Weddingbee Blog

Now that you’ve seen our invitations in all their glory, let’s break them down to their painstaking how tos. Other tutorials exist around the hive if you’re interested in single panel pocketfolds, too. You can check out those from the awesome Mrs Ballet Flat, Mr & Ms Sew, Miss Cola, Mrs Deviled Egg, Miss Snapdragon, and Mrs Daffodil.

I knew I wanted to have invitations with 2 panels: one in English and one in Vietnamese. I couldn’t find pre-made pocketfolds, so I had to make them myself. I began with instructions I found from Project Wedding’s Wedding DIY Challenge.

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I modified the instructions to suit my needs. I wanted the panels to be the same size. Here’s what I came up with. This diagram is for 11” x 17” cardstock paper.

CUTTING

The 11×17 aqua cardstock needs to be cut to 8 3/4” x 17”. The gold text paper should be cut to 5” x 8”.

I had the aqua cardstock and gold text paper cut at Kinko’s for $1.49/cut per stack. A stack is about 150 sheets. The cardstock we used was thick, so it was more like 75 sheets. They could cut the 11×17 sheets of cardstock without a problem. All in all they had to make 9 cuts across the aqua and gold paper. That’s 13.41 for all the cutting!!! Heck yeah. It was so much better than going through a bunch of cutting blades and cutting them myself.

PaperandMore.com will also do cuts for you for $5 per cut per stack of paper. They don’t let you have the scrap pieces, though. Kinko’s lets you have all your scrap pieces back if you want them. The right aqua piece (thinner piece) is “scrap”. That’s a LOT of scrap that can be used for all kinds of things. I wasn’t about to give that up. I ended up using almost all the “scraps” for other wedding projects! I highly recommend going to Kinko’s for cutting. When you’re on a budget, scraps = GOLD!

POCKETFOLDS

- Measure and mark the aqua cardstock at each fold.

- Use a bone folder or scoring blade to score and crease all 3 folds.

- Create a triangle out of scrap cardboard or cardstock.

- Use an X-Acto blade and ruler to follow your cardboard triangle cutout to create the cutout for the pocket.

- Use double stick tape to secure single sided satin ribbon. I used 11 inches of ribbon per invitation.

- Use tape/glue of choice to secure the actual pocket. I used Xyron tape. It didn’t hold as well as I would have liked. I would not recommend it based on my own experience. Make sure to secure the ribbon after taping the ribbon into place so that the end of the ribbon can hide on the inside of the pocket.

- Tape the gold text paper to the aqua cardstock. I used double stick tape on each corner, and one piece in the middle.

Next, I’ll go through the actual invitation panels and inserts.

Did anyone else make their own pocketfolds? What kind of tape and technique did you use?

* all personal photos unless noted