Now that I've done the official reveal of our invitations, I thought I'd share a little bit of the "behind the scenes" action; i.e. how much these suckers costs and advice from a non-pro.
Now, I think we saved some money making the invitations from scratch (compared to paying for custom-made invitations). Here's a run down of things we had to pay for:
-paper from Paper Source
-eyelets
-eyelet setter
-paper cutting by Kinko's
-Gocco screens
-Gocco lamps
-stamps
(Note: I'm not adding the cost of the actual Gocco machine and inks since those weren't purchased solely for making invitations)
If I add up all the costs of supplies and divide by the total number of invitations we made (75), they come out to approximately $2.80 each.
Regardless of whether we saved money or not, here's my caveat: the work that went in to making these took much more time than any money we could have saved.
With that said, my main advice to anyone out there looking to make their own wedding invitations (and who, like Mr. Tortolito and I, aren't design professionals) is this: although it might save you a few bucks, don't do it for that reason only. The frustration alone will kill you. Do it because you know you'll truly enjoy the process and reward of making your one-of-a-kind invitation suite. Once you're set on making your own invites, here are a few other pointers I can offer:
-Be OK with, and accept imperfection. Like I said before, we don't craft or design for a living. I didn't expect for our invitations to be of professional quality, and they weren't. And that's OK. In our case, we used El Gocco for printing and every single print was different. Some pages printed smoothly and evenly, some had imperfections. Some text came out straight, others were a little bit off-centered and crooked. It's all good though! As long as the information was there and legible, we shrugged it off and let it go. Chances are your guests will not notice a thing, and I assure you they won't scrutinize the invitation to the same extent that you did.
-Work with a partner. This might not apply to everybody, but I found that I was 100% more productive when Mr. Tortolito and I got together for some serious craft time. When I worked alone I sort of just went on my own, relaxed pace. I'd take a break every few minutes to check email, surf the net, etc. Sometimes I'd question my work and get really frustrated, and just plain out stop working because "nothing was coming out right." When Mr. Tortolito came over to help, I was so much more efficient because he gave me reassurance that the invitations were coming out fine. If we came across a problem we would solve it together. If we got frustrated, we'd encourage each other; and when our invitations started to take better form, we celebrated together!
-START EARLY. We started brainstorming/designing the invites early to mid June. We started production late July/early August. Invites were out mid-September, which was late according to our own personal deadline. In the end, I'm sure it didn't really matter to our guests whether they got the invitation exactly two months in advance, or a week or two after. Just give yourself plenty of time to deal with complications that WILL come up as well as take care of everything else going on in your life and wedding planning.
-Buy extra of everything! Paper, ink, envelopes, assembly tools (we went through about four Fiskars border punches - they kept breaking!) Unless you really know what you're doing (we didn't), you're probably going to mess up..like a lot. Better to buy supplies in bulk and have enough for mess-ups than waste hours driving back and forth to Paper Source/Michaels/etc.
and a few more words of advice from Mr. Tortolito himself:
-Calligraphy isn't so bad. All you really need to know how to do is hold the pen correctly. I recommend starting with calligraphy markers, which control the flow of the pen automatically. Once you know how to hold the pen, you realize that the pen does all the work. Just write in your own cursive or check out fonts with glyphs for inspiration. It is frustrating though, because you're going to mess up your first 10-15. But once you get that confidence, it's over! You're ready to rewrite the Declaration of Independence!
And there you have it! Making your own wedding invitations isn't so bad after all. I assure you that the effort is totally worth it. :)
Do you have any more tips to offer?
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