Invitation Printing/diy Invites

We purchased our invitations from Hobby Lobby when they were 50% off and printed them at home. DH's parents had a printer with one of those ink supplies that costs pennies per sheet, they looked great! We did the same thing with our programs. We were able to find template ideas on Hobby Lobby's website.

I ordered from Vistaprint:

125 Invitations

125 RSVP Cards

125 RSVP Envelopes (printed w/ our address)

125 Info Cards

60 Save the Dates (out of towners only)

250 Menu Cards

I ordered during one of their frequent sales and upgraded to "linen" paper. It was about $475 for everything, which I thought was good considering how much I ordered.

I splurged on printed mailing envelopes from Minted, which was about $50 extra for Invites and Save the Dates. 100% worth it.

Hi! I am a graphic designer and am in the beginning stages of designing my own invitations. I am a big support of DIYin the invites if you are comfortable doing so. I have done some research that astounds me about pricing invites (which is motivating me to start my own affordable invitation/printing business). For my wedding, I am printing 125 invites, 125 RSVP cards, 125 website cards, 125 belly bands, 150 programs, and 200 gift tags on 250 (8.5x11) sheets of paper. That's is going to cost me about $75 for the good quality paper and ink (I am getting good quality graphic design paper and envelopes, but you can always get paper from hobby lobby on sale for much less). Envelopes will cost another $60. Add in small things like corner cutters or fonts that I bought for the design and then stamps to send and the grand total is less than $250 with the entire stationary suite done.

If you are just having black ink, I would say definitely do them at home! If you are going to go with the rough edges paper that might be a little harder, but considering you work at Hobby Lobby, I feel like you could figure it out. Printing on vellum is a little tricky. Make sure the velum works with your printer (laser or inkjet) and you let it dry at least 24 hours. (Every time I have printed on vellum, it has smeared because of my impatience.)

If you would need any help designing or setting up files so they print the best, please feel free to contact me! Etsy also has templates for designs!

I wanted to do my own invites at home, but I really love some I got sent for free from minted as examples. However, I only have 50 invites, whereas you have 250. YouTube has some awesome DIY invitation help videos and I have heard lots on WW about printing at staples. Hope i was able to offer a little help.

Try looking online for sales I did both my save the dates, which are picture magnets and my invites for $185 and there was no stress and they all look amazing. Don't forget when thinking about DIY invites you need top factor in the cost of ink as well. And if you have a Costco card their prints are very reasonable.

I diyed my invites and I was very happy with the results! I was lucky enough to be able to print at work but I have used other places as well for friends or last minute things on the weekends. I would suggest staples but put crop marks on and cut yourself I don't trust their cutting abilities. I designed my brothers save the dates but he lives in another state so the most efficient way for them I found was vistaprint (which is were I printed my save the dates because I wanted it on a magnet) and this worked out really well both times and they always have great specials. They do a 40% off almost every month.

I used one of the "print-it-yourself" invitation templates on Minted.com. They are $50 and you can edit it as many times as you want. There is some customization you can do with color, font, and format. Once you get it how you like, you save it and have it printed. I had Alphagraphics do mine. I had 110 invitations, 110 rsvp cards, and 40 photos printed for $107. I just bought and printed my save the date postcards from Minted because there was a sale and coupon (I think i paid $30 for 60 save the dates).

I had our invitations printed in both Romanian and English, a bit of a pain to translate and get everything to fit in the same formatting as the English version, but I made it work.English invite, rsvp card, and save the datePrinted addressesReturn addressing

I love the envelopes, did you print them yourself or did a company do it?

I ordered my save the date magnets from Vistaprint; ordered 100 (it was either sets of 50 or 100 and I needed 78) for $75.

However, I made my own invitations after pricing out invitations from various vendors and realizing how much I could save with the DIY option. Plus, I like crafts/projects.

In total, my invitations cost me about $85 (not including the cost of stamps) to make.

I ordered the cardstock from www.paperandmore.com; I searched around and I really liked their options (sizes, colors, metallic, etc) and their prices. I first ordered samples of the cardstock that I thought I wanted to use and when it arrived, I loved it! So I made the full purchase order. I got a pack of 100 8 1/2 x 11 white cardstock for all the actual pieces that I printed; 100 5x7 navy metallic cardstock for the invitation backer and 100 5x7 yellow metallic for the RSVP card backer. Since the RSVP card is obviously smaller than 5x7, I used the remnants I cut off to help make the belly bands.

I designed my invitations, RSVP cards, information card and belly band piece on Microsoft Word. It was actually pretty simple and my computer skillls/knowledge is pretty basic. I printed 2 invitations per page. I also included the belly band pieces (which are just our initials and the wedding date) on the page with the invitations because I had the extra space; I think 6 printed on each page. I printed 4 RSVP cards per page and 10 information cards per page. I did test prints on normal computer paper first to make sure everything was the right size, in the right place and to make sure the fonts looked good. When I created the word documents, I made all of the various pieces in text boxes, which made copy and paste easier, and made the outline of the box dashed lines that printed on the page, so I would know exactly where to cut. If you don't have a decent printer or don't want to front the money for a new ink cartridge (we changed our out just prior to me starting all this and the cartridge is only like 1/2 gone) then you could make all the documents, put them on a USB drive and take them to Staples/Office Depot/etc with the paper and have them print it.

I used a paper trimmer, which I already owned, to cut everything out. But you can buy those for like $10-$15.

I bought a corner decorative punch thing (initially I intended to do that decorative punch on the whole invitations, but on my test pages I actually didn't like the look and thus changed the design) and punched all the corners of the invitations and the RSVP cards. I attached them to their respective cardstock with double sided tape (purchased on sale in a pack of 6 for like $10 at Sam's Club). Bought white ribbon (50 cents/10 yards at Michaels) to use for the "belly bands" to hold everything together and used the double sided tape to secure the ribbon to the remnant square of the yellow metallic cardstock then placed the printed belly band piece on top, like a sandwich.

I bought the envelopes, both invitation and RSVP, on amazon for like $16. Printed all the addresses onto the envelopes using my printer and Microsoft word. I changed the opacity of the print on the envelopes so it was printed fairly faintly, just enough so I could trace it. I used a calligraphy marker (double sided with a brush like end and a more marker like end) that I already owned to do the all the writing on the envelopes so they all look handwritten.

In total, it was a good bit of work but I had surgery not long ago and was pretty immobile for 4 weeks so I had a great deal of free time to work on them and I love projects/crafting, so it wasn't so bad doing them myself. If you had your wedding party or your significant other to help you with all the cutting and punching and taping, that would move it along faster.

I'm pretty proud of my invitations and I think that they turned out looking really nice, especially for the amount of money I "invested" in them.

At the end of the day you have to decide how much money you're willing to spend on a piece of paper that will most likely end up in the trash/recycle (I tend to keep all Christmas cards, invitations, etc; but most people don't keep that stuff after the event is over). If you want to save money on invites so that it can be reallocated somewhere else in the budget, then it's worth the extra time it'll take in order to make all your invitations in my opinion.

Good luck!!!!