Weddingbee Blog

After a long week of constant partying with my Gocco, our invitations are officially out!! I’m really relieved/excited to say that they are on their way to our guests, and I can’t wait to get RSVPs back!

These invites have become my biggest worry, really. I was always second-guessing myself on the design of the invites, because hey, you only do this once, and I wanted my guests to get excited about our big day!

I made everything in our invitation suite using the Scriptina and Optimus Princeps fonts, which are freebies! All of the paper for our inserts, as well as the envelopes, are in Stardream Opal. I found this paper to be cheapest at Anchor Paper online (where I had them cut to size for me at Office Depot and Kinko’s), and I bought the envelopes at Envelope Mall.

I made DIY our pocketfolds, and you can find detailed instructions for those here. I’ll still say, they aren’t as bad to do as it seems. Just tackle a project like this early on in the wedding planning process, so it’s not too much to take on at once!

I used my Gocco PG5 to print everything for our invitations. If you want to see how I made the invitations and RSVP cards, here’s a post on how I made those. For those of you who are wondering, it does take a little longer for the ink to dry on Stardream paper, but once it dries, it will not smear!

These are the direction cards. I added reception and website information on this card, since I had room.

For the maps, I made these bad boys on PowerPoint, using the drawing tools and free clip art from Google. They took me a good 4 hours to make, but I think they were totally worth it!

To seal the deal on these babies, I used the scraps from the bronze invitation background cuts, and sealed them together with glue dots. They ended up being about 2″ x 11″ and fit perfectly around the pocketfold. I Goccoed a fleur de lis on the belly band and wrote in our guests’ names with a scrapbooking white ink marker.

For the envelopes, I was going to have calligraphy done by a very talented bridesmaid, Miss K. However, I lost track of time and slacked on sending my guest list to her at a reasonable time. So, I sucked it up and hand-addressed them myself. While my cursive isn’t breathtaking, it got the job done.

I will say, the best thing about sending these off is that I have great confidence that these will make it to our guests in tip-top shape! I mailed one to our house two weeks ago (to make sure I had included enough postage and to see how banged up/stamped up it would get) and it came in perfectly, with only one small barcode sticker along the top!

(The actual invitations were written in brown scrapbooking marker. This was just for practice. )

Budget breakdown (rounding up to make calculations a bit easier):

Note: I won’t be counting the cost of the Gocco in the tally, since I will be reselling it pretty soon.

• $50.00 – Pocketfold paper
• $15.00 – All cutting costs at Kinko’s/Office Depot
• $67.00 – Stardream bronze and opal paper for inserts/invitation backing/belly bands
• $75.00 – Stardream 4 bar and A7 envelopes
• $61.00 – 8 Gocco screens, 16 bulbs (due to two messed up bulbs that burnt half the image on the screen…blah!), and a good bit of turquoise (mixed with black), brown and white inks
• $30.00 – 2 packs of bronze brads, glue dots, tacky tape, scrapbooking pens (all purchased at Michaels with coupons)

$89.00 – total postage

————————————–

$3.87/invite (Eep… a bit over budget, but I have tons of leftover supplies that will be reused!)

$2.86/invite (not including postage)

Compare that to the going rate of pocketfold invitation suites on sites like Etsy, and I saved about $3-4 per pocketfold, which would have been $264-352 in savings since we sent off 88 total invitations! I feel pretty good about that!

How did you feel after you sent off the invites?