Novices: Make your own wedding invitations?

Hi all.....I'm looking for some real people advice. I've been looking at wedding invitations and can't find anything I like that isn't expensive. The wedding is in February and our centerpieces will be bare branches with jewels on them. So, I would like our invites to have bare branches. Everything I find has a flower or leaf on the branch. I priced some out at a stationery store and they were like $300 for 50 invitations and rsvp's. WHAT THE...? Plus, I wanted programs that talk about the historical significance of the building we're having our ceremony and reception in....another $250. And we're talking simple stuff though. No liners or ribbons or jewels.

So...my plan is to try and make them myself. I found a stock photo that I'm willing to buy but I need to manipulate it...ya' know..make it bigger or longer, remove some branches or something. After that, I think I can put it in powerpoint or visio. Anyone have any suggestions?

Try a wedding invitation kit from either Office Depot or one of the craft stores.  The kits are about $35 per box with 50 invitations per box and they have some very simple but elegant designs.  As long as you have a computer and a good printer, they will look professionally made.  I ended up spending about $75 total on 90 invitations.  I printed the invitation, the RSVP card, and the envelopes on my computer.

thanks Kristinalh - I checked those out, along with the kits at Michaels and Joanns. They just don't offer the design I'm looking for. I would be willing to compromise on that but I need to get a matching program and those kits don't have it. However, I will keep that in mind....oh yeah, and if necessary, I'll snag one of those 40% off coupons from the Sunday paper.

i made my wedding invitations myself.  basically i found a design i liked and then i hit the craft stores to find what would work.  thank God for scrapbooking, those aisles are packed with fun and trendy designs and are cheap, i got 2-3 invitations out of each sheet, and each of my invites were 4 sheets thick.  finding a design that was already done for you would be quicker, cheaper and easier than manipulating a stock photograph and printing it.  i love doing this stuff so if you need any more suggestions please let me know!

I'm making mine too.  I went round shops loking at designs, looked at loads on the internet, found designs that I liked, sent off for samples, then worked it out from there.

Hard to describe but ours are cream, printed on hammered card, with a vellum cover, a ribbon bow and in a sleeve of matching card.  Quoted around £400, made for around £60.

Good Luck.

Original Post by trendstudent:

thanks Kristinalh - I checked those out, along with the kits at Michaels and Joanns. They just don't offer the design I'm looking for. I would be willing to compromise on that but I need to get a matching program and those kits don't have it. However, I will keep that in mind....oh yeah, and if necessary, I'll snag one of those 40% off coupons from the Sunday paper.

 Well, my wedding is Saturday! Woo-hoo! We made our own invitations.  We didn't like any of the pre-packaged kits that any of the stores sold.  We used black card stock cut in quarters (our cards were 5 in X 5in squares) with a black and white photo (that I had copied 4 to a sheet of white cardstock at Fed-Ex Kinko's...EXCELLENT QUALITY PRINT) centered on it; that entire piece was covered by a 5X5 sheer vellum square with our wording on it and the 2 pieces were held together with a ribbon ran through 2 holes we punched in the top.  We made 125 invitations for around $80. 

We're doing our own programs in Microsoft Publisher, which I think is excellent for this type of application.  They have some pre-made templates you can use for the layout/format and insert your own text, graphics, change the font and colors and even the template if you want. 

Edit:  One piece of advice...If your invitations aren't a standard size (ours weren't) it will cost you an arm and a leg for postage.  Ours were $.80 each for postage...the POSTAGE cost more than the invitations and envelopes combined.  Also, I would chose and envelope size and work from there.  I had my heart set on the 5X5 invite and ended up ordering the envelopes from LCI paper online.

I have some awesome photos of large branches that are reflecting off of water taken her in North Carolina if you want to print them onto your card. I'd be happy to let you use a few of the images if you like.

I  made my own 7 years ago so styles have changed (god, I suddenly feel so old) but we had our address cards, vellum, rsvp cards, etc. printed up at a local quality printing shop on paper we supplied. Kinkos gets it wrong half the time for me for some reason so I didn't want to risk it. We found our paper at a big paper warehouse type place that only sells paper. The selection was fairly amazing, better than a craft store but I would suggest hitting a craft store first and you may get lucky. I think I spent 300000 hours tying vellum to hand made paper and then stuffing them into envelopes finished with stickers I made from hand out of flowers from my garden. Gag. That's a good reason to stay married, I never want to do that again.

I ordered really simple invites from Office Depot (or one of those office supply stores).  I got 250 (invites and envelopes) for about $100.00!  Don't waste your time and money on the perfect invitation...they end up in the trash.  I created a wedding web page at www.theknot.com and used it for the rsvp's.  I noted the web address to our web page on the invitation and people rsvp'd on my personal web page.  It's worth checking out because you can create the web page to match your colors and themes and include directions, etc, etc. 

