We made our own invitations. It was a process, but we are very pleased with them, and proud that it was all our own design work, print work, and assembly work.

The design work was probably the hardest part. We are lucky we have access to Adobe Illustrator, so we did our designs in that program, but something similar could be done in Word or another program. The design was the hardest part – choosing fonts, deciding on layout, finding artistic elements, and even deciding on the words! Do we use our middle names or not? Do we use traditional wording, or more contemporary? Do we use a flat-panel card or fold? What about enclosures? The list goes on…. It’s a lot of decisions!

After all the design work was done, here’s how we went about assembling them.

What we needed:

• Heavy, Colored Paper 105 lb (backing)

• White or light paper, 65 lb cover stock (wording)

• Nice printer
• Ribbon
• Scissors
• Glue Dots
• Glue Tape rollers
• Paper Cutter (we went to Staples to have our paper professionally cut for the final version, but our home paper cutter was priceless for the many samples and test prints we did).

First, we printed the invitations on the white linen paper. We then went to Staples to use their professional grade cutting services. This was 1 cut for the blue paper (8.5 x 11 sheets cut in half to 8.5 x 5.5), and 3 cuts for the white paper (8.5 x 11 sheets, cut down so that each invite was 8 x 5). Each cut was $2 for up to 250 sheets of paper, so this cost us $8. This was well worth it, since cutting them ourselves would have been done one or two at a time, and I’d be afraid of not doing them perfectly straight. So, for the time and peace of mind, professional cutting was the way to go (for us, at least).

With all the cut paper, we set up sort of an assembly line on our coffee table. We also cut ribbon to size before we began. (I apologize in advance for the picture quality – for some reason they came out really yellow)

Tie the ribbon on to the white invitation paper

Secure the knot of the ribbon to the invitation with a glue dot.

Trim the edges of the ribbon to size at an angle.

Pass the ribboned invite to your fiancé

Use the glue tape roller to add adhesive to all 4 sides of the invitation.

Line it up, and lay it down on your backing paper so it’s centered.

Press it down to secure. Repeat until you are finished.

That’s it!

We were able to assemble 90 invitations in about 3 hours, with breaks.

That does not include putting them in the envelopes, adding enclosures, sealing them or stamping them. It certainly doesn’t include addressing the envelopes. But, making the invitations themselves was surprisingly easy, and not as time-consuming as I had thought. If we didn’t have the ribbon, it would have been even faster!