DIY Pocket Fold Invitations

Another budget-friendly way to personalize a wedding is with DIY invitations. After looking through catalogs and finding most options to be overpriced, boring, and expected I turned to other brides for inspiration.

The pocketfold invitation trend is growing in popularity, and with due reason! It is especially appealing to brides like myself who don't like opening beautiful wedding invitations and having the inserts fall out onto the floor or table. Pocketfold invitations are sleek, organized, and being new to the wedding scene; unique. I liked the idea of doing them, rather than hiring a printing company, for the simple fact that they would then be both highly personalized, and purchased at less than 1/2 of the cost to buy them commercially.

My future Mother-in-Law and I began at a paper supply store, where we pulled samples and unanimously decided that metallic card stock (despite being more expensive) was the way to go to create a professional, elegant, and beautiful invitation.

I turned to www.cardsandpockets.com, who offer inserts and the actual pocket fold in the curious metallic line. They send us samples of the colors, and with little debate, Dave and I chose square sand folders, emerald mats (precut), opal invitation page and R.S.V.P. card, caramel directions insert, and galvanized attractions insert. The emerald provides a pop of color, and the carmel and galvanized exactly match the graphics we are using.

The emerald mats came precut to fit the square pocketfold, and I am using a paper cutter to cut the rest from 8.5 x 11 to size as follows:

R.S.V.P. : 4 x 5
Direcitions: 5 x 5
Attractions: 6 x 5

Each insert is one inch taller than the last, leaving just enough room for the title.

We downloaded paint.net (a free paint program) which allowed us to crop out a blue Colorado Columbine from a photo Dave took. I had to zoom in about 400 times, and go around the exterior of the Columbine to erase erroneous pixels. Once that was done, we saved it and now it's used like a stamp on the invitation. (Photo to right: before removing extra pixels).

We then downloaded the Aramis font from 1001fonts.com, worded the invitation, and started putting it all together! Dave used Google Maps to create a fantastic map for our guests.

I used acid-free glue tape from Staples to glue the mat and invitation together. The text will be printed onto the invitation at Kinkos. Unfortunately, we bought a nice printer for this project and were told it could handle card stock, however all it does is jam up the rollers. This of course, adds somewhat to my budget for this and has put me over, so I've made accommodations elsewhere (like making my crinoline, below).

At Micheal's I found table confetti from Brides.com that is ivory shimmer card stock flowers. I paired them with sheer green ribbon to create the belly bands; something we weren't originally going to do however we felt that something was missing from the outside.

Our invitations, which would have cost over $10.00 each to do professionally, cost less than $5.50 each and that includes postage. A bit over my budget, but definitely reasonable considering the beautiful result!