Wedding Invites

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on making my own wedding invitations. Currently, I am on a ten week Medicine rotation and I'm just about to finish up third year of medical school! It's been a good rotation, but with 30 hour call once a week, maybe it was not the best time to undertake this project. It took a little more time than I thought it would, but it was worth it in the end. There was one small hiccup in the production when my fiance tried to be helpful and constructed 40 invites on his own to save me time -- they then needed to be re-cut and reconstructed from scratch by me afterward because I'm picky. I felt really badly because he had worked so hard, but I really wanted them all to look the same and that would be difficult with two different people constructing them in different ways, with different methods for measuring and taping.

I decided that there would be three parts to my invites: The actual invite, the response card, and an insert with additional information and a map.

Invite:

There are four parts to the main invite. I started by creating the actual written part of the invite in Word, found the wording and font that I wanted, and then I sent the document to staples where they printed it onto white card stock. They did a great job, and it saved me the ink from my own printer. The middle paper layer was a black and white design that I found at Michael's in the scrapbooking section, and the outer layer was a red cardstock from Paper Source. I used my brand new papercutter to cut everything to the appropriate size (how did I live without one all of this time?!). Then I assembled the three layers using double sided click dispenser tape and a ruler to attach them together. The last step was to use a special ribbon hole punch that puts two vertical punches right next to each other and to tie the ribbons. Here's a photo with all the ribbons strung, and just waiting to be tied.


Response Cards:
Next, I created the response cards. I already had the printed information from Staples: I was able to place two invites and two response cards on each copy from Staples, so I just cut them apart. The assembly was the same as above; cut the three paper layers, cover the edges with clicker tape, and use a ruler to assemble. To make the process go a little quicker, I would put the tape around the edges of 10 invites at a time, assemble those 10, and then continue from there. Here's a picture of all the cut paper layers ready to be assembled and a quick look at the mat and ruler that I used to make sure that everything was even.

Inserts:
The final step was the wedding insert that has all the hotel, webpage, and location information that I did not want to muck up the actual invite. The hardest part was finding a map online that I wanted to use. The wedding will be at a church on a college campus, which is private property, and therefore does not have an actual address that can be entered into a GPS. Hopefully it will all end up okay; I included more maps on the wedding webpage, and I'm sure we'll put some signs up so that people can find their way. For the insert, I made a Word file again that had two copies on one sheet, sent it to Staples, and had it printed on white cardstock. After a few hours they were ready for pick up and I just cut them in half. To spruce them up a little bit, I stamped a design on the top, covered it in embossing powder, and used the heat tool to create a raised image. The finished insert came out great, as did the invites in general. As I mentioned before, I was pleased with the outcome; I just had such a hard time finding invites that fit my style when looking online, so I'm glad I was able to find this as a solution. Besides the fact that it was very relaxing to come home and do something that was not related to medicine, I'm proud that I actually finished a project!