making invitations

If you have any pics could you flash them please x

It all depends on what you want. There are some amazing ones on here. I tried the pocket fold ones originally but there was just something about them I didn't like, so I came up with these. (at the moment for 100 invites and all the "trimings" it's cost about £30/£40). Since taking this picture I have added a few little embelishments in the corners but nothing fancy.

I did my own. The flash of them is on the forum last week. It depends on what style you are wanting asto whether its worth doing it.

They took about four times longer to make than I thought they would as I had a very specific design in mind that was very very very fiddly to create using just word and the printing was a headache as although it looked fine on the screen it was printing with bits cropped off. However, once I had the printing done making them up was a doddle - double sided sellotape and glue and away I went. Got all my paper and card from PDA card and craft. The pocketfolds from amazon, the embellishments from Handmade card co. Already had a basic laser printer. Designing them took about a month. Took me all day Sunday and last night to make them up. I haven't done anything like this before but I was quite arty when I was younger and done a few very basic crafty things for the house over the years.

There are some places where there is a half way house in that you design how you want it to look and they then send you the stuff to make up at home. I was considering using pure invitations prior to deciding on a different style and doing them myself as they offer this and a printing service too. You just stick them together. Quite a few B2B have used Vista print where they wanted a more photograph style print.

Cost wise - I have ended up with a design which would have cost much more if I had had it professionally made due to the embellishments and the chandelier design inside (most other pocketfold for the same cost are plain inside with minimal embellishments. I wanted bling!). But I would have just picked something simpler within my budget.

When you are say 'not crafty or artistic' what is it making you want to make your own. Have you seen any you liked?

Some questions to consider before you start:

• Do you have access to a laser printer if you want pearlescent paper? Does it print on card too?
• Would you want your other wedding stationery in the same design as the invitations? If so you may have to make these too. I want my place cards, table plan, table numbers, menus and order of service in the same design as the invitations so will have to make all these too.
• How many do you need to make? I only had to do 26. Bear in mind that the first ten will be ok but if you have to do 50 that's quite a time commitment - especially if you take into account the other wedding stationery.

Having said all that I have had a big sense of satisfaction when putting them in envelopes last night. MY OH might not agree it was worth me being in a bad mood for three weeks when trying to design them.

You can always buy a few bits of paper for a sample and see if you can make them yourself to a standard you want. It wasn't until I did this that I realised how hard it was going to be - but did it anyway!

Another flash of mine? oh go one then...any excuse :-)

That is really jen- lou. you are very talented. How did you decide on your design.

Wow they are amazing cinnamon009 did you make your own save the dates

These are my invitations and order of service. Just a simple design in our wedding colour. Making 100 invites and o.o.s for all materials cost me around £30-35 x

We are having a marquee reception so wanted something to show that. Its a mixture of stock images anns various bits on word/publisher

Love yours jen-lou

We used Vistaprint for our Save the dates and they were just what we wanted - cheap and cheerful (good quality though).

I made pocketfold invites from patterned card and some plain white cards. They were cheap to make but as cinnamon said, the design for the insides took me a while to get just right. We did get loads of lovely comments about them though and so it was worth the time and effort.

We really enjoyed making ours, my mum and I. We both aren't "creative" but I think they came out well... Cost about £3.50 per invite but that's because we stuck a first class stamp on the RSVP envelope ( more chance of people actually replying)

I made our invites, really easy and much more cost effective, less than £50 in total. have a look on here or google for some inspiration, there are lots out there

Worked out a lot cheaper (well so far). Roughly £25 to make my own save the dates, so I shall continue and make the rest of the stationary items myself.

This was the picture we used for our STD. We mounted it on card in our colour scheme and added personalised ribbon so people knew who was actually getting married and some magnets to the back so they are fridge magnets.

These are our invitations.

Front;

Inside;

As we made them ourselves we personalised each one with the guests name printed onto each invitation and RSVP.

I would estimate for both STDs and invitations its cost us around £200 and I made around 80 of each. The main expense was the cloverleaf cards from hobbycraft. A tip is that when you sign up to hobbycraft you get 15% off your first online order so if you need to get anything from there, work out what you need and then order it all at once using the discount.