The Invites--to DIY, or not to DIY

I don't mind a certain amount of DIY. I'm not the most crafty person, but Mr. T went to art school, so I think we could pull off designing and printing our own invites on our own printer at home. Mr. T is worried that they will look terrible. I guess I can't fault him for being concerned.

Still, finding premade Halloween wedding invitations is pretty much not going to happen. I actually did find one vendor, but they were in the U.K. and I didn't love their stuff.

We both love the look of letterpress printed stuff, but my initial research has been discouraging--I found one vendor on Etsy that charges $700 just for 100 invites. I will keep pricing, but that first amount doesn't make me feel very confident about affordable letterpress invites. But, you never know.

In my googling I did find some adorable DIY invites. I love the look of the inside of this first one:

It looks all Edward Goreyesque, which I love. I also love the white type on the black background. I'm not as crazy about the Hardy Boys front cover. Mr. T says it's obvious that they pasted the invitation together and says it looks cheap to him. I don't mind the pasted together look so much, but I'm not a graphic designer. I also found these:


I think this is from Better Homes and Gardens. I like the look of the vellum, and I like the font they used too. I haven't shown it to Mr. T yet, so I don't know if this is an approved font or not. I was joking with Mr. T that we should use Comic Sans or Papyrus for our fonts, trying to keep my best poker face on so he'd think I was serious, but he knew I was kidding. I guess 10 years of dating helps you to know stuff like that. Mr. T is very opinionated on the subject of fonts. An Italian restaurant opened up in our neighborhood and printed their very cheap looking sign using Papyrus...when they went out of business, he snorted, "well, no wonder!" (As an aside, if you haven't seen the documentary "Helvetica," and you are at all interested in books, typesetting, or graphic design, you should check it out.)

I also found some just plain old Halloween invitations, which we could have customized with our own text. I liked this one:



I like the simplicity, with just the black and orange. Perhaps it's too Halloween and not enough wedding, though? The bonus is, these are cheaper--$200 for the quantity we'd need. However, it doesn't include a reply card. I suppose we could do our own, just on orange cardstock (although that presents the problem of matching the oranges...). I also thought about having all the reply cards be vintage Halloween postcards, something like this:


We could get books of postcards and each invite would have a different postcard. Of course, we'd still need to print on the backs.

Mr. T would like to have one of our artist friends draw something for the front--do a totally custom invite--but I'm not sure yet where we could get those printed or how much those would cost. There are machines for home printing--almost like silkscreening--called Gocco, but they are hard to find and set up costs would be $200 or so, plus paper expenses and ink, etc. I like the looks of the ones I've seen, but I'm not convinced it would be cheaper, or that it would look good in my noncrafty hands...I guess Mr. T would be assigned silkscreening duties.

I mused aloud the other day that I'm considering taking a calligraphy class, to address our invites. Now, I know I could just address them myself in my normal handwriting and that would be fine. (Unless, of course, you're reading one of those wedding magazines that admonishes you, "Get your invites to the calligrapher early!" The calligrapher??? I priced this, just out of curiosity, and it would cost us about $5 an invite. Ouch!) But, I have plenty of time, and I think the calligraphy would be a nice touch with the Halloween theme. Also, I could do signage for the reception in calligraphy. Mr. T surprised me by saying he'd taken a class when he was a kid and that he'd be into taking another one with me. I guess there are still things to find out about your partner after 10 years! So, we might do that.

I'll do a separate post on Save the Date cards...those will be easier, once we get a venue, that is.