Wedding Blog
Once we had our wedding date, it was full steam ahead for our little wedding invite factory.
That’s right–after much research (including much Weddingbee reading), a couple of panicky trips to local stationery makers, and lot of grumbling from Mr Sea Breeze about the cost of things “that people are just going to chuck in the garbage,” I decided to make our own wedding invites.
It could have been worse. We could have sent out Evites - ’cause that’s what he was heavily campaigning for.
What a joker. (But apparently not the only groom out there with the same idea.)
So fine. Marriages are built on solid compromises, right? I’ll (painfully) retire my visions of dreamy letterpress invitations ($1,500 for 100 invites?!) if not one more word is said about Evites.
Done and done.
My search began online, naturally. I can’t even begin to estimate the number of hours I spent on wedding invitation websites.
There were even some sites that could make your invite look like a boarding pass, which could be kind of interesting for a destination wedding (koket design).
The more I looked at these, the more I realized that there were quite a few little design companies out there that probably consisted of a person or two and a big kitchen table, judging by their online galleries. Each design was totally unique and special and you could tell they were lovingly made one by one. Like Epiphany Designs and Glimpz (both based in Calgary - go Canucks!), and Stephita.
They all seemed so pretty and clean and simple. And c’mon, they don’t look that hard to make, right?
My decision to make them myself was finalized after a trip to Wintons Social Stationery. If you’re not from Vancouver, basically it’s a very popular place to go where you choose your papers and the style you want and they custom make everything for you. The greatest thing about the place is that they have books and books of examples of invitations they’ve made so it’s a FANTASTIC place to go for inspiration… being able to actually see and touch the invites is so much better than looking at pictures online (though it’s a start). Wintons turned out to be pretty expensive too, especially the more paper colours and folding you added.
So that cinched it.
The papers at Wintons were generally $1.25 per 8.5″x11″ so I decided to shop around (Mr. SB definitely approved that part). I dragged him to Michael’s one weekend with high hopes but was soon dismally disappointed by their totally lame selection of paper.
Luckily my sister-in-law told me about Scrapbooker’s Paradise. It only has stores in Alberta so far but I wouldn’t be surprised if they spread very soon - the place was HOPPING when I went there while visiting family over Easter. They had an AMAZING paper selection, and, what’s more, it was bigger and cheaper - $0.99 per 12″ x 12″ sheet (not to mention the fact there’s no Provincial Sales Tax there). AND… yes, it gets better… they were having a special Easter sale so everything purple was 10% off. It was meant to be!
And so I got paper, bought ribbon (from Walmart), and got a paper cutter (’borrowed’ from the office) so I was set!
Or so I thought.
What made you decide to make your own wedding invitations?
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Share this post: Making Invitations Can’t Be THAT Hard
i think all men want to do evites. every man i’ve ever talked to is like “the invitations just get thrown away…can’t i send out an e-mail instead?” i think it’s just a guy thing.
I had a similar experience and stumbled across Talk, Paper, Scissors in Manchester, NH. Another hopping scrapbooking place, I told them I was looking for some specialty paper, and she gave me a huge pile of scraps to dig through! I was able to take 5 or 6 samples home, to which Mr. Trebuchet fell in love with one. The cost wasn’t terrible, and now we have gorgeous paper!
I abandoned all hope of letterpress invites once I saw the price. Yikes! But I really wanted to create custom invites without breaking the bank. My solution: gocco! It was a lot of work, but really a labor of love!
I have to admit, I’m kind of with Mr. Sea Breeze on this one. We just couldn’t justify spending that much money on something that - lets be honest now - most people will recycle. Plus, we only needed 50 invites and most places have a min order of 100.
I can’t wait to see how yours turned out!
I can’t stomach the thought of spending $1,000 on invitations, especially with a $15,000 budget (excluding the ring and honeymoon).
I’m lucky enough to have a friend designing them, and using Boxcar press to make polymer plates so I can letterpress them myself.
I’m excited to have the invitations, envelopes, save the dates and reception cards all done for under $200.
How cool that purple items were discounted - you’re right, it was fate! I can imagine that things got difficult though - we DIY our programs and had to go to 7 walmarts (3 of which were in another city) to get enough red ribbon.
Yes, it was December. I should have known!
becky
I knew from the beginning that I would pretty much make everything that I could. I even made the enelopes from matching cardstock. We are paying for everything so every little bit of saving helped. I joke and say that my wedding will be sponsored by “Ebay and Hobby Lobby”. lol. I’ll probably never make envelopes again because they were kind of a pain but everyone has said the invitations looked great so I am happy.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27217954@N05/sets/72157605376524573/
DH’s daughter (20) was quite the evite proponent as well. I’m sure this is an idea whose day will come - but about half our guests are not computer-philes, and the other half (the younger half) tend to be like me. I’m such a slave to my Outlook and my Blackberry 60 hours a week for work that I will honestly go days (and often weeks) without checking email or even listening to voice mail messages at home. Everybody who REALLY needs to get ahold of me calls or texts on the crackberry. If you don’t email me a lot, your email goes right in the SPAM bin, never to be retrieved.
