Wedding Announcements on a Budget

Weddings are the most important day of a bride and grooms life, so being on a budget is one of the last concerns.  But if you're looking for a way to have beautiful wedding announcements without breaking the bank, today I am sharing How to Make Wedding Announcements on a Budget.

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My son recently got married so I know first hand that there are many, MANY details to attend to.  It actually is a little bit overwhelming thinking of everything to be done.  But I promise that there is a way to accomplish everything without losing your mind- I am here as proof to that.  My biggest tip is to have your child marry into an awesome family that's excellent with wedding details!  haha!  

For real though, my son's in laws are amazing and took care of almost everything.  I did get the opportunity to do a few projects, starting with the announcements.  If you've looked into announcements, you'll know that they can be very pricey.  Between the paper, envelopes, enclosure cards, other embellishments and postage - it can all add up very quickly.  But I found a budget way to get beautiful invitations and everything that goes with them, without spending a ton of money.  In today's post, I'm going to share every bit of it with you.

How to Make Wedding Announcements on a Budget

I am all for spending money on important things.  But after practicing invitation making for years with all of the birthday/party invitations I've done, I knew I could do wedding announcements in a less expensive way. 

How to Make an Invitation in an online editing program

When we got started, the bride, groom and I looked at various invitations online to help us figure out wording.  Once we decided on that, I used the online photo editing software that I always use to design an invitation in the following steps.

• Download fonts to be used (I got mine here) and install them on your computer.
• Open blank 5 x 7 canvas in editing software.
• Type wording and format it how you would like it to appear.  I create a text box for each sentence to make moving them around easier.  Picmonkey has an alignment setting to make all of the text centered.
• Try out a bunch of different fonts.  I like to use upper case fonts and lower case fonts along with a script font.  Fonts I used Handmade Wanderlust Thin Regular for the uppercase, Avocado Sans Thin Regular for the lowercase and script is Forever Soulmates Script Font Regular.
• If there is a lot of information to include on the invitation, create a line to divide the information.  I used a black rectangle squished down and thinned out into a line.
• Save the invitation several times a long the way so that you can go back and fix parts at any point.
• When you think you are finished double check the spelling.  Then invite someone else to check for spelling and grammar errors.  Ask me how I know that.
• Save the invitation as a .jpeg and/or a .pdf.

How to Make an Enclosure Card for Wedding Announcements

We included enclosure cards for those invited to the temple ceremony and to the ring ceremony.  For the cards, I used the same fonts and did them in the same manner as the announcement to make them cohesive.  

• Open a 3x5 canvas.
• Type all pertinent information with same fonts as announcement.
• Use simple images to accompany the cards - I purchased this temple image.
• Save the cards as .jpeg or .pdf.

Printing Tip for Invitations

Once we had the invitations and enclosure cards ready, they were ordered from here.  

• The invitation is a 5 x 7 single sided invitation on 14pt cover stock.  I uploaded the invitation .jpeg (that I created as shown above) to the site.  I chose to have #500 printed even though we could have gotten by with way less, because the cost between 250 and 500 was about $10 more. So the invitations were less than $100.  Can you believe that?  
• The enclosure card is a 3.5 x 5 single sided invitation on 14pt cover stock.  The lowest number I could get was #100 so that was more than enough.  The enclosure cards cost about $60.  

heart paper fasteners  |  mini hole punch

We wanted to include a photo with the announcement.  Since he's my son and I take photos, I did an engagement photo shoot with the bride and groom.  They looked through the many images we captured and chose this photo to go with their announcement.  I had them printed in 4x6 here, my favorite photo printer.  

To attach the photo to the announcement, I punched a hole in the top left corner of both, then pushed the heart paper fastener prongs through the holes.  I split the prongs apart and pushed it down on a flat surface.

kraft envelopes  |  felt tip marker  |  brush tip marker

We decided on kraft 5 x 7 envelopes.  I bought them at Hobby Lobby when they were 50% off, which they do about every other week.  I hand addressed all of the envelopes, using an addressing template downloaded for free here.  I used a fine tip pen for the address and a brush tip pen for the last name of the guest.  I'm not going to lie, this took quite a bit of time.  But I just watched Netflix a couple of nights in a row and got them all addressed.  I used a rubber stamp similar to this for the return address on the back of the invitations.  

The invitation for my son and his sweet wife's wedding turned out so well!  We were all so pleased with how they turned out and how inexpensive they were!  It's not hard to make Beautiful Wedding Announcements on a Budget.