Wedding Talk: Burried in paper

Posted on May 28, 2008 by knittingpatterns4you | 1 Comment

Hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend, everyone! We spent it up at Brown and outside of Boston, attending a wonderful wedding. Seems like all we ever do anymore is go to weddings or plan our own!

Speaking of which, I am currently knee-deep in invitation prep. See?

I've sorted everything, Adam stamped the RSVP envelopes, and then I started working on the envelopes. I had planned to hand-calligrapher the envelopes myself, knowing all along that I was taking on a huge project. I'd been practicing for months, I bought special pens, a light box, and I was sure I knew what I was doing.

Unfortunately, I "forgot" all about my carpal tunnel problems. After I'd done the first 5 envelopes (about half of which required one or more redos), my hand had cramped up something fierce. Plus, the envelopes just didn't look professional enough. Clearly I am no professional.

So I went to Plan B:

I went through my fonts and settled on the gorgeous (sorry, not free) Palace Script font:

I already had the list in Excel (I am an Excel freak, I have one set up for my yarn, one for pattern sizing, one for the wedding budget, one for my own budget, etc etc), but I needed to lay out the envelopes. So I turned to Word mail merge and used the envelope setting to lay out the envelopes. I fed them one at a time into our deskjet printer, using the good print setting, and they came out great!

The best part of this method is that I was able to look at each envelope individually before printing it, and so was able to tweak size and alignment for each envelope. Since we have lots of invites going out of the country, this was especially important, as those invites have an extra address line in them. I ended up printing a few in a smaller font in order to get everything to fit.

Also great about printing them this way was that I was able to do inner envelopes as a second step each time. First I printed the address envelope, then I deleted the address, changed the name format, and hit print again. This way the inner and outer envelopes were already collated when I went to stuff them!

I have to say that printing them out was 100% the right decision -- I finished them in just 2 days, my hands don't hurt, and they look neat and perfect! I realize people are just going to throw out the envelopes anyway . . . I don't understand why I wanted to hand-calligrapher them, it turns out my creative time is much better spent on other DIY projects!

Which I'll talk about a bit next time . . . specifically rehearsal dinner invites!

Posted in addressing, knitting, wedding, wedding invitations


1 Response

gleek
gleek

May 28, 2008

good for you for printing them! i would have done that but my envelopes were dark red :) i had to hand address them all in a silver ink. it was a lot of work. i would have rather printed them!

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