Plus, for me, evites are like sheetcake. Great for the kind of work get-togethers where you do a month’s worth of birthdays all at once. Not necessarily an appropriate level of effort if you expect me to get dressed up and buy a present.
I am doing my own as well - pocketfolds. I’m sure it will be a lot of work, but I get to customize the size that way. I also designed the invite to use tiny little clovers instead of flowers (cause FH is irish and he loved that little touch).
Its not just the boys who are hip to the evite. I thought it was a great idea. But then again, I completely hate the clutter of mail (on my dining room table, on the entry way table–all needing to be recycled).
The only two things holding us back are 1) C’s mom saying “No way!” and 2) older family members who are not computer literate.
I hope we can find a nice looking eco-friendly recycled paper, soy based alternative to pixels.
I am totally a non-DIY bride and was all about paying for convenience, but not paying too much because we’re on a pretty strict budget. We had three constraints for our invitations: 1) They had to be purple, 2) They had to be able to accommodate two languages, and 3) They had to be decent quality and not outrageously expensive.
I searched and searched and searched and found tons of things that fit two of the criteria, but nothing that fit all three. And that’s how we wound up at Paper Source, buying custom-cut paper to make our own invitations. Which still aren’t done even though they have to be sent out in three weeks. Luckily for my sanity, there is no Gocco involved.
Kenzie-
How are you going to lettepress them yourself? Do you have a machine?
Just curious, would love to do the same thing, but find the task extremely daunting.
I never really considered having them done by anyone else…though that probably wouldn’t be the case if I had to make more than 70 or 80 of them. I guess we knew we’d be custom designing them and that they’d be pretty complicated, so it was a foregone conclusion that professionally produced wouldn’t fit the budget. And hey, my labor is free!
I wanted red invitations with white text, and I didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg. Apparently you can’t have both without DIY.
Two things: one was the price. The other one was that I simply couldn’t find something that fitted what I had in mind.
I wanted to go with our fall theme and most of the invitations with those colors were just not us. So I just made them and I’m happy I did.
I handed some out this week-end and I got some great feedback. 
[...] you may recall, deciding on a design and buying the cardstock for these things was quite the ordeal. Once I realized that folds and pockets were gorgeous but complicated and finally settled on a [...]
I found a place in CA that does really cheap letterpressing (well, relatively cheap, anyway): http://mercuriobrothers.com/invitation_prices
I’ve designed my own but I will be using them to letterpress. I figure by the time I buy the paper, buy a new printer, buy the ink, deal with the mistakes and general problems, I could have had them print the invite, reply postcard and envelope. I’ll put the invites together and hand address them.
Good luck!
Well, I am a designer so it would be silly just to have my invites ordered online or designed by default. A lot of guests invited are working with me so I didn’t have much choice. As a designer I knew from the beginning that I DID NOT want to print my wedding invitations in CMYK because that’s the cheapest look that I have to deal with way too much every day. So in the end my invite had raised typography with one PMS color and a debossed design. I picked envelopes and 2 different papers, both card stock to make the invite more official. When I picked up my printed pieces I had to do some manual work, which would be attaching extra sheet of paper and adding map and tying everything with a ribbon. After making about 200 invites you realize how nice it is just to pay somebody for this slave work. Even the simplest details like attaching the stamps are time taking. And if you are designing your own invitation make sure you don’t forget about weighting it, because most likely it will end up being heavier than an average letter and you will need to add an extra stamp. Yes, it all adds up really quickly. All together with my own work put into all this I spent about $1,000 out of my pocket since my wonderful husband to be was fine with evites as well. I am really happy with how everything turned out so at the end I suppose it was worth my money!
I couldn’t find anything that caught my eye in our wedding colors, so invites became one of the first wedding related projects that I challenged myself to take on. I used Evelopments products from Evelopme.com, and had the printed layer done at a local print shop. I love the way they turned out.
I do have my own press (I’m a little over-the-top with the DIY stuff sometimes), but I’m not using it for the invites. There’s a place in Minneapolis where you can take classes (also in Boston, San Francisco and some other places). Once you take classes, you can rent time and do whatever you want in-studio.
But, If you’re willing to try it yourself, check out eBay for a Kelsey or Chandler & Price tabletop. I’d be happy to share any resources I have
I’m using Adam Glidewell from Glidewell Press to press my invites. $298 for 50. He’s on etsy and has his own webpage.
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Mrs. Sea Breeze, Vancouver/Dominican Republic
Age in 2008 and Occupation: 30, Communications Manager
Fiance's Age in 2008 and Occupation: 29, Experiential Marketing Director
Engagement Date: October 6, 2007
Wedding Date: November, 2008
Blogging Since: July 17, 2008
Venue: Majestic Colonial Resort, Punta Cana
About Me: Planning a destination wedding by the sea should be (oh no she di-in't…) a breeze (…*sigh* yep, she did) but when you've never been to the Caribbean, your powers of imagination are really put to the test. Luckily, I'm 90% resourceful, creative optimist (and kooky, neurotic practicalist-if-that's-a-word for the other ten). Other than writing about our week-long celebration of family, friends, laughter and love, I adore books, shoes and… you guessed it… long walks on the beach.
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