Invitations: Cost Breakdown

Now that you've seen the invitations, it's time to break this bad boy down and figure out how much it cost to make them.

Number of invitations: 93

Total printing cost for all inserts: $171.39 from Catprint

Stamps (outer envelope and RSVP card): $97.52

Wrap labels: $15.87 from onlinelabels.com

Belly bands: Paper used from previous projects.

Corner rounder: $4.54

Envelopes (includes sample costs): $48.71 from Envelope Mall

$240.51 total, excluding postage
$2.59 per invitation, excluding postage
$3.63 apiece including postage

Was this cheaper than having someone else design them? Or buying a box of invitations? Probably not, on both counts, but I had a lot of fun messing around with various designs, and assembling them with care. To me, it was worth the months I put into them. I would not change a single thing.

Are you designing your own invitations? Or have you hired one of the amazing, uber-talented paper vendors out there? Tell me about your paperrrr. :)

Invitations: The Big Reveal

Finally, here is the story of our invitations! We worked long and hard on them, tirelessly rounding corners and cutting belly bands, printing endless versions of labels trying to get them to line up properly ... and look, Mr. Hyena helped!

Belly-banding!

Corner-rounding!

Here they are, ready to be sent off into the world ... 

Here's what our guests would see. I could have blurred everything out, but I love the fonts we used, and I want to show them off! So ... I 'shopped a new address on! Pretty envelopes! Pretty stamps! Harry Potter!

Okay, and the blurring begins. We did wrap labels since I wanted to print people's addresses instead of worrying about calligraphy. Our return address is on the back.

Open the envelope verrrrrry carefully to see the pretty liners! I only have a picture of one of the papers we used, but I had many different scrapbook paper patterns in my scrapbook basket, so they're all unique!

The suite, cuddling cozily in its belly band. Awww.

All the pieces together!

Now, this post wouldn't be complete if I didn't do something to make life difficult for myself. We had two events during the wedding weekend outside our ceremony and reception: the rehearsal dinner and a Sunday barbecue. Instead of mailing separate invitations for all those events ... I created three different RSVP cards and two different event cards, depending on which events each person is invited to. Oh, complications. ^_^

The RSVP cards with the bright pink envelopes! I love getting responses in the mail, and the pink envelopes make me so happy!

Andddd ... the event cards.

Last but not least, the invitation itself. I guess it's too late to elope now. ;)

These took months of work to create, have printed, assemble, figure out which pieces go in which envelopes, etc., but it was totally worth it seeing the final result! They're so pretty and colorful!

Did your fiancé/e help out with any of your major projects?

Invitations: Paper and Printing

This is me holding out on you just a liiiiiittle bit longer.  One of my bridesmaids lives in China, and I'm going to pretend she hasn't gotten her invitation yet. *wink*

So. A while back, when I first was working on them, I was telling you about the different components of the invitations. Once I had my envelopes, I went about designing our invitations. I never intended to print them myself on my printer, because I wanted them to have a higher-quality finish than I think my printer can provide. I contacted a couple of printers in town that we use at work to get pricing information, and found out I could get them printed for much cheaper online.

There are a lot of places online you can order prints, but I decided to go with Catprint.

Not, not you, kitty-boo.

Hi everyone. I'm Miss Hyena. And I am a crazy cat lady.

THIS:

via Catprint

They had tons of paper options for printing, and since you can't actually touch things through the screen (yet), I asked them for their wedding paper samples, which they sent to me for free. They felt pretty. I couldn't decide between four of the five samples they sent me! They were all so nice, and one was textured, and two of them were shimmery ... I let Mr. Hyena touch them, and he decided the one he liked best was the 130-lb. ultra heavy card stock in white. It's soft. ^_^  Oh, and they did a beautiful job on the invitations, and I lurve them.

