, when I mounted the base mat onto the left side of the pocketfold, I basically "eyeballed" the center of the panel. This was not exactly the ideal method and of course, I was never able to perfectly align it on each side. But, I am hoping that I did a decent enough job that the imperfections aren't immediately noticed. The same "eyeballing" method was used when I mounted the Main Invitation onto the base mat yielding the same inconsistent results. Also, because I was "eyeballing", it took me forever to get it just right such that the invitation would land almost perfectly in the middle of the mat base.

What I Should Have Done

When I had my "Aha!" moment, I was happy yet angry at the same time. Happy because I had finally figured out how to properly mount the paper but angry because I had already mounted all the paper I had and couldn't re-do them. Anyways, my "Aha!" moment is pretty simple and I really don't know why I hadn't thought of it sooner. What I should have done is measure from the top of the pocketfold 1/8" and then make a faint pencil mark (just a dot or something). Then, from the left side of the pocketfold, place my ruler such than it's 1/8" from the edge. All I would have to do from here is mount the base mat flush against the ruler on the left side and align the top to the pencil mark I made. Assuming that all of my paper were pre cut by professionals, the rest of the sides should have equal spacing of 1/8" from the edge of each side of the pocketfold panel. This same process would be applied for mounting the main invitation onto the base mat.

2. Design, Print, Cut

What I Did

For some reason, I found it much easier to design everything on PowerPoint. There, I was able to fit two insert panels per page (Inserts are: Main invitation, Direction insert, Accommodation insert, Reception insert, and RSVP insert). I then printed the design on an 8.5 X 11 Sheet of paper and painstakingly cut each and every sheet so that I could separate the two panels. Because I am making 150 invitations with a total of 5 inserts, that means that I cut 375 pieces of paper one by one (actually, so far only 300 sheets because I haven't cut the RSVP cards yet). I started printing this past Sunday and finished cutting paper by Wednesday which means that it took me approximately 17 hours to print and cut alone.

What I Should Have Done

The last thing I did tonight was print mailing addresses on each individual outer envelope through the top feeder of my printer. It was pretty easy and I did it through Microsoft Word. All I had to do was set the paper size to 5x7 (the size of my invites), type in the name and address in the middle of the page and print. I suppose the repetitive nature of the task finally beat it into my head that I really should have gotten my paper pre-cut at any office supply store. They can cut up to 100 sheets at a time in a matter of seconds and it only cost $1.50-$2 per cut (not per sheet of paper). Similar to what I did with the envelopes, I should have typed my design on Word with the page setting set on custom sized paper (just indicate what size I had my paper cut) and then fed the pre-cut paper through the top feeder of my printer. I anticipate that changing the process from Design in Power Point - Print - Cut to Design in Word - Cut - Print would have probably saved me 12 hours.

Despite the tedious work, I'm happy to report that the invitations are coming along really well. Hopefully, I can implement these ideas for some of my other friend's future weddings (if they choose to go the DIY route....which I hope they will ; ).

Pictures coming soon!