Weddingbee Blog

I love letterpress. Thermography, with its raised effect, is also very beautiful. And who can forget engraving? Swoon!

However, with 250 invitations that need to be printed and the extra pieces from our Korean and Chinese translations, having the invitations professionally printed wasn’t a financially viable option. At this point, every penny counts. Gocco was tempting, but hand-pressing more than 1,500 individual sheets of paper seemed too daunting with a full-time job.

And so Mr Peony and I decided to use (gasp!) our inkjet printer for our invitations. Luckily, we have a high-quality printer (the Canon PIXMA Pro9000) from a project I had done earlier in the year.

As we are nearing the end of the design process and are about to enter the heavy printing and assembling stages, there are certainly some things that I’ve learned along the way…

1. The heavier and more porous the paper, the more chance there is of the ink bleeding (unless you use photo paper). I printed many samples on all the different settings available on my printer. In the end, the “Plain Paper” setting beat out the rest by producing the most crisp images. There is still some very slight bleeding around the edges that will bug me until the day I die, but I’m crossing my fingers that no one will scrutinize our invitations that closely.
2. Mr Peony was dead against using white paper, because traditionally the Chinese associate pure white with funerals. (This is why we couldn’t use matte photo paper which would’ve printed better.) So we decided to print on cream cardstock instead…. which turned out to be a nightmare in terms of color-matching. Once again I had to print various samples to get the desired color output because the printed results always took on a darker, yellow tinge from the paper.
3. I admit it: inkjet printing really does not have the same look and quality of letterpress, thermography, etc. In short, the end result looks very plain and a bit dull. One of the best ways to combat this problem is to add embellishments. I will be adding tiny self-adhesive crystals to my invitations to give them an extra oomph.

I don’t think I am saving that much money from printing and cutting all my myself, but I was hellbent on saving the moolah. Because of the extra paper needed for the Chinese and Korean translations, the invitations still ended up costing quite a bit at about $7 per invite, including envelopes and embellishments. However, when I had proposed my design to several professionals earlier, the cheapest was $12 per invite so I did save some money at the end (and not just by switching to Geico).