Wedding Flowers

Your wedding invitation will be the first thing that your guests see from your wedding.  It may be displayed for weeks on their mantelpiece, and will probably be one of the things that they keep as a momento of sharing your special day, perhaps even ending up in a frame.   They should reflect your sense of style, personality, and theme of your wedding.

There are endless choices in designs for wedding invitations, from traditional and classic to bold and modern. Although professionally printed, personalized wedding stationery can often be expensive, with a bit of creativity it is easy to make your own wedding and bridal shower invitations.  As well as saving your wedding budget, creating your own wedding invitations can be a fun process to share with your fiancé or bridesmaids. Your design will be unique to you, and your guests will know that their wedding invitation was handmade by you, making it even more special.

Printing your own wedding invitations will definately save you money,  but creating just the right look and getting it right can be a tricky business.  We give you some pointers on how to print your own wedding invitations the easy way.

At first, it might seem like a very easy idea to print your own wedding invitations.  You just design them on the computer, buy some pretty paper and hit ‘print’.  Unfortunately, things can get a little more complicated than that, with paper jams, sky-high ink bills and software incompatibility turning your dream wedding invitations into a nightmare.  The good news, is that most problems can be avoided (or at least minimized) by some good planning.

The first stage to printing your own wedding invitations is design.  Think about what type of invitations you want.  Try to keep the printing as simple as possible – you can always add embellishments such as ribbons and stickers later.  When thinking about the layout of your design,  find out what the limitations of your printer are.  Will it print edge to edge, right up to the border, or does it have margins?  Can it print double sided, or will you have to manually load each page in twice by hand?  Does it handle subtle or complicated graphics and shading well?  The answers to these questions may help you to narrow down your choices for elements of your design.

Your design can be created on many different software programs.  Word processor programs such as Microsoft Word can do an ok job,  but pay careful attention to setting such as page margins, layout, table padding, and alignment.  You will have much greater control over layout by using a graphics program such as Publisher, or Pagemaker.  There are also specialty software packages available to help you design and print your own wedding invitations.  These software programes contain templates, fonts, graphics and ideas to get your started.

Ink can be very expensive, so you should take this into account before designing an invitation that has a lot of colour or large areas of black on it.  If you have an old printer that seems to go through a lot of ink, it might be in your best interest to invest in a new one.   Printers are now extremely affordable, and often come with free packs of ink.  Try to buy a printer that has individual cartridges, so that if you print your own wedding invitation with mostly black and red you can replace those colors instead of a more expensive full cartridge with yellow and blue.

Most types of paper will go through modern printers, including fancy or handmade papers.  Check your printer’s manual, or website to see what types of paper are recommended, and what the maximum thickness is to use.  Tip:  test a sheet of paper by printing a blank document.  This will let you see how well the paper runs through, without wasting it.    Don’t forget to add the cost of envelopes to your budget for printing your own invitations.   When designing your invitation make sure that you can find matching envelopes in the right size.  You can purchase special kits to help you print your own wedding invitations that contain paper, envelopes, and templates, taking away most of the hard work while leaving you with the flexibility and control to print your own wedding invitations exactly how you want.

Websites:
http://www.ed-it.com/p_tcwe.htm
http://www.lcipaper.com/TipPrint.shtml