(This is actually one of our messups. I had a perfect one I saved for myself that got
lost on the way to the reception for display and now it’s gone FOREVER :’( :’( :’( )
For our wedding invitations, I wanted to do them ourselves to make them more personal and to be a little creative with them. (There is probably no better opportunity for DIY projects than a wedding. :P )The theme I decided on once I chose Hakone Gardens as the venue for the ceremony was an Asian autumn, with the Japanese maple (momiji) as my primarily inspiration. I wanted this theme incorporated in the invites, along with clear Japanese and Taiwanese influences. I had toyed with the ideas of more nerdy things, like maybe a puzzle/riddle oriented invite or maybe binary for anything number related, but I stuck with something more traditional and classic in the end. For the nerd/creative factor, I spent it on the inner envelope.
The Inner Envelope
For people who haven’t gotten married or didn’t pay much attention to wedding traditions for when they did get married, wedding invitations have two envelopes: an inner envelope that holds all your invitation parts and an outer envelope that takes the beating from the USPS. We didn’t want to spend too much on the invites, so we didn’t do any reply cards or whatnot since they’re costly and unnecessary. As a result, there weren’t multiple physical parts to our invitation; we opted to have everything online on our wedding website. The inner envelope was purely decorative and to state explicitly who was invited (like you might address the outer envelope to your friend, but invite both your friend and his girlfriend explicitly on the inner envelope… or explicitly leave out people’s kids like we did for our adults-only shindig). I’m sure the first thing everyone thinks of when “paper” and “Japanese” are put together is “origami”, so I looked for interesting origami envelope options online. I found a picture of an origami crane envelope on flickr and a couple sets of instructions on how to make it through Google. I found these instructions to be hard to follow, but Kelvin figured them out pretty easily since it’s a simpler derivative of the regular paper crane, and he already memorized how to make regular paper cranes from years of Japanese-American Sunday school.
The crane envelope requires a square, and to make an envelope of invitation-ish size, you need a square that’s over a foot in width. If we had lots of money and free time, it would have been nice to get pretty Japanese washi paper and cut them to be the appropriate sized perfect squares, which is not trivial. Unfortunately, we had neither of these things, so I searched for places that sold large origami paper that I could obtain within the week to make the 6-weeks-before-wedding deadline. (Yeah, I kinda procrastinated on this.) My best option appeared to be 13 3/4″ origami paper squares by Yasutomo. Red is one of the available colors, and I figured a red envelope would be nice to make it more Chinese-y. I called all the local Japanese stationary shops around San Jose, but the largest paper most of them had was 9″ wide. Luckily, Yasutomo happens to be headquartered in South San Francisco, so I gave them a call to see if I could find a local store that carries these. They tried to locate a store for me using their system, but it must be a really archaic system, because they needed zip codes to check who had what. But it’s not like I know every stinkin’ zip code in the South Bay! They told me there was a store in San Francisco called Paper Tree that picks up products from them regularly every week, so they’d definitely be able to have the paper I was looking for in stock within the next couple days. I gave them a call, and sure enough, they already had the paper in stock. Ten packets of it even! So they set aside ten packets of extra large origami paper for me to pick, and my friend Rodney (also one of the groomsman) picked it up for me. They even gave us a 10% discount, which was real swell of them.
Big origami paper
This origami paper was the most expensive component of the invitation, simply because Yasutomo does not sell extra large origami paper packets in one color. You have to get their packet, which has 6 reds, 6 blues, 6 greens, and a single each of gold and silver metallic. With each packet costing ~$7, that’s like over $1 for each red origami paper, since all the other colors are worthless to us. We used a couple of the other colors for practice, but needless to say we have a ton of blue and green left. (If you need extra large blue or green origami paper, feel free to contact me :P) The paper is the thin, cheap-feeling plain origami paper kind, but in hindsight something thick like washi paper probably would have been a pain to fold 60 times. Paper held together just fine, and the dye/ink never came off the paper onto our fingers. Kelvin is much better at me in origami, so he did the majority of them. If any of my guests got a crappy crane, it was probably folded by me. Because of how time consuming it was to fold 60+ of these, I recruited some of my work buddies to help out. Thanks Mike and Ted!
Kelvin shows his appreciation for origami.
Mike, Hoang, and Ted making or practicing to make crane envelopes.
