Whether you’re looking to minimize costs, retain more control or just add your personal touch, crafting your do it yourself wedding invitations an be a fun and rewarding endeavor.
In this guide we want to walk through the step-by-step process to easily create wedding invitations that are so polished and sophisticated, your guests will never know you pulled them together yourself.
We’ll show you how to take your invites from a simple idea to fully made cards, from selecting a design, to buying stationery and printing. We’ll also share our practical tips for avoiding common blunders and saving time.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- Advantages of Making Your Own Wedding Invites
- Finding Inspiration and Ideas
- Choosing the Right Invitation Style for You
- Test Your Idea
- How to Make Your Wedding Cards, Step-by-Step
Advantages of Making Your Own Wedding Invites
Every couple has their own motivation for taking their wedding invitations into their own hands, but here are the reasons we most often see our customers choose to go this route.
Making Your Mark
A wedding is often a showcase of the style and personality of the couple getting married and the invitations are no exception. It’s only natural for a couple to want to put their own personal touch on their invites. It is often a couple’s first joint project!
After all, your wedding invites showcase your personal taste and give your guests a glimpse of your wedding theme. Why wouldn’t you want to be involved in crafting them?
Plus, creating your own invites gives you the ability to tap into your creativity. It is an awesome chance to explore your artistic side. And you can even turn parts of the project into an excuse to bond with your wedding party, friends, and family as they assist you in making the invites.
Retaining Control
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be intimately involved in the creative and decision-making process, when it comes to your wedding cards.
While hiring a stationer to take on the entire project may be a great fit for some couples, it’s not for everyone. Many of our clients want to be more hands-on in every aspect of crafting their invites to ensure they get exactly what they have in mind.
When you choose to do it yourself, you maintain control over the process. Since you’re the designer, you can choose the design, color and word formats that please you; playing around with options until you find the one that feels just right.
Rather than wait for the final cards to be delivered, and find out at that time whether you like them or not, you can see the results of your DIY project at each stage and make adjustments as you go on.
It removes the stress of accepting not-so-well-made cards that you’d have paid for. And, as an added bonus, you’ll probably feel a tremendous sense of pride in your accomplishment when friends and family start giving you compliments for the cards you have produced.
- Feasibility: is this truly a style or a print type you can do on your own without special commercial equipment? (Ex. custom shape cuts and letterpress printing isn’t typically for the do-it-yourselfer)
- Affordability: If one of your motives for going the do-it-yourself route is to keep costs in check, then you may want to avoid falling in love with exotic invitation styles that incorporate specialty papers and other highly custom items.
- Skillset: While you may be drawn to highly intricate graphical elements, it may not be within your skillset to re-create these effects without formal graphic design training and software. Our templates provide many of these elements for you but in general leave the more complicated effects to the professionals.
- Colors: Narrowing down the color scheme for your invitations isn’t usually very difficult if you already know what your official wedding color palette will be. However, don’t limit yourself only to invitation options that include these colors in the papers themselves. Many times, you can purchase a neutral color invitation kit or papers and simply implement your custom color scheme into the color of the ink or by using embellishments such as ribbons, seals or lace to get a second or third color into your finished invitations.
Styles: What types of invitation “style” are you drawn to? Vertical or horizontal? Pocket fold or simple one-card designs? Cards with embellishments, such as ribbon and lace? Single flat panel cards or invitations with borders and layers?
- Paper: After exploring options, you might have your heart set on a specific type of paper, such a shimmery finish or linen texture. Just make sure you use a good quality card stock. A plain design on good quality card stock will always look better than an exotic design on cheap paper.
