2. Make your invitations yourself. Design them, perforate them, bind them. Even print them yourself if you want to! Did you know you can sew through paper?
Why? Hiring someone to make your invitations can get spendy, and if you are the creative type it is far more satisfying to have created something as important as your wedding invitations from scratch. My husband and I are both English majors so we decided it would be appropriate to create a miniature book to announce our engagement and invite our friends and family to join in the celebration of our marriage.
We chose a dark brown card-stock for the cover (80 lb. paper), and a light cream colored paper for the interior pages (20 lb. paper). P.S. This is the awesome tree illustration that my super talented brother-in-law Manny Trembley created for us.
How do you DIY? Having a bit of graphic design background is necessary for this DIY. My husband spent weeks designing the invitations using Adobe InDesign software. We collaborated to get the wording just right and had the privilege of being able to ask our former graphic design professor for some critique on the design. Also, my awesome brother-in-law (mentioned above) is a graphic illustrator and graciously designed the main illustration for the cover (the tree), the detailed leaf that appears multiple times throughout the invite, and the map on the back side of the directions.
As you can see, it was daylight when we started this task, and it covered the entire kitchen table.
To DIY perforate paper all you need is a sewing machine. I thought this was so cool when I first saw it on pinterest that I had to try it! All you have to do is run the paper through the machine without any thread in the needle. Pretty neat. Also, this allowed our guests to easily tear out the directions and RSVPs without ripping them.
Of course, when you are taking on big DIY projects it is always a good idea to recruit willing family members to help. My mother helped sew all 250 invitations together. She is the #1 Nice Lady. My older sister (and MOH) volunteered quite a few hours to the process as well. Tips: to increase the speed of production sew continuously through as many invitations as you can by feeding them through the machine one after another. Once you are finished you can and snip the connecting threads.
Woah, how did it get dark so fast? Oh, yeah, it seriously took all day to assemble these invitations. By this point I had to leave to babysit, and my dedicated husband stayed behind to finish the process.
To view a complete PDF of our invitations click on the link below.
A few things to note:
- The cover page is white, but we printed on dark brown card-stock to make it look more "book like"
- Yes, we designed a husband/wife publishing logo (the WE inside a book)
- The pages are displayed in spreads (each page was folded down the middle)
- See that cool vine under each chapter? That's an exact imitation of my wedding band-- a vine that encircles my finger with diamonds on each leaf
- We omitted the address for obvious reasons
- Yes, the tree on the last page of the RSVP is intentionally upside down. When torn on the perforation and folded it creates a sweet little card
- Not shown in the PDF or in the pictures is the return envelope we rubber cemented to the back inside page of each invitation
No comments:
Post a Comment