Our invitation combines vintage patterns and prints to evoke a casual elegance, perfect for our picnic wedding!
If you make your own wedding invitations, you can save truck loads of cash, but it can be pretty disappointing to send out a chintzy pre-packaged invite when you really wanted the finest letterpress on that thick velvety paper you loved so much. Postage costs enough already, so don’t feel like you have to spend a ton of money on your invitations and get crafty instead! These are a few ways that we got around the usual invite expenses without sacrificing quality.
If you can't afford a calligrapher, spruce up a printed sticky label with elegant fonts and a simple rubber stamp. We bought several nature inspired postage stamps that looked lovely together to add up to our total rate.
We created a simple linen booklet to tuck everything into. We couldn't afford enough real wood paper to back our invites in, so we used a small amount for our "info" label.
Mount home printed invitations with double stick tape to something heavy, like this chipboard, to give some importance and weight. I printed the back with a white faux bois linocut for a modern edge. Round the corners with a special cutter to make it look less homemade.
If you have a lot of travelers coming to your wedding, be generous with any information they might need to get there. We found a card at Papersource that we recreated with stencils for our info booklet cover.
Our booklets were printed at home and designed in Photoshop. We included what to expect at our picnic, things to do in the area, and all travel information.
Instead of printing a map straight from the internet, trace the important roads and draw funny little mile markers and color by hand. Color copy or print at home.
Print a pattern on the back of your RSVP cards so you can tuck it into the invitation pattern-side-up. It adds color, texture and happiness! We also printed the return labels with each guest's address as a personal touch. This way, they won't have to do anything except fill out their card and pop it in the mail.
Make personalized tapes with a simple sewing machine stitch and the Xyron Sticker maker. My RSVP stickers only took about 30 minutes to make with some twill tape, my Bernina and my sticker maker.
I hope these inspire to you to try some new techniques with your invitations instead of feeling like you have to hire a professional printer. We went to a few stationery stores and put things together that we liked and could recreate ourselves or assemble in a new way. Think outside the box and add one special handmade touch to each piece of your home-printed invite. It could be as simple as machine stitching a decorative border around the edges of the paper or as complex as carving full-sized stamps and hand-printing each piece. Either way, you aren’t spending 15-25 dollars per invite for something memorable!
Here are some of our sources:
delia-hauser.com 
WOW! You are sooo inspiring. These are simply lovely and your guests will appreciate the care and detail of their invite much more than just some piece of paper with an address on it. Simply LOVELY!!!!
Thanks! Designing them has been really fun for us and we’re happy to send out something we’d be thrilled to get in the mail ourselves!
Do you mind telling how much those cost to put together and ship? How many did you send out?
Thanks! I am amazed by them! I’m just afraid to hear how much they cost. eeps.
-Kristen
Sure! We just wrote down everything we bought to make them, and did the math- they were about $5.45 a piece including the interior and exterior postage and we sent out 150 of them. Postage is what got us in the end, because they were just over 1/4 inch thick, which makes them a package instead of a letter. $5.45 isn’t TOO bad considering the cost of letterpress these days, but $2.05 of that went to stamps! The materials weren’t that expensive because we used a pretty lightweight paper attached to the cheap chipboard to make them seem more important. Also, you get a discount at Paper Presentation the more packs of envelopes or paper you buy. Hope this helps!
Found your blog thanks to Ruffled! Really dying to know what tool you used to round the corners of your invitation—it’s so expensive to add that when getting them printed, but if I could do it myself inexpensively with a scrapbooking tool or similar, I’d LOVE to! It is a beautiful touch.
The rounded corner cutter seriously changed my life….I’m rounding off everything these days! Here is a link to the one we bought- it’s great, and still really sharp: http://www.amazon.com/We-Memory-Keepers-Corner-Chomper/dp/B0024M5GH4
Thanks!! I will look into that for sure.
Awesome post.