DIY Wedding Invitations Phase 1

DIY Wedding Project: Invitations

We've dedicated this weekend to finally getting our invitations done. We sent out our save-the-dates last September, and we also did those ourselves. They were pretty low-key though; the design wasn't a full bleed and there was no ribbon/embossing/tricky printing involved. And one envelope. We made sticker address labels and sticker seals for the back of the save-the-date envelopes. They were easy to print, easy to apply. The save-the-dates were a cake walk.

The invitation design, however, is a full bleed. And our printer, it turns out, is a worthless piece of junk. They've printed out sideways, crooked, half on the page, blurred...and then at one point the invitation printed out and all it said was: Screw you Kristen. From, your shitty printer.

The envelopes this time are acting as the proverbial monkey on my back. Partially my own fault. Rather than print address label stickers, I wanted to print the design directly on the envelopes as we printed the address of the guest. It won't print the return address though, not without being cut off every single time. We've tried InDesign, jpegs, pdfs and even bloody Microsoft Word. It might be the thick envelopes that are throwing off the printer. I eventually gave up and decided to use the reject address labels that I didn't like for the save-the-dates. The back of the envelopes look cute, though.

We used our custom-made stamp that I designed back in February rather than an envelope seal like we used for the STDs. I like the look, but mostly I was just excited to use the stamp for the first time on something! Printing the RSVP mini-envelopes was relatively problem-free, so that was a nice surprise.

So we currently have roughly 170 envelopes and nothing to put inside. I don't want to post any photos of the actual invitations until we have the printer issues figured out. Right now all I have to show are some poorly assembled mock-ups and an InDesign file that looks pretty bland without the embossing, ribbon and silver cardstock-backing that make the invitation complete.