Designing your wedding invitation

Are you an art and craft person? Do you want to design and make your wedding invitation unique by making them yourself? If yes is your answer, then making your own wedding stationery can be as simple or as involved as you like. It can save you money but it won't save you time so take into account your own skill and patience.

If you go the do-it-yourself way, then make a day or evening of it and organize a bridal shower where you allocate each person a task and depending on how many hands you have your wedding invitations could be finished in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

Embellishments for wedding invitations include all sorts or gorgeous adornments including jewels, charms, crystals, flowers, ribbon, lace, buckles, cameos, letters, tassels, skeleton leaves, wax seals and all kinds of motifs including shells, starfish, hearts and seahorses.

When choosing to create an odd sized wedding invitation, make sure there is an envelope available that will fit it perfectly. Odd sized envelopes can be hard to source and expensive to buy and handmaking them yourself is very time consuming.

Preparation is the key to making your own wedding invitations. Get started by playing around with different papers and adornments.

Also, when designing your wedding invitations less is best. Don't get excited about all the different embellishments available and have them all, you don't want your wedding invitations looking like a school project. Choose one or two as the main feature.

Research about popular paper choices include cardstock, paper and vellums and which is best for elegant finishes and overlays.

Translucent or vellum papers are very popular choices for wedding invitations. Vellum is used mostly as an overlay and can be used as the insert to the invitation as it can be printed on. All translucent papers should be handled with care as it can crease easily leaving a white scar.

Not all printing methods or calligraphy will work on all papers. You may need to tweak your wedding invitation design to include more print friendly papers. If you find a paper your wedding invitation can't do without then consider layering the paper with print friendly ones.

If you are concerned about printing on your gorgeous and expensive papers have them printed professionally and then assemble the wedding invitation yourself....you will still be allowed to say you made them yourself!!