Invitations are important because they are the first thing that guests see about your wedding. They should depict your wedding style and motif, plus a little of your personality. Wedding invitations are also mementos that can be cherish for years to come. When it comes to wedding invitations, you can select from a variety of styles–from elegant and sophisticated to something a little more funky and fun.
If you head to your local stationery shop to pick out your wedding invitations, you may be overwhelmed by the seemingly endless number of options to choose from – colors, papers, inserts, ribbons, shapes, sizes, styles. Of course, the designer and printer will probably want to pressure you into the best paper and the best ink with all the bells, whistles and extras that you can probably imagine. And with the rising cost of weddings these days, it simple just doesn’t make much sense for most people to spend a small fortune on their wedding invitations.
Well instead of splurging all that cash on hand-crafted invitations from a shop, DIY wedding invitations may be the right option for you. If you are bit crafty (and I don’t me sly), you can create elegant wedding invitations on a budget with do-it-yourself options. Though it does take a little bit of extra effort, it can save you a bundle.
A friend of mine, Crystal, is getting married in April. I received her wedding invitation a few weeks back. It was beautiful, original and she created it from a D-I-Y invitation kit. The paper was gorgeous and I wouldn’t have guessed that she did it herself, unless she told me.
With these D-I-Y kits, you get a template or set of templates of wedding invitations. And then you can print out your own invitations on card stock or a multitude of other papers. You choose the set up, design, paper, style and everything else.
Consider that with do-it-yourself invitations, you will have to fold your invitations yourself – which might be a hassle, depending on how adept you are at folding. However, many invitations are just printed on one face of a flat card, rather than a tradtional folded style so that may be the way to go if you are doing it yourself.
If you want to add ribbons, bells and other additions to your D-I-Y invitations, it’s easy to do so. Just invite your bridesmaids over one night for cocktails and they can help your put together and assemble your invitations. Of course, drink most of the cocktails AFTER you have assembled all the invitations – not before. You want to get things done right.
If you are having an eco-friendly green wedding, you can print your do-it-yourself wedding invitations on recycled or plantable papers. Head to you local print shop and see if you can buy recycled card stock in bulk. Tell them it’s for your wedding … they might be in a good mood and give you a soon-to-be wed discount. You can buy wholesale plantable paper from Botanical Paperworks. The paper is embedded with wildflower seeds. After the wedding, you guests plant your invitations and wildflowers will grow right out of them. It’s a cool idea that is catching on.
You can find DIY wedding invitations & kits online at a variety of different national companies, or look for them at local print shops and wedding stores.
I can’t stress the importance of double-checking the wording on your invitations before you go ahead and print hundreds of them. Last year, a friend of mine had bought some very beautiful, delicate wedding invitations from a high-end shop. She drew up the wording and design with the sales guy and they told her that they’d fax her the proof for approval before they started printing.
About three months before her wedding, they fax her the proof and sent her a .pdf to her email. She’s busy at work – looks over it briefly, adds her signature for approval and faxes it back. A couple weeks later, the invitations arrive in boxes to her home. She opens them up and finds that her soon-to-be husband’s middle name is misspelled.
She storms down to the shop, assuming it’s their fault, of course. They show her the proof. Sure enough, she had signed off with the error right on it. The bride-to-be begs, pleads and cries on the ground, trying to get them to re-print the invitations for free. No dice. It’s two months before her wedding and they have to re-print everything – at her cost. Needless to say her fiance wasn’t happy at all. It was such a small mistake but it cost them an extra thousand dollars.
Anyway, the moral of my little (or not so little) story is that whether you are printing D-I-Y invitations or having a well-known shop do them, double check, triple check and then check again before printing them all. Ink, paper, time … it all adds up and you don’t want to end up doing it all over.
While the benefits are using do-it-yourself wedding invitations are many. You need to weigh your options and decide if it’s right for you. If you are really short on time, or aren’t crafty at all, then it might be worth the expense to spring for traditional invitations. If you have the time to set them up and put them together (which isn’t hard at all), then it might be worth saving a little extra money and putting it toward something fun — like the honeymoon.
