My Wedding: The Wedding Invitation

Continuing on the wedding series, man I'm really dragging it out aren't I...

The front of the invite

Pop up flower!

Close up of pop up flower

I designed the invitation myself, keeping to the colour theme of the wedding. The intention was to keep the design minimal, non fussy and low cost. I stuck with black and white with a shot of red. For those of you who got cards to do, keep the following in mind when going to the printers. Factors that pushes up the prices are:

1. Any die cutting (cut shapes other than a straight line)
2. Any embossing (those raised patterns on the cards)
3. Any foil leafing (usually text in gold or silver)
4. More than one colour (more inks and mixtures of inks to get the colours you want)
5. Extra pages inserted in (more paper, more inks)
6. Fancy envelopes (especially if it has to be customised to the cards)
7. Type of paper or card used (anything which isn't a flat non laminated or pearlised)
8. Awkward shape (more paper had to be used to account for wastage)
9. Any extra emblishments that needed to be added on (more work)

So, the fancier your invite, the more it will cost.

For myself, I designed my wedding invite around the pop up flower. I already knew how the card was going to come out physically with the prototype I made and had the information laid out using Illustrator. I then bought the prototype and the file to the printers, after fiddling a bit more on the file with the head designer the layout was done. Chose the paper and came back a week later to collect all 600 pieces.

During that week I hunted for the right shade of red and grey for the flowers. 600 pieces of red and 600 pieces of grey flowers were needed. To see the process of making them click here.

Then it took me another week to stick all the flowers together and into the cards. I glued half in already when I realised the glue I was using was staining the card which was visible on the front, I half hoped majority of the people who recieved the invite had poor lighting.

After the wedding mom announced she held back 100 pieces. I slightly had a fit because we could've invited more or save money and time on not having to print out that extra hundred and make the extra hundred flowers.

So what am I going to do with these extra cards, If you're interested in recieving a wedding invitation with the pop up flower, email me with your address and I'll send one over to you.

P.S, my wedding invitation worked out to just under a $1 each. Not including the cost of pizzas for the volunteers to help cut the flowers out.