Save money by custom-creating and printing your own wedding invitations.
Weddings can quickly drain your bank account, run up your credit card bill or even cause you to take out a small personal bank loan. When it comes to wedding preparations and planning, there are many ways in which you can save money and keep yourself out of debt. Printing your own wedding invites instead of seeking the services of a wedding planner or desktop publishing service may save you as much as several hundred dollars.
Instructions
1. Choose your wedding theme or colors before you get started designing your wedding invitations. Most people try to portray the wedding theme in their invitations to give guests a sneak peek of the wedding. Choose your colors or theme to guide you in choosing decorative elements and font colors for the invitations.
2. Turn on your computer and open up your favorite word processing program. Decide if you want to create a vertical or horizontal invitation, as well as if you want an invitation that folds open or is just a flat invitation card. You may need to change the orientation of your card. To do this in Microsoft Word, go to the Page Layout tab and click on the Orientation button to change the orientation to landscape instead of portrait, if necessary.
3. Add decorative elements to the card before you add any text. This allows you to size the font as necessary and position the decorative borders and images as desired. You may use images from your word processing program, your computer, or you might look for images online at free clip-art sites and sites that offer royalty-free images. Upload the images to your computer and open them in the invitation. Position the images as desired, keeping a blank space in either the center, top or bottom where you may include text.
4. Go online and look at wedding invitations to gather ideas for the wording of your invitations. Many invitations have wording that sounds as though it comes from family members requesting your presence at the wedding, while others may sound as though the bride and groom personally request your presence.
5. Create a text box to add the wording and font to the invitation. In Microsoft Word, click on the Insert tab and click to insert a text box. Adjust the size of the text box for the open space on the card and then type in your chosen wording.
6. Highlight the text and change the font style and color as desired to match your wedding theme. You may consider using different fonts or different font colors for the bride's and groom's names or for the date of the wedding. Try to limit yourself to three font colors and styles, to keep the card from appearing overly busy and sloppy.
7. Ensure you have a full printer ink cartridge before sending the invitation to your printer. If not, you may have to stop the printing when the cards start to come out in faded or unwanted colors. At this time, you should also look at the invitation in print preview to ensure that you want the invitation design you created in previous steps.
8. Send the invitation to your printer by hitting the print button on your word processing program. Print only one invitation and look at this first invitation before you use any more ink to print additional invitations. If you like this invitation, print more copies of it. Print at least ten more invitations than you need, in case you add invitees later. Save the invitation to your desktop for easy access in case you need to print additional invites.
Tags: font colors, invitation your, processing program, wedding invitations, wedding theme, word processing