To make the envelopes more Chinese, I purchased a double happiness stamp and gold archival ink from Paper Source. It’s not as nice as embossing it, but given the time crunch, I was still pretty happy with the result. The stamp can be weak from certain angles, but bold in others. The bad part of stamping is getting it even and not messing up the stamp. Kelvin was particularly awful at this, so I did most of the stamping, but I still had many off-center or double-printed stamps. If it had been easier to get more origami paper, I would have been more particular, but that wasn’t really an option. I also learned from this that stamp ink apparently takes a while to dry, even though we supposedly had one of the faster-drying ink brands.
This one is about to be stamped.
For writing the invitees names on the inner envelope, I used a gold ink pen that I bought from Mitsuwa. The resulting writing is very nice, but the pen is kind of a pain to use. It seemed to like to leak ink a lot above the tip, so we’d often end up with ink on our fingertips. Occasionally, the pen would barf up a glob of ink. Thankfully, we only ruined on envelope this way.
The final result is a red crane envelope with gold touches. It’s got a nice envelope flap that you can tuck underneath the crane. The envelope apparently isn’t the most intuitive; I watched several of our friends almost rip our envelope figuring out how to get the invitation out. The color and feel of the envelope also reminds of red envelopes that Chinese folks use to give our money gifts.
A batch of envelopes waiting for the stamp ink to dry
The Invitation
The size of our invitations were limited by the size of our envelopes, and our design was limited by our lack of money. My coworker April helped me out A TON, primarily by taking me to the local paper chain, Kelly Paper. It’s a giant warehouse with tons of different kinds of paper, but most of it is for office printing. They have samples of just about every paper they have that you can take for free to try at home in your printer, and their salespeople are super nice and helpful (at least the guy named Jesus working at the one I went to happened to be super nice and helpful).
The thickest paper I could find was a paper weight of 80lb, which is kinda thin for an invitation. I wanted an ivory toned paper with a brown background, and Kelly Paper happened to have these sheets of dark brown cover paper (I think it was called Classic Columns or something) that was also 80lb. An 80lb paper glued to another 80lb paper felt invitation-like enough for me, so we went with that. What’s great about the sheets is that they cut to the size you want for you, and it costs the same regardless of number of cuts. So I was able to get ~100 brown cards of the right size for the cost of 3 or 4 sheets, which were a few bucks each. This was particularly great for us, since we needed an atypical size for our special crane envelopes. For the ivory paper, I found one that had nice grains/fibers in it, giving it a very natural tone. I forget the name of the paper, but it’s by Evergreen and the color was “birch”. They not surprisingly also supplied envelopes, so I bought the cheapest box of A8’s I could find.
Most of our materials
The good thing about going to an office supply store is that everything is cheap. The bad thing is that everything is in bulk. Using the envelopes as an example, you can get 10 packs of A7.5s from Paper Source (they don’t have A8s, so I’m just using A7.5 as an example) for $4.50 each. So for ~$30, I’d get 60 envelopes. At Kelly Paper, I got freaking 250 envelopes for the same price. The cheap-o envelopes are thinner, and you can only get white, but who cares? This is for the outer envelope that takes the beating from the postal service. Now, if for some strange reason I need another 190 envelopes… well, I’ve got them :P It’s very handy for things like printer messups.
Total spent at Kelly Paper:
Ivory, fiber-y 80lb cover 8.5″ x 11″ paper – 250 sheets – $26.57
A8 plain white envelopes – 250 envelopes – $29.61
Brown 80lb cover paper stock – 3 or 4 large sheets cut into ~100 pieces of the right size, plus a bunch of leftover scraps – $24.15 – Actually, this number seems high. I got this from my credit card bill cuz I lost the receipt from this purchase, so I’m wondering if I bought something else when I got this. But let’s assume it cost this much for now.
So for about 80 bucks, I got a ridiculous amount of paper and envelopes. Keep in mind, each sheet of ivory paper makes 2 invitations, so we only used like 40 pieces of paper for the invitation. We had quite a bit of leftover brown paper as well. We used all the brown leftovers and some ivory paper for programs later. We actually ended up wasting quite a bit of the ivory paper when we print the programs because we made a printing mistake on the entire batch… regardless, we still have a bunch of ivory paper left. Very cost-effective choice for materials.
