Dreaming of Pocketfold Invitations...

Where do you get your inspiration from when you’re trying to make decisions?

Some people like to look at magazines…some look at books…some drive around looking for inspiration. I guess that it depends on what you’re trying to get inspiration on. If it’s wedding inspiration that you’re trying to find, then I seriously doubt driving around would help you all that much. Well, I guess that any given Saturday you could try to crash some weddings to pick up inspiration, but that seems like a LOT of work…

Me? I go to the web…surf the internet and “stalk” websites searching for inspiration on ideas that I’m looking for…one of my recent favorite searches has been for wedding invitations. Now that I can see the end in sight for my STDs, I am trying to start the focus on my wedding invitations.

You see…I have a confession to make…I’ve had SO much fun making my own STDs that I can’t imagine not trying to make our wedding invitations. Since one of my hobbies is scrapbooking, it just seems SO logical to me that I would be able to do this. In order to do that I needed a little inspiration for what exactly I was looking for in a wedding invitation. Because obviously, if I fell in love with something too complicated then I would have to hire at least a portion of the invitation out…

So I went to work searching…and searching…took a few weeks off to work on STDs…and went back to searching.

Yesterday I finally decided that my initial love of pocketfold invitations was something that was going to stick around, so I started looking into the cost of doing them myself…or buying them pre-made.

But before I set out to see if this was something that I could do or not…I decided that I needed to make sure that Mr. CC was going to love the pocketfold as much as I did. Probably not AS MUCH as me…but you know what I mean.

So I pulled some pictures off of the internet for him to look at, some different options that I liked. Actually, the first thing that I did was try to get him to give me “free reign” of this whole process…no such luck. I think that I messed myself up with the words “free reign.” He immediately got suspicious and wanted pictures since he had no clue what a pocketfold invitation looked like, and my descriptions didn’t really clear anything up for him.

To my pleasant surprise, Mr. CC liked the pocketfold concept too for our invitations, and even went so far as to pick out my favorite shape – the square invitation. Nice, Mr. CC – don’t ever let anyone tell you that you don’t have any taste!

So now that the biggest question has been settled on – back to my project of seeing if I could do these as cheaply as I could order them pre-made (which is NO fun at all!).

Cardsandpockets.com is a company that I found that will make JUST the pocketfolds for your invitations, so that you can DIY the rest. And the cost of fairly minimal – ranging anywhere from $.75 to $1.38 per pocketfold. A great deal, if I do say so myself…and they can be ordered in a wide range of colors, including shimmer/metallic papers. A nice alternative if you don’t want to do it yourself.

But what happens if you don’t happen to like the sizes that they offer? Can a handy DIY gal do it herself for the same price?

I set out this morning to figure out the answer to that question. I made a “trial” pocketfold (including all the mattes and invitation paper too) just to see it all together. Perfect – JUST what I had in mind…

Now for the cost…I can order the larger, heavier paper from here and get enough for all of my invitations for less than $40 (including shipping). Sold! That’s only $.04 per pocketfold…a thrifty gal like me with a paper cutter and scissors and tape can totally make these! Even factoring in cutting charges and tape, the total cost of my pocketfolds should be less than $60, which makes 100 of these come out to $.06 a piece.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress. I can’t WAIT to get started on these…and my BMs are chomping at the bit to start helping me with things – this is the perfect project for that!

Have you found a project that would be easy to purchase already done, but just can’t justify the cost when you actually figure out the savings that you could have if you do the project yourself?