Cheap Wedding Invitations

Printing your own invitations may or may not be a route you may take to save money on your wedding. If you are computer savvy, this task should be manageable for you. If you are computer challenged, it may be best to go through a printer or company to print your invitations for you. You will save yourself a lot of time and headache. Creating and printing your own invitations can take 3 - 5 hours. If you do decide to print your own invitations and response cards, like I did, here are a few tips.

Paper Selection - It is easiest to go with a one sheet invitation instead of a folded one. One sheet invitations are more common nowadays anyway.

MS Word - MS Word is probably the best program for creating an invitation because of the wide selection of fonts available. Try to stick with an easy to read, block font (I like Century Gothic), not a cursive font. Why? Because you want your guests to easily read the details of where and when your wedding is. Make them work hard at reading your invitation and they may get some of the details confused.

Wording - Select the best wording for your invitation by doing a search online. Here are some wording samples.

Spell Check - Check and double check, then triple check the spelling of all names and wording. Have several people look at it to verify. This is your wedding invitation, after all.

Layout - Keep it simple by justifying to the middle. Make sure everything fits within 1/2 inch of the edge, on all sides, of the invitation for best results, depending on your printer.

Test Print - Use thin printer paper to do a test print. You can then place this sheet over your blank invitation to see if the formatting works on your invitation. When you are ready to print the real thing, do another test print, this time on your invitation paper. This is where extra sheets of invitations come in handy. You can also test out how to best feed the paper into your printer.

Printer Settings - Set your ink settings to best quality and select the right weight of your invitation paper, usually this will be heavyweight.

Printing the Invitations - When you are ready to print all of your invitations, I highly suggest printing 5 sheets at a time. Usually, there will be 2 invitations per sheet so you will be printing 10 invitations at a time. You can check how your printer handles high volume printing. Sometimes the paper will feed wrong when printing multiple copies, especially with heavyweight paper. It's also best to stand by your printer while it prints to correct any feeding errors. You'll see what I mean. This may sound tedious, but what will you do if your printer printed 20 invitations wrong and you weren't able to catch the error? You would have to buy more invitations and this would cost you more time.

Response Cards - Don't forget to print your response cards. Formatting and wording this may be just as challenging as your invitation. Here are some ideas.