Handmade Invitations

I have to admit that there was a moment where I threatened to buy off-the-shelf invitations to use, if David didn’t finish the design of our invitations… but now that they are all done and sent, I’m so glad I didn’t follow through with that threat!

As I mentioned in our Save the Date post, we drew our inspiration from these sheets of Nepalese Peach Blossom paper that we found at the Rochester Art Supply around the corner from where we work.

David began by designing the actual printed portions of the invitation: the wedding information card, the ceremony rehearsal and dinner invitation card, the RSVP card and the directions card. We printed these on our work printer, on sheets of thick, textured paper purchased online (and made specifically for this printer, for the best quality).

Once all of the printed paper portions of the invitation had printed and had ample time to dry, we used a new paper cutter (we had been needing one for work anyway) to slice them down to their proper sizes.

The next step was to start building our “folders”, as we called them. They consisted of a thick, brown card stock adhered to the blue blossom paper, scored and folded to the shape we wanted. The first part of that process was cutting the brown card stock down to the proper shape. David was wonderful at anticipating ways to make all of these tasks easier, so he had designed the folders to cut out nicely from 8.5″ x 14″ sheets of the brown card stock, so it took only a minimum of cuts to cut out, but we still had to do 63 of them.

Once the brown portion of the folders were cut out, I laid them on some scratch paper and used a spray adhesive to then adhere them to the back of the blue blossom paper. Spray adhesive is fun the first few times you use it. Then you start feeling it in your arm hair, nose hair, etc. and it becomes infinitely less fun.

Once the blue and brown paper had dried together (only took about 30 minutes or so), Dave re-cut out each folder with his trusty exacto knife. He did an excellent job “free handing” this work, and I’m still impressed that he was able to do so many without a single mistake.

Once they were cut out, I used a closed pair of scissors to score the fold of the flap, and then stacked the folders under something heavy (the closest thing at hand was a spindle of DVDs!

That was all we could accomplish in a single night. My hands hurt, I was covered in glue, and I didn’t want to move into the next round of work which would involve handling the paper cards and ribbon. So we called it a night and started up the next day.

As I worked on scoring the second fold of the folder, Dave used a paintbrush and glue to adhere the information card to the folder.

The last step was to assemble each invitation based on the role of the invitee(s), and to tie a ribbon around the flap portion to keep everything nicely bundled. We couldn’t decide if we liked a white or pink ribbon best… so we eventually decided to use both! You wouldn’t think tying ribbon could be painful, but trying to get very neat bows requires a lot of force and after doing it over 60 times, my fingers were not happy campers.

The last step was to put it in an envelope (we used the same color / type as we did for our Save the Dates, but in a slightly larger side), and affix a stamp. We had custom stamps made to match our design through Zazzle.com which we thought was a fun touch!

Once they were all done, I dropped them in the mailbox! I was incredibly nervous (as I was with the Save the Dates) about the reliability of USPS. It’s funny how when you mail something not incredibly important to you, you don’t really think about it, but as soon as you put 60+ cards in the mail inviting people to the biggest day of your life, you are suddenly incredibly anxious! To my surprise, most of our invitations were delivered by the very next day!