Paper Trimming

Now that I know our guests, even those far, far away, have received our invites, I can now do our reveal!!!

Since I'm terrible at going to the post office, I ended up mailing out the envelopes to my mom to address way later than I had originally planned.  To be fair, though, at one point I was waiting for some extras to arrive from Cards & Pockets first, but that shouldn't have delayed me three weeks months.

After I finally got all the envelopes, RSVPs included, out to my mom, I started working on the invitations and the other cards for the pocketfolds.

Things actually went a lot smoother than I thought that they would, especially after reading some horror stories from other brides about DIY invitations.  First, I spent a lot of time cutting out the paper.  Since I ordered scrapbook paper, all of the sheets were 12"x12".  And while you think that caused a lot of extra work, the great thing about it was that I was able to make multiples out of every sheet.  For the RSVPs, I was able to make 8 RSVP cards from every 12"x12" sheet of paper.  So, the $1.09 per sheet cost, ended up actually only being about $0.14 per RSVP card, not including the cost of ink, which I will not be considering in my invitation assembly, as I already had the cartridges for my printer and did not need to purchase replacements.  I'll do a full cost breakdown at the end of this post - back to cutting.

To help figure out how much paper I needed, I made some diagrams to figure out the number of cards I could make from each 12"x12" page. For each type of card, I made a grid. For the orange invitation cards, I only did 12x12, with each square representing 1". For the other cards, I did 24x24, with each square representing 1/2".

Orange Invitation Paper Diagram - 1" Grid / Personal Picture

RSVP Card Paper Diagram - 1/2" Grid / Personal Picture

Accommodations Card Paper Diagram - 1/2" Grid / Personal Picture

Map & Directions Card Paper Diagram / Personal Picture

As you can see above, I could fit a lot of cards on one piece of paper. And, for the Map & Directions Paper, since it was just plain white paper, I was able to get some 3.5"x5" cards out of the same page, which is the exact size I needed for the white part of the Invitation. It worked out perfectly!

I purchased a paper cutter since I knew that I would be making the invitations for the wedding, and I have to tell you, if you plan to do a lot with paper for something, definitely purchase a cutter.  It will be well worth the money.  The one that I purchased was by Fiskars, and while I was at it, I also purchased some replacement blades.

Fiskars 12" Personal Paper Trimmer / Image via Scrapbook.com

This was an absolute life saver.  Because I cut a lot of paper.  I made a total of 56 invitations, all of which consisted of an invitation (two pieces of paper), an RSVP card, an Accommodations card, and a Map & Directions card.  So, each pocketfold had five pieces of paper in it.  That's a whole lot of cutting.  

So, first, I marked out the paper where it needed to be cut.  Because my paper was double-sided, I made sure I was marking on the opposite side I was going to use.  If you have the ability to, use a boning knife to mark your paper instead of a pencil - it will save you time and look better.  

Marking the RSVP paper / Personal Picture

Then, after marking all my paper, I went through two blades on my paper trimmer cutting them all out.  Once they were all cut, extras included, I ran some test prints through my printer. Everything was working fine, so I set them all up to print, but hand-fed each individual sheet of paper to prevent misfeeds and paper jams.  That was the most time consuming part, especially since I couldn't really print in front of the television with other people because the sound was so annoying.  

I'll get to the assembly portion of the DIY Invites in the following post. But, I just wanted to share my cost breakdown with you here:

Orange Leaf Print Invitation Paper @ $1.01/sheet with 4 Invites/sheet = $0.25/Invite

White Invitation Plain Paper @ $4.29/25 sheets using only 2/3 of paper = $0.10/Invite

Yellow Grid RSVP Paper @ $1.09/sheet with 8 RSVPs/sheet = $0.14/RSVP

Green Swirl Accommodation Card Paper @ $0.96/sheet with 6 Cards/sheet = $0.16/Card

White Map & Directions Card Plain Paper @ $4.29/25 sheets using only 1/3 of paper = $0.05/Card

Total Paper Cost = $0.70/Invitation Suite*

I'd say that's a pretty darn good number, wouldn't you?

*Number does not include Pocketfold, Invitation Envelope, RSVP Envelope, or Postage.  If you include those, the total cost comes out to $3.20/Invitation Suite. Still a pretty good number!