Weddingbee Blog

I don’t remember when I first fell in love with pocketfold invitations. It was at some point before we were engaged–maybe a year or more–but I knew when we eventually got married, that I wanted pocket folds.

Source: Envelopments

Mr. Fondue was easily convinced (I showed him one example and he said, “Those are awesome.”), so one of our goals during a visit to a local bridal show last January was to price pocketfolds from different companies. The verdict? Too expensive and out of budget. Deflated, but not defeated, I began researching how I could make them on my own.

I found several good tutorials to turn them into a DIY project, including this one from HGTV. So began my search for 11×17 black cardstock. Nearly impossible to find, I soon discovered, and even harder to find black linen, which is what I really wanted.

After much googling, I found Paper Presentation. They had the black linen cardstock in the right size! But even better: they had black linen pocket folds already pre-made. Think of how much time and energy I would save if I could just buy the pocket folds and put it together from there!

So that’s what I did. I bought black linen pocket folds, firecracker red paper for backing, and solar white for the actual invitation and the insert cards. I bought similar papers for the programs as well so it will all match. I have to do a little trimming on some of the white paper, but for the most part, I can just print and assemble. And the final cost? $3.50 per invitation. Had I just bought the cardstock and made the pocket folds myself, it would have come out to about $2.50 per invitation. But for an extra dollar per invite, I’m personally glad I saved the time and energy (not to mention, my sanity, since I’m a perfectionist and cutting and scoring all that paper probably would have driven me crazy).

Once I had the paper, I began work on a design. I didn’t really know what I wanted, so I used a few different designs from Microsoft’s Clip Art Gallery to play around with. I just scanned in a blank (but assembled) invitation and photoshopped a mockup of some ideas.

There were things I liked about all of them, but I wanted something with a little more… texture. I knew we couldn’t afford letterpress, so I decided to try my hand at embossing and went in search of a stamp. Here’s a bit of a teaser.

Are you designing your own invitations? How many ideas did you go through?