For the actual invitation design, I wanted to have momiji leaves on the invite. We looked at images of momiji leaves on flickr for inspiration. Kelvin took one of the images (this lovely picture from flickr user * Yumi *, to be exact) and, with some Photoshop/Illustrator magic or something, made it into a nice, artsy graphic in bright red and orange colors. Printing on the grainy, ivory paper in an inkjet meant the print would bleed a little bit, but this turned out to be a good thing for the image, as it made it look more like brushwork. Kelvin printed two invites on each sheet, including marks to show where the paper needed to be cut. Printing our own color images was definitely a money saver, as doing color in a print shop isn’t cheap.
Pre-Kinkos invites
Because the ink tended to bleed on the paper we got, we didn’t want to print the wedding text ourselves, and we didn’t have access to a good laser printer. We put the print layout in an Adobe Illustrator file and took it to Kinko’s. Black & white printing was insanely cheap; I think like a few cents a sheet. The pricey part was having them cut the paper for us. We borrowed a paper cutter from April, but amount of cutting required would still be time-consuming, so we opted to have Kinko’s do it. Man, what a rip. It’s like $2 per cut, and Kelvin didn’t line the invites on any of the paper edges or put the invites next to each other, so we needed to make 6 cuts. The bulk of the Kinko’s cost was in the cutting, and their cutting was totally gimpy! They didn’t follow our markings very well, and the edges weren’t totally straight or parallel. Plus I think the guy would cut too many at once, as a handful of invites had mangled edges or weird clamp imprints. It was still usable, but for some cards that were really off, Kelvin had to recut them on the paper cutter to make it straight.
Inkjet vs. Laser
With the printed portions done, next was more manual labor. With more help from coworkers (thanks Hoang and Ted and Mike!), we pasted the printed ivory portion on top of the brown card stock. We were using double-sided tape with glue stick to adhere to the two pieces, but I underestimated our usage of tape, and it ran out. We ended up using only glue stick for some the invitations, but the glue stick held pretty okay, especially for a glue stick.
Some finished and unfinished invites
This was it for our invitations. We took our invites and stuck them in our crane envelopes. Perfect fit!
Invitation and inner envelope together
The Outer Envelope and Postage
Okay, this part wasn’t very complicated, but still a little time consuming. I printed each envelope using my inkjet printer (no friggin’ way was I gonna hand address each envelope like is recommended from some wedding etiquette guides), and I stuck a heart stamp on each one. Well, the stamp is a dude carrying a giant heart… not sure what that means really, but it was the only good heart stamp the USPS had. I took a finished invitation to the post office, and they said I could get away with one stamp each invitation! The second post office I went was hesitant at first, but they measured it and realized it’d be no issue. I also had invitations I needed to mail to Taiwan (even tho no one from Taiwan except my father was coming), so I stuck all of those invites in a couple giant envelopes, got exact postage from the USPS counter, and mailed it to a family representative to distribute to relatives.
Conclusions
While we were trying to keep the invitations cheap, all the materials (paper, adhesives, printing, stamps, etc.) still cost us about $170 for what ended up to be around 65 invitations. That’s pushing $3 an invitation, which isn’t exactly bargain basement but not as costly as having someone else make and design them. This is ignoring the fact we have a ton of crap leftover. If you consider it by exact cost of materials per invitation (one origami paper, half a sheet of ivory paper, etc.), it’s easily under a dollar per invite. I’m pretty happy with the final results, especially how last minute we did everything.
My advice for future brides:
- Look online for inspirations. Etsy, Craft, and flickr were particularly inspiring.
- Don’t bother with reply cards. They’re costly, wasteful, and the only people who get to keep them are you and the inconsiderate jerks who don’t RSVP. (A huge portion of your guests will NOT RSVP, regardless of how easy you try to make the RSVP process, paper or no paper.)
- Educate yourself on the different paper types to know exactly what you want. If you’re fancy-shmancy, read up on print types as well.
- Buy in bulk, especially paper that can be used for other things in the wedding. Programs, name cards, table numbers…
- Check out office supply stores for bulk materials.
- Check with the post office for the exact cost of mailing an invitation.
- Ask your friends to help. Friendship = free manual labor = awesome.
- Don’t do things last minute, especially for DIY stuff! I don’t even know why I bother saying this since I never listen to this myself…
Kelvin’s contribution:
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steps and you’ll make less mistakes!
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New thing I learned today: The paper weight number is how many pounds 500 standard sized sheets of that paper weighs. “Standard size” varies with the type of paper, like text (25″ x 38″) versus cover (20″ x 26″), so 80lb text paper is not the same thickness as 80lb cover paper.
