Making Our Own Wedding Invites

A little-recognized side benefit of having a small wedding, as we are with our Escape package, is that you don't need to spend as much time or money on invitations. In fact, all told, we only needed to send out 13 wedding invitations, since many of our wedding guests actually live with one another. In fact, we could have probably gotten away with sending fewer (since we ended up sending three invitations to a single address...twice...so that some family members could get their own invitations). Yet despite this respite, somehow I suspected that Girl Scout Fiancée wouldn't let me off so easy, and I was right. You see, Girl Scout Fiancée is a crafter, and the phrase, "I need a new wedding craft" is said on almost a daily basis around this house. It came as no surprise to me that she wanted to make our own wedding invitations, and as a result this became the wedding craft that I have (thus far) been the most involved in.

Perhaps only a slightly exaggerated view of what Girl Scout Fiancée's half of the computer room looks like.

Girl Scout Fiancée got the idea for our wedding invites from someone else; as she recently asked, how did people plan weddings before the rise of Pinterest? That idea was a simple one, and a quick search turned up many examples like it: the wedding invitations would be made to look like airline tickets. This seemed like a great way to hopefully get people excited about our destination wedding, and it gave us lots of opportunities to customize the invitation, and provide some much-needed information to our guests, since the invitations are actually meant to look like a small sheaf of papers you get when you check in for your airline. Girl Scout Fiancée downloaded a great example made by Aylee, that included a template for you to use in Word (available for anyone to use under the Creative Commons license), and put together a version using all of our pertinent information.

Once she showed it to me, I offered to take a crack at replicating it in Photoshop. As much as I liked the original, I could already tell we might end up with some printing difficulties (would everything be at the right DPI, how well would the watermarks show up, could we come up with some more visual flair of our own, etc.). I took her initial mockup, replicated the shape of the three-tiered boarding passes in Photoshop, hunted down fonts, and then started looking for opportunities to make some small visual tweaks to make it look more like an authentic airline ticket. I even found a site that generates QR codes for you and created a QR code that links directly to our wedding website, which I put onto the second "page" of the invitation. I have no idea if anyone receiving a wedding invite is going to have any idea what a QR code is, but I thought it was a fun touch that added a little bit of authenticity to the boarding pass look (as many boarding passes have all kinds of strange barcodes and scannable objects on them).

And, if that had been the end of what I did (taking Girl Scout Fiancée's start and simply transferring it to a cleaner-printing format), that would be fine. But, no, I'm not that smart; I got overzealous. Perhaps it is because I'm creative professionally, or perhaps it's because when it comes to all things Disney I can't just stop when I'm ahead, but I kept tinkering with the design. I put a strip of black-and-white Mickey Mouse heads across the top and bottom, making it look decorative. I changed fonts, trying out a dozen different ones until I found things I liked. I changed icons from Mickey Mouse heads to Cinderella Castle silhouettes to Walt Disney World logos. I tried out half-a-dozen watermarks, ranging from a washed out version of the scene where Robin Hood & Maid Marian leave the wedding chapel at the end of the film, eventually settling on a Boardwalk post card-style watermark. I may have gone a little crazy, and the end result was a tense conversation between Girl Scout Fiancée and I where it was (rightly) pointed out to me that by constantly tinkering with the invitation I may have been sending a bad message about the work Girl Scout Fiancée had done before me. Fortunately, sanity reigned, and after some quick discussions with Girl Scout Fiancée's coworkers we settled on a design that was very close to what Girl Scout Fiancée had originally put together, but with a few small tweaks of my own that cleaned things up a bit. From there, it was simply a matter of spending a few hours in Photoshop getting all of the text spacing right, cleaning up any rough text, and then going over everything to make sure it was perfect.

The final version of the invitations.

While I was working on the invitations, Girl Scout Fiancée had found a great template for a folding sleeve in which we would place the boarding pass slips. She also figured out what kind of paper we wanted to get to print them on (a thick cardstock), and went to Michael's to buy the thick craft paper that she would make the sleeves out of. Once we finalized our plans, we tweaked the text and printed them out. Over the course of one Wedding Wednesday (which may have actually been a Monday, since sometimes Girl Scout Fiancée ends up having to do Girl Scout Things on Wednesdays) I hand-addressed each envelope while she put everything together. All told, start to finish, I probably put in about 8 hours doing design, tweaking text, and writing the envelopes, and Girl Scout Fiancée probably put in close to the same on all of her tasks.

The sleeves are folded, with the invitations waiting to be cut.

Girl Scout Fiancée cut out the pages of the invitation, and stuck them together with a fastener.

All put together, waiting to be stuffed into envelopes.

I think they turned out great, but we did hit one snag near the end of the process. Originally, the plan was to have the third page of the boarding passes also be the RSVP; we were going to perforate the ends so people could tear off everything except for the actual reply card. Unfortunately, when Girl Scout Fiancée went to the post office to determine exactly how much postage we were going to need, they informed her that the post card portion of the invitation was below the minimum size needed for the post office to guarantee delivery. Again, though, we lucked out, as it turned out the leftover envelopes from our save-the-dates ended up being the perfect size to fit the RSVP card in, and we knew that these envelopes would be delivered because we sent some out several months ago.

Of course, Girl Scout Fiancée threw me one more curveball before the end of the process: we needed to come up with something else to put in with the invitations, and she had just the perfect thing: the first of two Wedding Newsletters. More information on those coming soon...