Bite Me, DIY: Invitations and place cards

So the Friday just past I had my cousins confirmation. Congrats little man. Anyway for his sisters communion last year my aunt decided to have a go at making the invitations an as the last time I actually had the store bought invitations was in primary school I got roped into helping. This time was no exception.

Now before you take on the task of making invitations keep in mind how many you will meed and how detailed you want every thing to be. As my cousin was sharing the reception after the event with his best friend my aunt volunteered to make theirs too so that they would all be the same. Actually I lie they were not the same, his were gold while my cousins were silver. In fact the whole reception had an on going theme of gold and silver, even the cakes were identical just the colors swapped. So with this in mind and the design my aunt had chosen we had a lot to do. Over 50 invitations using three types of paper and ribbon. It took us a few nights and we recruited two little helpers too. Oh and imagine is you make a major mistake, yeah its a lot.

So when planing out your invite, make sure to keep it as simple as you can if you have 100s to do. Leave your self plenty of time to get it done too. Also be flexible with your design, my aunt wanted it done a particular way but the craft store we went to didn't have some of the things we need to make that design or not enough of it. They had other things there though that suited better or that were close enough to what she wanted. So the design change a lot while browsing through the store. We also made mistakes or didn't get enough supplies like envelopes and I was going up and down to the store and going to other stores to try and find more. So plan ahead, make sure you have enough or you will me stuck with two different invitations.

Before you start cutting all that paper and putting it together make a mock invite. much like a first pancake, see if it works and the best way to go about it. This pancake invite also got us to alters some things on the final design. It just didn't look right so we played around with it a bit till it looked good.

Now that you know what your final design is going to be jump on the computer or get your pen if your hand writing your invites. I had to do this for my aunt but its really simple once you know how.
Once you have all the info you need as well as your wording down make a table in word. adjust is to the size you want the paper to be. I managed to fit about 3 invites to a page once i turned the paper to landscape. Make sure to change the lines of the table to a very light color preferably grey, so it is just visible enough to cut along. big black lines framing your info is not what you want, unless you decided on that. Choose a font, muck around with the words layout and color until your satisfied. Now just copy and paste it into the next box until you have the amount to need. or just one page and keep reprinting that if you don't want to have the guests names typed.

Now its time to make your production line. Cut up everything, use a slicer if you have one, they are quicker and you get a much straighter line that by cutting with hand. Once everything is cut or while its being cut if you have someone cutting for you start gluing, craft glue, glue stick or double sided tape are some of your options for this part. if you have textured paper craft glue will work best and the tape works well too. The quickest way is to to one step at a time for all the invitations don't make one than move onto the next one, it destroys the rhythm you build up.

Eventually you will be done. congratulations. Oh you want to place them in envelopes now? I hope you didn't make them too big to fit in the envelope? You did? now you have to make your own. oh it sucks to be you right now. Choose some paper and start folding and gluing. Good luck to you.
Thankfully we planed ahead and knew is had to fit into an envelope. YAY, too bad we couldn't get the right amount of envelopes and some people had different shades or texture than others. Of well.
Now what I did on the enveloped was to jump on the computer and make a new file as an envelope size, it should be on the packet from the envelopes. Use the same font from your invites and type up the names/addresses/return address. just use a mock envelope to make sure you print goes on the right side and right way up. Trust me I forgot one time and half of them were up side down. Also you don't want to use one of those big printers where the paper had to travel through several rolls it creases the envelope. If you only have that kind of printer at your disposal it may be best to hand write it all.

You could of course make a little slip to put around the envelope instead like we did. We used the red textured paper from the invite to make it as well as the church hole puncher we found to make it. It fit nicely onto the envelope which vanished. any way it added a little something and make it a bit more special.

With some of the extra paper we had left over we made place settings too. that took a while as I did most of it myself. My cousin helped me with the gold ones and threw her hands in the air when I told her we also had the silver one to do. Oh and I decided to make some special place settings for the guest of honor.