So, you’ve decided to make your own invites..
Well, if you’re the creative type, I can safely say it’s the best decision you’ll ever make! I love to create and make things, so for me designing our invitations was the perfect opportunity to put a personal stamp onto our special day.
The first step is to decide on what kind of invitations you want – we went for the pocketfold design, as it was a handy way to have all the information in the invite, without it looking untidy! Next, you can either order the templates or download them and buy the material to make them – once you’ve picked a colour, of course! We decided to order the pocketfolds from a website called www.pocketfoldinvites.co.uk. Firstly, we ordered a few samples for 99p each, just to see the colours and sizes. One of the great things about this site was the option to add on tacky glue (to assemble your templates), which is really good, and the option to add envelopes for each template you order for a extra few pence. For our invites, there is a download provided to get the sizing right for the tabs, so you can make them to fit the pocketfold.
Next, order some card for the tabs to go on – I got us a pack of 250 sheets of A4 card for about £6 on Amazon, so it’s really inexpensive! I also bought us a guillotine for £5 – a worthwhile investment, as cutting with scissors isn’t as accurate and really makes your hands hurt after a while!
The most important part now – design the invitation and the information tabs. We went for a ‘venue’ tab, with a map and information on parking, plus a ‘where to stay’ tab with information on accommodation and transport, and finally an ‘RSVP’ tab, with contact information.
Now for the time-consuming bit… putting it all together. Figure out how many invitations you will need in total, and add about 10/15 to that. You will mess some up, I guarantee, so it’s worth your while to do a few extra from the beginning. I took the route of doing all the cutting, then all the sticking, then a load more cutting, and a load more sticking… I found doing the jobs in bulk made it easier that making every individual invitation.
The best bit, by far was the last few tasks. Simply putting the tabs into the pocketfold and wax sealing it shut! We chose to do a wax seal, as it was something unique and fun for us to do. It literally put a personal stamp on our invitations! I bought a wax seal seat from Amazon for £10, and some extra wax seal candles for £2/3 per pack. To give you an idea – we had around 60/65 invitations, and we used about 5/6 candlesticks, tops.
In all, it took us around 2/3 months to make our invitations (bearing in mind we just did them when we had a spare 5 minutes). If we had solidly done them in the evening and weekends, they could have been done within a month – we just did them slowly. Give yourself plenty of time to create them, as you will have evenings/weekends where you just won’t feel up to doing them and you don’t want to rush them.
Don’t forget to collect up all the addresses for your guests – we printed ours on labels and stuck them to the envelopes.
There’s nothing like the feeling of looking at the finished product and thinking “we did this!” Persevere – it’s definitely worth it! 🙂
