DIY Wedding Invitations

One of the crowning glories of card making, in my opinion, has to be making your own wedding invitations. DIY wedding invitations give you that great opportunity to make your own, ultimate, personal style statement next in line to your wedding dress and all of the decorations!

As you set about to design your invitation, postage costs will be something to consider: To save money on postage, make sure you discuss your proposed envelope size and expected enclosures for each invitation with someone at the USPS before deciding on an invitation size. Size as well as weight will figure into postage costs. That means that the weight/thickness of your invitation cardstock is something to consider.

Almost any size or style goes, as long as you can find envelopes to fit the size you have chosen – best to choose the envelope size first, then the size of the invitation to go with. So, that leads me to the next thing: you will be making your DIY wedding invitations but ideally with a little help from your friends, the paper companies, if you want to streamline things and still have the personal, handmade quality to them.

In this example you would pre-cut the bottom-most layer to be whatever chosen size and purchase the appropriate sized envelopes to go with.

If you REALLY have the time, get a good paper cutter and cut all of the paper components out yourself. That may or may not be appealing to the majority of do-it-yourself-brides doing the DIY wedding invitations thing on the fly especially if there are loads of them to do.

There are three layers – could be simplified to two layers; see heading below, “Assembling the layers” and please refer to the photo. Keeping the whole process as simple as possible is important for doing DIY wedding invitations, especially if you are doing lots of them. You can still have the whimsy and elegance thrown into the mix, even in the simplicity of design.

Supplies:

Ivory or white cardstock for bottom layer
Decorative or specialty print paper
Ivory or white paper for top layer
Double-sided adhesive tape
Adhesive glue
Paper cutter
Swirl stamp
Colored ink pad
Scissors
Ribbon to match one of the colors in the decorative paper (in this case, a gold color)
Computer
Color ink jet printer or color laser printer

Instructions:

Bottom layer: If not using purchased, pre-cut ivory or white cardstock, cut your cardstock to fit into the chosen size of envelope. Again, make sure it does fit into your chosen size of envelope! I lightly swiped the edges with an earth-tone red ink pad to go with the colors in the decorative paper. Try experimenting on scrap paper.

Second layer: Size the patterned specialty paper to fit (slightly smaller in size) onto the ivory (or white) cardstock, using the photo as a guide. Adhere to bottom layer with double-sided stick tape.

Topmost layer: Print wording onto the ivory or white paper (see “Wording for your wedding invitation” and “Font color choices.”) You may need to experiment with how to arrange your wording for printing. For example, you may be able to print two invitations’ worth of wording onto one 8.5” x 11” paper, using “landscape” for the page layout or setup, then cut it into two, cut it down further, and adhere to the patterned decorative paper.

You could simplify things and just have two layers: the patterned bottom layer of cardstock, and the second, top layer of ivory cardstock with your wording printed on it.

Wording for your wedding invitation

Print the wording onto the top layer, the ivory (or white) paper. You can see what I did on the sample shown here as a guide. I used an olive green and an earth-tone reddish color for the font colors. The font is called “Dobkin Script” with the names of the bride and groom enlarged proportionately compared to the rest of the wording, and their names being in the brown font color. There are several books on the market to assist you with wording of wedding invitations. Try using any saved wedding invitations you may have on hand as samples, or of course, go online and check out samples that way.

Consider arrangement of your text so that you leave a nice area of white space around it; a kind of elegant touch, plus gives the eye a “rest.” I.e., not too busy looking. (See the photo).

You can also create a black text “original” and have it printed and cut at a local copier shop.

Tip on your text: Be sure to check and double-check your spelling, etc., as you are likely planning to print out many copies!

Font color choices

Another tip: When choosing your font color, the best is to use one, maybe two colors at the most. Make sure they match the decorative paper somehow, are dark enough to be read easily, or just use plain black; even plain darkish brown looks great with many colors. If you choose a brightly colored decorative paper, or it has strong contrasts, using a black font might be the best so that the wording is not lost to the eye.

Rubber-stamped images

I decided to use a swirl type rubber stamp using a soft red ink to stamp the swirls. This is optional, of course. If you choose to add subtle stamped images as I did here, “less is more” so as not to distract from the wording, and to give a soft, elegant look. Also, because the ink was fairly juicy, I stamped the swirl first onto a scrap paper, then onto the printed invitation paper to give the subtler effect. You might prefer it without any rubber stamping at all.

Adding the embellishments

Take a piece of ribbon about 4 ½ “ long and tie a simple knot (using photo as a guide) or tie a small bow. Glue these with a light dot of adhesive onto the decorative paper, positioning it in the upper center, using the photo as a guide, about ¾ “ down from the top edge of the card.

Remember, these are suggestions, and that you will have to experiment with your prototype to get it the way you want it. Then you have the “green light” to duplicate a whole bunch of them!