Making your own invitations

I've made all my own stationery and I really enjoyed it, but I'm quite 'crafty' anyway. If you don't usually do this kind of thing I'd recommend keeping it really simple to avoid stress!

I bought most of my stuff from eBay, Hobbycraft and a local craft shop.

Im not crafty at all, and am making mine. I am sending the day ones this week!!

I got my actual cards from ebay - 100 with envelopes for under £15 inc p+p, spent about £20 on good quality paper for insert type things, and about a £20 on ribbon. I printed the insides myself, and just printed the gift info and hotel room prices on normal paper to slip in the envelope. Also bought some craft scissors and caligraphy pens for about a fiver althogether.

This is them, but only my first rough copy. The finished things are slightly different. The inside is a slightly different colour, and i have edged the insides too.

Hello

Ive made all my invitations/save the dates/place cards etc.

I went to the Paper Shop, you buy a box, which i think is about £6 or £8 and you can have as much paper as you can fit in it. There is loads to choose from, well an entire shop! Also if you reuse the box they first gave you, they give you an extra 10% off your next re-fill.

All the lines, rings and flowers we also got from there, to make all our stationary for the wedding its cost us about £30 and few hours of hard work, but they look amazing and im so proud to put my own stamp on them. Ive made about 150 invitations with everything that we bought.

Claire

Chicken82 - ow ur invites are amazing, hoping to make our stationery too - just a quick question - how long did it take you to make them all?

Have just bought most of the bits for my invitations from ebay.

OH is a printer and a friend of his has a printing firm. He said they would do the invitations for us but has said even they cant get the card/envelopes etc as cheap as they are on ebay so definately worth a look!

I made all mine, including my orders of ceremony which i'm just finishing off now for next week, and it's prob cost about £35 (for 70ish invites, 40 OOCs, favour box tags and table names). I got the paper and card from the paper mill shop (fill a box for £6), and punches and stuff from a couple of internet sites (handy hippo and eb ay) - I made a few different designs and it took me a few evenings through the summer to make all the invites, and it's taken me about 3 evenings this week to make the OOCs. I just printed all the inserts etc. on nice paper myself. I'd definitely recommend doing it if you're a little bit crafty - I loved the fact that mine were individual and i got really nice comments about them (although people may have just been being nice!).

I have brought several bits from www.weddingcrafter.co.uk

seem to be ok.

Try www.madaboutcards.com

I used to use them all the time when card making and have ordered some bits from there for my wedding stationery.

As a wedding stationery designer and just having read MrsSP post - would be interesting to see what prices made you fall off your chair!

I've used pda card and craft http://www.pdacardandcraft.co.uk/ (recommended on here), they were the cheapest place to get cards with pocket fold bits I found. We also printed directly onto their card for our save the dates.

I also got a fancy "weddingy" font for free from the internet to make the stationery look a bit more professional.

I went to hobbycraft for ideas, but have used a mix of coloured paper, wrapping paper, and printed tracing paper to decorate the front rather than ribbon etc as I have had to make 80. It's going to work out as less than 50p per invitation/save the date/thankyou/order of service.

I made my invites because I wanted a picture from our engagement on the front but I couldn't find anywhere that did what I wanted. I got my bits and bobs from Hobby Craft, confetti and Partners. I've really enjoyed putting it all together. Ive done save the dates, day invites, night invites, rsvps, maps, thank you cards, table plan, table numbers, menus, place cards, disposible camera cards, order of service everything really! Altogether I've probably spent £80. One tip is if you buy something from Confetti - i bought blank place cards you can access the print centre where you can find templates to download for free for everything and anything.

I used PDA cards and crafts too and bought the invitation card and inserts and a glue stick for about £33. [I think there were about 200 cards and inserts]. I bought a punch and some card and gold paper from a craft shop in Bluewater and Staples for the envelopes. I also bought some ribbon from someone on hitched I spent about £47 in all which made my invitations for the day and the evening, our seating plan, place cards and Thank You cards.

I am not in the least artistic, so I kept the design simple and confess my son helped me with the printing etc. on the pc, [who says teenage boys aren't useful?] but I have to say the invitations looked very professional and I had many lovely comments on them too. The Table plan was easy enough to do and also looked really good. The place cards I made as luggage labels tied with ribbon and were really effective. I quite enjoyed making them all.

One tip I would give, have a trial run with the inserts on normal printing paper so you don't waste the inserts. I also printed the guests names on them rather than write them in.

Good luck I think you will enjoy making them.

I only did some rough sums because at the moment I'm only looking into the cost of everything and we don't have exact guest numbers but based on a number of different designs I liked it was going to cost well over £500.00 for day/evening invites, save the date cards etc. Now I think that's a tad on the expensive side for something that most guests will just throw away afterwards...