The thing I really like about Catprint is that I could order the invitation pieces in the quantities I needed them; I found through most of the local printers, you had to purchase quantities of 100, 250 or 500, and I didn't need that many of them. Especially because, as you'll see soon, I had many varieties of inserts for the invites...

I promise the next post is the big reveal! Pinky swear!

(Catprint did not pay me for this post. They're just awesome and I can't stop saying nice things.)

Stamped, Sealed, Delivered

You guys, I really lucked out on this one. After my save-the-dates with the polar bear stamps, and a friend whose stamp options were "dolphins" or "Black History Month," I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that our invitations were not going to have pretty stamps on them. So I was pleasantly surprised when I took an invitation to the post office to be weighed and, despite the cost being higher than I had anticipated, I was presented with this option:

(source)

Actually, it was the only option for a 61-cent stamp. Post Office Guy actually looked kind of embarrassed about their lack of other stamps until I assured him that they were fine, since they were for wedding invitations. Hallelujah!

What were/are your stamp options?

Unwanted STDs: A Save-The-Date Saga

During our planning, our wedding invitations have been my baby. I have rounded each corner with love. When I found out the address stickers on the RSVP cards had our Zip Code wrong, I cried as Mr. H and I disassembled each invitation. I can picture that proud moment as each invitation, ready to take on the world, leaves our nest and arrives in each guest's mailbox ...

And I adamantly did NOT want to do save-the-dates. I planned to skip them entirely; that is, until the week of Thanksgiving 2010, when I found out no one — friends, family, bridesmaids, groomsmen — knew when the wedding is.

By the time I realized that I had to do save-the-dates if we wanted people to not plan their vacations during our wedding, we were already past the less-than-six-months-to-go mark. After pouring all my time and energy into "my baby," I just wanted to get the save-the-dates designed, get those puppies out and be done with 'em as quickly as possible. So I did just that.

Considering I only spent like, two days on this project, I'm very pleased with how they turned out! I decided to do postcards to save on stamps, and only one side in color to save on printing costs. (As I didn't plan to do these, there was no budget money set aside for them.) Yes, yes, I am aware that really both sides are in black and white, save for the text, but I love the way they look in B&W! It reminds me of newspaper announcements. :)

I had them printed from Catprint with a full bleed (that means all the way to the edge) on heavy matte cardstock.

How about a closer look:

Sorry the light made the back side show through a little...

Stamps ... those little polar bears don't match anything in the history of everything. Boo. But the new evergreen Forever stamps are kind of cute. :) I also printed off the polka-dot address labels for our guests, since they tie in with our invitation suite (and keep this side of the STD from being totally black and white).

And of course, all engagement photo credits go to Bridesmaid J!

What's your planning "baby"?

Invitations: Envelopes May Be Brighter Than They Appear

I ordered our envelopes from EnvelopeMall.com. They sell them in packs of 100 for the lowest prices I've found online. I really like the envelopes we chose.

If you're making your own invites, please please please please get samples before you spend the $18+. They are only $1 apiece, and it is pretty much the only way you can guarantee that you will get the correct colors.

We knew we wanted one of our envelopes to be pink and the other, maroon, but there were a couple of options for each. I ordered samples for the following colors (the following four images are from the EnvelopeMall site):

Stardream Metallic "Mars"

Astrobright "Pulsar Pink"

Carnival "Red"

Eames Furniture "India Pink"

Kids, this is why you order samples:

That color on the far left? Yeahh, that pretty and light "Pulsar Pink" is NEON. It doesn't look that way on the Web site! (The others, from left to right: Red, India Pink, Mars. India Pink is a tad brighter than the picture looks, but it's pretty close.) Mars was the only one that looked exactly the way I thought it would.

If you don't know approximately what size envelope you want, you can order different sample sizes, which is probably a better way than I did it. I looked up the dimensions for envelope sizes and got out my ruler and drew a bunch of envelope-sized boxes on a single piece of paper. Way to be confusing, self.

