A Guide to Printing Your Own Wedding Invitations

With so many ways to charge your credit card as you plan your marriage ceremony, invitations shouldn’t be one of them. Ordering simple invitations with small photos or a minor bow here and some color there can be more than you’ve budgeted. $150.00 for only 50? And envelopes are not included? That won’t even cover your family let alone his. How can you cut this cost without breaking out the construction paper and markers?

Here are five reasons why printing your own invitations are worth the longer route.

1. A kit of 50 is about $20.00; you can usually find them on sale for $15.00. That’s about a tenth of the cost of the mail or store order kind. The kits come in a selection of different top embossments and designs. Envelopes and reply cards are included and they are usually half the size of regular letter paper, which is a decent presentation for those that have a hard time reading small print. You can usually buy matching seals separately for a few dollars to complete the package. Since they are not a popular item, you can find a good selection at any store.

2.While ordering invitations is obviously easier, you still have to wait for them, and usually hand address them. When you print your own you can find typos easier-in fact before you print out a hundred or more! If you are an environmentalist this is a relief.

3.Have no idea how to write a formal invitation? No problem. Each kit comes with different examples of formal and less formal wording as well as from different perspectives (mother and father of bride or groom, or bride and groom themselves). You can even take a tip from the style of their font, how big they make the announcement portion compared to the names, and how they word the location. You’re only job is to customize the lettering into whatever style you want and whatever color you so choose.

4.The printing is easy; once you make a few copies on regular paper you can see how it will look by placing it over a blank invitation. You can figure out what you need to align better, space farther, and make bigger. It’s that easy! You will also need to fix the margins of the document exactly how the included instructions tell you to do it. You don’t even have to estimate it yourself; they’ve done it for you. Make sure your printer feeder is adjusted to fit your invitations and print away.

5.They will come out elegant without being too flashy, and you have the privilege of saying you did them yourself. If you would like to include a photo, get them printed separately from an online photo store (probably not Walmart because their quality can vary considerably from one photo to another in the same order). This will also allow the recipients to better frame your picture if they so choose since it won’t be attached to the invitation or be a mere wallet size. Even for 3 x 5 color photos, the cost will be a fraction of what you would have paid if you had ordered photo invitations, and the results will be just as good.

So if you are willing to spend one evening on the devoted making of your invitations, you can cut your wedding costs significantly. Besides why spend all that money on something most of the people receiving them will toss out once the wedding is over? It’s not as difficult as it may seem to print your own, and you will have the opportunity to see the whole process through to ensure they are exactly how you wanted them to be.