Wedding Invitations

Wedding invitations. You’re on a budget and you think:

“Oh hey, I’m gonna save lots of money and just make my own invites. It’ll be simple. I’m crafty! No problem at all!”

But, in reality, it’s not that simple.

Getting physical mailing addresses from everyone in your family is hard enough. I mean, who sends snail mail anymore?

But then you need to design the actual invites, response cards, other informational cards, and (if you’re feeing really ambitious) thank you cards. And while you’re in the midst of learning Photoshop, and swearing at the computer, your husband-to-be will decide he has a really great opinion on what kind of font to use.

Of course, you ward off the nay-sayer. Then after you’re done designing everything you decide to show your handy work to your mom. Because, let’s face it, you’re pretty proud of your new-found Photoshop abilities and want to brag a little. But you’re inevitably met with more harsh criticism.

And once all of that is said and done, you can’t forget about printing the invites, cutting, glueing, addressing the envelopes, adding stamps, incorporating other fun details… It ends up being So. Much. Work.

Printing the invites and putting them all together was an all-day and all-night project for us.

In total it probably took us about 8+ hours to complete about 70 invitations. Wasn’t a minor feat for the faint of heart. But I loved the end result! Probably worth it in the end.

If you’re feeling ambitious and up for the challenge yourself, here’s how I made it happen.

Designing

I got my original inspiration from this post I found on Pinterest. I loved the two male and female-looking arrows (because arrows can totally have genders, right?!). Arrows are such an on-trend theme. I’ve been seeing it everywhere I go. And we’re trendy people, so why not throw something like that on the invites.

But actually, the arrows made me think of Cupid (get it!?). Since we were having a Valentine’s Day wedding I wanted to have a nod to the holiday without it being super obvious with cutesy hearts everywhere.

I was able to track down the Etsy seller, Peter Loves Jane, who did the original arrow artwork in the blog post I had seen. The store owner, Nikkol, sold me the psd files for the arrows so I was able to use the graphics to make my own templates for the invites, RSVPs, details cards, and thank you cards using Photoshop. For the fonts I used Housegrind and TrajanPro-Regular. Unfortunately for Max, no Helvetica.

Sizing

It’s really tricky to get the sizing right for the cards to be able to fit in the envelopes. But here’s what I decided to do after a surprising amount of research on the topic:

Large Invitations:
Envelopes – A7 Euro Flap Envelope 5 1/4” x 7 1/4”
Cards – 5” x 7”

Response Cards:
Envelopes – A1 Euro Flap Envelope 3 5/8” x 5 1/8”
Cards – 3 1/2” x 4 7/8”

Details Cards:
Cards – 3 1/2” x 2 1/2”

Thank You Cards:
Envelopes – A1 Euro Flap Envelope 3 5/8” x 5 1/8”
Cards – 7” x 4 7/8” (3 1/2” x 4 7/8” when folded in half)

Envelope Liner

I bought fancy paper to line the inside of the large invitation envelopes to give everything a more personalized look. There are tons of tutorials on YouTube on the topic of envelope lining. You’d be surprised. They’ll teach you things like how to make an envelope liner template and attach the liner to the actual envelope. I would highly recommend checking those links out.

Supplies list:

A7 Euro Flap Envelopes (poptone pink lemonade) – LCI Paper
A1 Euro Flap Envelopes (poptone pink lemonade) – LCI Paper
Natural linen card stock – Amazon
Envelope Liner – Hobby Lobby
Burlap Ribbon – Hobby Lobby
Thermoweb Memory Tape Runner – Amazon
Bone Folder – Amazon
Paper Trimmer – Amazon

Wedding