I ordered 100 of the 4-bar size in India Pink for the RSVP envelopes (NOTE: THIS IS THE SMALLEST ENVELOPE SIZE YOU CAN MAIL THROUGH USPS! Don't try to mail anything smaller than 3.5 inches by 5 inches!) and 200 of the A7 size in Mars for the outer. Since we're putting together about 93 invitations, this gave me a little room for error, and now I have matching envelopes for thank-you cards too, once I design them.

Once you've got the envelope size and color chosen, you can use this handy dandy chart to figure out what dimensions you need to make your invitations so they'll fit in the envelopes. Maybe make them a tad smaller if you're going to have several enclosures. Ours have a couple o' pieces to them, but they fit just fine, even with an envelope liner.

I don't have a good question to put about envelopes, sooo ... talk amongst yourselves. :)

Invitations: Font Failure

Our invitations are in!!! And I'll do a little sneak peek soon ('cause I can't keep 'em secret for long!), but first I want to give a little insight into the design process, starting with the fonts.

I'm that girl who can look at a font on a sign and tell you what it is. But I took the lazy way out on our invitations. And I couldn't be happier!

Oh, imagine the horror: all the fonts in our invitation suite ... were already standard on my computer!

Let's put it this way: I could have spent hours upon hours browsing dafont.com or Fonts for Peas or 1000 Free Fonts. To be honest, that probably would have been fun, but I just didn't have the energy. I work in marketing, and most of the time, the standard fonts work fine for any project (Myriad Pro is EVERYWHERE, ya'll!). At my last job, my computer had 11,000 fonts on it, and I never had the time or energy to search through even HALF of those. Even with all those choices, we used the same five for almost every project. As much as I love fonts, I can't bring myself to go searching for them.

Regardless, I am very pleased with the way the invitations turned out. THRILLED, actually!

The fonts we used are:

If you're doing your own design work and don't have the time or patience to look online for fonts, there are a couple tricks you can do with your fonts in Photoshop to make them look cool.

First of all, play with variations on text. Just bolding, italicizing, condensing your font of choice can make it look totally different.

Second is the Swash tool, which I recently discovered! This works best with fonts that have "Pro" in the name.

In your character palette, click the drop-down menu on the far right (next to those double arrows that look like a fast-forward button).

Scroll down to OpenType, and select "Swash."

Now your text is fancy-fied!

This is just a subtle thing you can do to make your fonts look more unique. There are endless things you can do with fonts, even standard ones!

Are you designing your own invites? Do you have any cool text tricks?

(All fonts I've used are standard in Adobe Creative Suite 4, on a MacBook Pro running OSX Snow Leopard. I have no idea what fonts come standard on any other OS or version of Creative Suite.)

Invitation Inspiration

I've mentioned before that I'm designing our invitation suite. And ya'll, it's finished and it's legendary. I love them. I can't wait to get the prints so I can show them off! In the meantime, I've decided to show you some of the invitation ideas that inspired me. We pulled bits and pieces from some of these to create our suite, and added in our own elements as well.

via The Budget Savvy Bride / from Nonpareil Magazine issue #5

via Bridal Buzz / from Cheerupcherup on Etsy

via 100 Layer Cake / DIY labels by Mika 78
(Obviously not invites, but the scalloping is so cute!)

via Style Me Pretty / Photo by Steve Steinhardt

via Style Me Pretty / Designs by Viola at Chewing The Cud

Mrs. French Fries' invitations / Designed by Mrs. Gloss

via 100 Layer Cake / Designs from Minted / Left, by Design Lotus; Right, by Cheree Berry Paper

via The Knot / Photo by Jasmine Star Photography

via 100 Layer Cake / Invitation by Gus & Ruby Letterpress

via Style Me Pretty / Invitation by Sweet Letter Press

Oooooh I want so badly to show ya'll our design now! How am I going to be able to keep it a secret? I am bad at holding in things I'm excited about!

What inspires you?