Paper Cuts

May 2nd, 2007 @ 10:32 am by Mrs. Lime

Here’s all the paper for my invitations, cut and ready to be Gocco’ed and assembled. It looks like so little, bundled up this way.

I’ve heard horror stories about more than one local Kinko’s mangling paper or being inexact while cutting it, so I looked up a few stand alone print shops in the area on Yelp. I called around for a few quotes, and they seemed similar to Kinko’s prices, around $1 per cut, but a few also had a setup fee of a few dollars for each layout.

I ended up picking Printing Palace because of its convenient location (to my office, anyway), and because they had previously sent my office some literature regarding their services (yep, I’m a sucker for advertising). They didn’t itemize out the costs for me, but the total divided out to about $1.25 per cut, including any setup fees and taxes. It was totally worth it. Despite my mad x-acto knife and paper cutter skillz, it would have taken a ton of time to cut the large sheets down to these rather smallish sizes.

Here are the four layouts I brought in as each “page” of my invitations will be a slightly different size. I believe they have software that does this for you at most print shops, but I did it ahead of time in AutoCAD as I needed to know how many sheets of paper to order. Sources for paper and cutting are below these crazy layouts.

Oh! All of the supplies for the invites are in, and by current calculations, my invitations will end up about $1.80 each. Is that a good price for what I’m producing? You’ll have to wait and see if you think it’s worth it.

Paper:
Blue paper - Pool cover weight flat paper from Paper Source. Yes, buying the large sheets vs. their 8.5×11 or 12×12 saved me, even after adding in the costs to get it cut.

Vellum (it looks white in the first photo) - Clearprint 1000H from Dick Blick. There is cheaper vellum out there, but I had a few sheets of this leftover from projects past. I just bought more of the same to stay consistent.

Cutting services:
Printing Palace
2300 Lincoln Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90405
T. 310.451.5151