Do It Yourself Invitations? Yes, you can!

If Mary can do it, so can you! :-)

Is there a special event coming up that you’re in the early stages of planning? Chances are, in this economy, you’ve at least given thought to designing your own invitations. I had the opportunity to speak to Mary, who lives in Wrentham, Massachusetts, about her first experience with choosing paper, envelopes, and printing her own invitations. I think her story is interesting, especially if you’ve been thinking of taking the plunge and trying this yourself.

“It was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was back in June. We were trying to keep our costs low planning the party, so the first thing we thought about was just making our own invitations. I didn’t have a lot of experience, but I had heard from friends who had gone and bought paper and just made them at home. I did it without a special software package like a card package or a newsletter package. It was just Microsoft Word. I picked a nice cursive font. And then I picked the font size and the color and it came out beautifully!"

Mary's invitation

“I chose cards and envelopes that were simple and elegant. When I put the cards in the printer, I just had to line them up and make sure they were spaced correctly when they came out of the printer. It was trial and error as far as where I wanted the text and clipart to land on the paper. I wasted a few cards, but I had plenty of extra. That was fine.”

Printing on the envelopes?

“No, I did not venture that far. To me, that was another step. I hand-wrote them. And that can look nice too, for weddings and anniversaries.”

When Mary had finished her invitations, she approached the golden couple.

“It wasn’t a surprise, so I showed my parents. I said, ‘What do you think? Is this kind of what you were thinking of?’ They thought it was great. What’s so amazing is you can’t tell that you just did it at home. I know people that order birth announcements which are beautiful, but you can pay a lot of money to hire someone to do that. And I couldn’t tell the difference. So I was so pleased with the whole process.”

Did you get any feedback from your guests?

“Yeah! I did. They were surprised I’d done them as compared to calling up the local place. So that made me feel good.”

Mary recently discovered LCI Paper’s vast specialty paper offerings. She’s already thinking of what her next project might be.

“And then to know that there’s more paper selections... I think that makes a difference too. If people really want to be creative, now they’re not limited to just playing it safe. So I’ll tell a lot of my friends. With all the Brownie groups and Girl Scouts, you know, they get crafty. They want to know these things and where to find things. If an organization wanted to send letters to the troops over in Iraq, if you had a certain type of paper, it just would make a difference. It sends a different type of statement.”

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