Wedding Invites

Our wedding invites have all been sent out so I guess it's safe to talk about this now...

I wanted to make sure we used our engagement photos somehow because sometimes you never end up seeing a single engagement photo of a couple at their wedding.  Since we aren't using any of our pictures for our guestbook it was an easy decision to use one in our invites.  We had TONS of great pictures to choose from because our photographer is AMAZING!  Click here to see some other photo options we considered for our wedding invites.

The design.

John and I decided on all the wording for our invites.  We knew we wanted a Bible verse somewhere on the invite as well and I really didn't want the front of the invite to be too wordy (I was looking at some examples and one in particular just seemed too jumbled with words).  Because our wedding venue is outside of the city just off a highway we also decided it was important to include a map to where the venue is.  BUT, we didn't want the map on another piece of paper because that just adds to printing costs... so we made sure that got on the back of the invite.  Other than the important information for date, time,and location the only other thing we needed to include was an RSVP date and how they could do that.  We are actually using an online service for our RSVP (hopefully it works... I'll talk more about that next week).

But in the end we did not design the invites.  I have a very talented cousin that was (hopefully) more than eager to do this for us.  All we had to do was pay for printing and get some envelopes that would fit our cards (we had our cards designed so that 2 would fit on a regular piece of paper to help cut printing costs).

We had them printed at Staples... all we did was drop off our USB with the file of the invites on it and explain what we wanted.  They charge you to open the file on the USB but it was only $2... and in my opinion to do that in store rather than online ensures that you are getting the invites done properly... well worth the $2.  I was warned about them charging a fee for cutting so John and I had already planned to go to his parents place on Monday to use their paper cutter.  BUT, then the employee at Staples told me the fee to cut them would be $3 to get them all done... so I "splurged" and had them cut it.  My reasoning (other than it only being $3) was that if they messed up on the cutting I'm sure they would reprint them free of charge (we actually might not even know that they messed it up) but if we messed it up we would be back at Staples paying to have more invites made.

So all in all we paid $5 extra to have them printed at Staples but we are pretty happy with the results.  PLUS, it only cost us $78.87 to get 120 invites printed (so 60 pieces of paper) which was well under our budget of $150.  When we added some envelopes (I just bought a pack of 100... so some people are getting invites not in an envelope - but we are handing some out so I think that's ok) it came to $103.46 which is still a good amount under our budget.

I didn't even look into any other types of wedding invites... I know that at Michaels you can get a package of them and you can design them online with their program. But even then you still have to pay printing costs and we would have likely needed to get more than one box of them (I'm guessing one box might have 50 invites or so)... so I still think we went the smarter route.

A huge thank you to my cousin for designing these beauties!

the front

the back