Wedding Blog

I have to confess… the thank-you cards took longer than expected. We sent them out in waves… to all of our parents’ friends within the first 5 weeks, to our family members and relatives over the next two months, and finally to all of our own friends that we invited slowly over the following months. But I am happy to report that we finished writing EVERY single one of them the week before we sent out our Christmas cards… which means, now that all our guests have received them, I can share the details with the hive!

Many of our friends asked where we ordered them from, but the truth is that we made all 200+ of these at home by ourselves, and it was very easy, cost-effective, and personal! This is how we did it…

Ingredients:

• 8.5″x11″ Sage cardstock from Paper Source
• Luxe Cream 5×7 envelopes, also from Paper Source
• Double-sided tape
• MS PowerPoint (because I still have not mastered Photoshop)
• My trusty color printer

Now, the short version is that I wanted to include images but didn’t want to pay the price for printing greeting cards. The trick then, was this: Using PowerPoint, I created a collage of photos taken by our friends and saved it as an image, and then had them printed as standard 4″x6″ photos. We then mounted them on cardstock with a printed message inside, which we had created using our own color printer.

The detailed instructions:

To create the collage:

1. I started by drawing a 5.5″x8.25″ white box in PowerPoint. To do this, go to “Insert –> Picture –> Autoshapes”. This should pull up the autoshape menu. Click on the button with the shapes, select the rectangle, and draw it on your slide.
2. Right-click and go to “Format Autoshape”, which takes you to various options that allow you to specify the size and color.
3. Once you have done this, insert your photos into MS PowerPoint by accessing the “Insert” menu and selecting “From File…” Select the files. This can get a little messy if your photos are very large. You may have to patiently find the corners of the photos and then resize each one so that you can see them all on one slide.
4. Once you have inserted all of your photos and can see them all, you can adjust the size of each image and arrange them inside the white rectangle as you prefer. I chose to leave spaces between each photo that was equidistant from the border of the white box.
5. To insert text, go to “Insert –> Text Box”. Click somewhere outside your white box, and then type out the main message (which was just a simple “thank you” on the front in our case). Highlight the text, right-click, and select “Fonts”. We chose a font that matched the one we used on our invitations. Once you have chosen the color and sized the text appropriately, click on the edge of the text box and drag it to the location you want the text to appear.
6. At this point, everything on your collage should be in place. Click outside the white box, drag over everything, and let go. This selects every object on your slide. Right-click and go to “Grouping –> Group”. Then right-click again and select “Save as Picture”. Save it as a .jpg file.
7. The whole collage has now been turned into an image that you can edit and upload for printing. It can also be scaled for 4″x6″ photos. We uploaded our image to AdoramaPix and had them printed on Kodak Endura Matte paper. AdoramaPix was awesome in that they made sure the image was cropped and printed correctly! (We had previously used Snapfish but returned our entire order because the image was printed crooked.)

To create the backing:

1. We had the entire stack of sage cardstock cut at Kinko’s to the dimensions of 9″ x 6.5″.
2. In PowerPoint, I drew a 6.5″ tall and 9.0″ wide rectangle, in the same way as I did in steps 1-2 for the photo collage. I formatted the box (right-click on the box and select “Format Autoshape” to have a clear fill and for the outline to be a dotted 0.25″ very light gray line.
3. I created the text using text boxes (see step 5 under the collages). I rotated the text boxes and arranged them as follows:



4. I also used the same fonts that we had used on all of our communications and in the same color.
5. Next, I did a test print using regular white paper with my printer. This allowed me to figure out how to feed our already-cut cardstock into the printer. For my Canon MP530 printer, I only had the option of inserting our pre-cut sheets flushed to the right edge of the paper feeder, so the test print helped me figure out that the box I drew needed to be flushed to the left bottom of the slide (see image above).
6. After a couple more test prints to make sure everything was set, we inserted the 9×6.5 sage cardstock and printed 200 copies!

And the last step, of course, is to mount the 4″x6″ photos on to the cardstock. I recommend using Scotch’s double-sided photo safe permanent tape, which was what I ended up using on our invitations (the mounting squares got too expensive after a while!).

But yeah, that’s it! To be honest, making the thank you cards was the easy part… it was writing the individual handwritten messages that took much more time than I expected. Nevertheless, we really wanted to personalize each message, and we also wanted to include photographs of us with each guest in our thank you cards (we made sure to take a group picture with every guest table). It took a long time, but I hope our guests appreciated the cards!