Best of luck and congratulations!

You can also look for photos on flicker. You might find one you like from someoneo who would let you use it for free. Especially since you aren't planning to make money off your invitations. (If you figure out how to do that, patent it!)

GO to google.com click images/ type in bare branches or winter trees or branches and find a quality picture.

Copy it in to publisher and do your thing.

If you take you time it will look professional.

If you have adobe photoshop that would be great.

Remeber if strecthing a pic in Publisher hold down shift and point and drag so your pic doesnt loose any resolution.

I've seen some really pretty invitations where the text is printed on vellum and layered over a black and white (or sepia) photo.  That would be pretty cheap and easy to put together yourself.  You could use the back of the paper to which the photo is mounted as a place to include the extra info about the site.

hey... have you heard of Gocco machines? they are small screen printing machines that many use to print cards, invites, etc... check out this page myuglykitty to see what I mean...

If you are the crafty type, why not try to do something like these? granted you will need the machine, cards, ink, etc but given that you have a simple design in mind, I think it should be perfectly doable.

You guys are awesome. I got some great ideas from every post. My guy and I meet up on Thursday nights so we'll definitely be talking about these tonight.

I made it to a couple of craft stores again today to check things out. In the end, I can always buy one of those kits because I found matching programs with it and although the design was nothing like what I wanted, who's really gonna notice? However, I'm not working right now and I love these types of projects so I wouldn't mind a little elbow grease to get what I want. In fact, my silk flower boquet is almost done and then I can work on the other flowers...turned out pretty good.

Congrats to the other new brides and those of you celebrating several years of wedded bliss together. Heck, congrats to the singles on here too, eh? It's not always easy out there in the dating world but it sure is exciting.

I'm planning a wedding for next July (second time around for me). We've checked into the idea of creating a personalized wine label and sending out half bottles of wine. There's a couple of local shops that do that sort of thing and the cost isn't too outrageous I think. But we'd still have to print return cards and such I suppose. Although I like the idea of a website RSVP.

It would be a memorable invite and useful. Drink before tossing...

Please don't use Visio or Powerpoint. Those will ultimately be disappointing programs to use. As a designer, I would use ideally Adobe InDesign, less ideally Microsoft Publisher, and in the end at least Word. You will not have any control of design with Powerpoint, which is a presentation program, or Visio, which is a project timeline program.

If you want some help with the design, I would gladly help you out! I plan on spending a pretty penny on invitations because as a designer I care a lot about it. =/ I wish I had the guts to do my own. Could you show me the link to the stock photo? I could also tell you whether it is going to look good enlarged.

Good luck!

Definately try to avoid non graphics programs for this.  All you'll do is drive yourself nuts and get a crappy result.  Unfortunatley, they're generally fairly expensive, so I can understand.  The other problem with stuff like Powerpoint is that it's going to be a pain to print out.

First thing you need to consider is how are you going to produce these.  Are you going to print them?  Have someplace like Kinko's do it?  That desicion is going to change the file type.  Places like Kinko's can also make folded flyers, which can be very nice, and near impossible to do on your own.

PDFs work wonderfully for this kind of thing.  Once you get everything down the way you want it, make a PDF and you can hand it to just about anybody and you get the exact same result without the setup you might have with a raw file.  This is particuarly cool if you want to hand stuff off to a print shop.

I don't know how much PDF programs cost (I use Photoshop so I don't need a seperate one.)  Photoshop is perfect for this kind of thing, but it's very pricey. I don't know if the cheaper versions of it have the PDF functinality, but if they do, you might want to look there.

As to pictures, do you have a digital camera?  Pictures you find on the web are nice, but they're also low res, so when you put them on a flyer, most likely they're going to look grainy and distorted.  If you have your own camera, go take some pictures, just make sure the quaility's as high as possible. 

If you do end up making these things yourself, be careful of what font you choose.  Flowery fonts are nice in theory, but they're hard to read.  Also keep the audience in mind.  I did something like this for my grandmother's memorial, so I needed to make sure that we got her story told, but that the lettering was also legible for a bunch of 80+ year olds.

I don't know if they have anything you'd like, but you might want to check corbis.com.  They have quite a selection of photos over there.  Nothing beats real photos, but corbis is nice.

You might want to try 'Gimp'.  It's sort of a freeware photoshop.  I'm not that familar with it, but I know that although it's not as nice as Photoshop, it does the job.

Gimp is a great program. =) I agree with making it into a .PDF and having it printed at Kinkos or something. CutePDF is a free .PDF converter. Adobe will also let you convert like three files on their website for free.