How to Make Your Own Wedding Invitations

Learn how to make your own wedding invitations in this video with Haute Papier creator and owner Sarah Meyer Walsh.

Hi! I am Sarah Meyer Walsh of Haute Papier and I am showing you how to make wedding invitations and we are finally there. We are ready to put together actual wedding invitation. We are going to model the one that we are making today on this side here using browns and gold’s and copper colors. To get started there are few things that you will need including, however, many envelopes for mailing the invitation and envelopes for R. S. V. P based on the number of guests that you will be inviting. You will also need a paper cutter, glue, scissors, a pencil, a ruler or a straightedge and a couple of fancier papers; depending on how many invitations you will be making, you will need several sheets of two different decorative paper along with a plane brown paper. So to get started, you will need to print the actual invitation piece on your eight. 5 X 11 sheets of paper and like I said, you can get two out these page and I like to use a design program, so that I can print little guidelines, so that when I use the paper cutter it makes it much easier. So to get started we are going to match up the lines on the paper cutter just to make sure that the printer cuts the paper straight also and then we are going to start trimming the paper away to be precise that we hope that it would be. So once you've cut the invitation piece you can set it aside and I like to cut all of the pieces at a time. So if we were doing a hundred, I would cut all 50 of these sheets first and stack them up before moving on to the next piece. So the next piece we are going to be cutting is actually the white backing behind this sheet on here and just to expedite the process a little bit I have already cut that, so we have it right here. So we will set those two together. So next we are going to move on to cutting the ground piece, which will the middle backing on the page. So we want to measure, to make sure that it's the right size and it's like that it needs 4. 75x7, 75, so again we can get two invitation pieces out of one sheet of eight. 5x11 paper, so measure carefully. We've got seven. 75x4, 75, like I said before, if you are doing a hundred, you go ahead and cut all of those, all hundred of them first. So we can put this piece behind these two and just set it aside for a moment, because next, we will cut the one that is going to have the bigger band of the two large sheets of paper. So in this case it's going to be this coppery stripes page and what you want to do is, again, measure how big the piece needs to be. So the piece in this case is going to have to be five. 25x8. 25. So you would measure whole sheet and determine which way to lay them out to get the most pieces out of the one sheet of paper. So in this case, we are just going to cut off a piece big enough for our invitation. Then we will cut it out. So normally what you do is you cut all the stripes for all 100 pieces and then you would run them through the paper cutter to clean up the edges, because you always want to use the paper cutter to make sure that your edges are perfectly straight. So now we are just going to trim it to 8. 25x5. 25—5, 25 and 8, 25. Then we have that piece, so we will put that behind and then finally, we are going to cut the very outside piece which is going to be 5. 5x8. 5. So I have already gone and cut off a piece out of the big paper for this. So now we will just put it on the paper cutter to trim it. So again 5. 5x8. 5; now we have all the pieces we need to assemble our invitations. So again, you will cut all the pieces for 100 invitations and then you can move all these sheets of extra paper out of the way before you start assembling. So what I like to do is I like to separate all out, all of the pieces before I get started to set them into piles for each invitation set and then what you can do is start applying the glue. So we will gently and carefully run a tiny little thread of glue around the outside of this invitation piece and glue it on to its white backing and because these aren't in different colors. They do create a nice effect and help to make the invitation piece itself pop out a little bit more and to add to the overall weight of the invitation. Usually, you want your invitation to be a little bit heavier in weight. I am just applying glue to the next piece and generally, what you would do is let them dry in between, gluing on the next piece. So you would have done all the white pieces and them let them sit to dry before gluing them on to the brown piece, just so that they don't fled around when you are aligning them. Again, like I said, if you get a little bit of glue on the edges, just rub it off before it dries. So now we are going to glue the brown onto our first of the fancy papers and when working with the large sheets of paper they tend to be lighter in weight than using the cardstock, so you just need to experiment with how much glue. Some of them take very little and some of them actually need a lot because the texture is more rough and it's harder to absorb the glue. This one seems to be working quite nicely and then finally, we are going to glue on the backing and with the backing, you want to glue the pretty side on the outside, so that's what they see and then what they will see from the front is just another plane brown border. So again applying the glue to the smaller of the two pieces and then positioning it on to the backing, pushing down gently. So that not to have them sliding all over the place and pushing down gently to adhere the layers together and then again you can gently wiggle the paper around to align it to be perfectly aligned and there you have the invitation and it has a really nice backing.