How to Make Your Own Wedding Invitations

In an ideal world, your wedding day should be exactly the way that you want it, and your invitations should be no exception. Thankfully, this is one of the few areas of planning a wedding that can be completely within your control without any increase in price. In fact, if you plan, design and make your own wedding invitations, it can even be cheaper!

However, the prospect of making your own wedding invites can be really daunting. Especially if you’re not the crafty type. This breakdown of steps, shortcuts, and considerations will hopefully help to keep your invitation making experience enjoyable and stress-free.

Getting Ideas

Step one when you want to make your own wedding invitations is having some idea of what you would like them to look like. If you already have an aesthetic or colour scheme for your venue or bridesmaids dresses, this can be a great place to start.

If you haven’t got that far yet, don’t worry about it! This can be a wonderful starting point for many other aspects of your wedding, from the colour scheme to flower arrangement.  Creating a mood board can be a fun exercise to do with your partner,  which can help you narrow down colours and motifs that you both like.

Alternatively, a quicker way to generate some ideas might be to mine other people’s mood boards for inspiration. There are hundreds of wedding and wedding invitation boards that are public on Pinterest. You will almost certainly be able to find one that suits you very quickly.

Planning

Once you have an idea of what you would like, it’s time to get down to working out the finer details. This is a stage at which you might want to enlist an artistically inclined friend, or possibly the help of a professional designer. By pinning down the main aspects of your design beforehand, you should be able to keep the cost of this very low.

The key things that you will want to plan are colour, paper, size, any decorative motif, and perhaps most importantly, what you’re going to say.

Surprisingly, when you make your own wedding invitations, the colour scheme and decorative motifs are likely to be the easiest part of your decision making. However, it is worth bearing in mind that highly saturated or foiled designs will be more expensive to print.

The finish and size of the invitations tend to be a bit more complicated. The types of paper available to you can be slightly overwhelming. Not only do you have the grammage of the paper to work out, but also the various decorative finishes available to you.

It is worth seeking the help of a printing company to help with these choices. Most printing companies that offer wedding stationery will be happy to go through their options and prices with you.

There is also a wide range of options when it comes to the size and components of your wedding stationery. When planning to make your own wedding invitations, you can select exactly what you’d like to include.

Wedding invitations can range from a single sheet invitation to the inclusion of RSVP and save the date cards. You may also want to include accommodation options, directions and sometimes a gift list!

Try not to be intimidated by all of the options. Remember that as long as your guests have all the information they need, you can keep your invitations as small as you need to.

Make a Budget – and Stick to it!

The costs of organising a wedding can quickly spiral out of control, but there’s no reason why your invitations need to be expensive, as long as you plan ahead.

Take the time to explore the cost of the different aspects of the design as you are creating your plan, and what it will cost to implement them. Pearlescent cardstock might seem like a beautiful idea when you are thinking about what your invitations will look like, but you might not be so keen if this adds an additional £1 to every invitation sent.

Another key consideration that often gets overlooked when budgeting to make your own wedding invitations is postage. Makes sure that when you are designing your invite, you include the posting costs in your budget. Postage can be affected by the size, thickness and weight of your invitations if they are larger than a standard letter, or over 100g.

Don’t forget the Envelope!

It’s easy to get hyper-focused on when you are planning to make your own wedding invitations and to forget one of the most important aspects of the invite – the first thing your guests will see is the envelope!

You could source envelopes that match your colour scheme, or some companies will print customised envelopes that coordinate with your design as part of a wedding stationery package.

Printing

When you have settled on a final design, it is time to think about printing. You could do this at home. If you have access to a high-quality printer, however, most home printers will not be up to the task of professional-quality colour printing or heavy card stock.

Unless you already own a very high standard printer, you will probably want to take your design to a printing company that specialises in wedding stationery. They will also be able to help you fine-tune the scale of your design to be as economical as possible with their printing methods.

Make Your Own Wedding Invitations  – Final Considerations

Choosing to make your own wedding invitations can be daunting. There are plenty of resources online to help you, and it really doesn’t have to be too complicated. If in doubt, keep things simple. Don’t overload your guests with information, and make sure they can easily see the vital practical details of date, venue, directions, and any details regarding +1s.

Most importantly, remember that this is for you and your partner and that if you plan ahead, choosing to make your own wedding invitations can save you money, but it doesn’t need to be stressful.