Invitation Creation, Part 2: Inserts and Lasers

Now that the pocketfolds were made, I needed to make inserts containing all the information for our guests.

First up was the main invite sheet, which would be glued inside the pocketfold. Enter the fun laser cutter at Mr. Cola's office! We spent about three full weekend days cutting these onto wood grain paper, since each page took about 23 minutes just to cut out two invites, plus time to set up the cutter for each page.

(A side note here. This laser cut portion was from my original, super awesome, but time consuming invitations design. It was after three 10 hour days of cutting these that Mr. Cola decided he'd had enough, so I scaled back the overall design to the one I'm showing you now. Don't worry though, I still plan to show off the really cool versions!)

The laser cutter in action:

For a design this intricate, the cutter doesn't always do a perfect job, so I still had to go back through each one and poke out the leftover pieces with my X-acto knife. You can see in this picture how the & symbol and an e are still left after cutting:

But after spending all that time, they turned out really neat, especially when they were all stacked together and you could peak through the cut outs:

I rounded the opposite corners on these and they were then ready to be glued into the pocketfolds:

My original plan had been to mount these laser cut sheets onto a layer of purple card stock, and then mount that to the green pocketfolds. However, since my purple paper is a lighter, lavender shade, there wasn't enough contrast with the wood paper to be able to clearly read the cut out text. So Mr. Cola begrudgingly let me use the laser cutter to cut the purple paper into a frame shape, so the green pocketfold would show through the text, but the flowers would be purple (and he admitted that this made a lot more sense to laser cut, since it only took about 30 seconds to cut out two, not 23 minutes). It would have taken me ages to hand cut these with my X-acto:

Next on the list were the three inserts that would go in the pocket and the RSVP cards. I printed these at home and took them to Kinko's to be cut for about $20, a huge time saver.

Rounding the opposite corners of all of these inserts was NOT fun, but I think it was worth it. I had a huge bruised indent on my thumb for almost a week from about 7 straight hours of corner rounding:

With the help of my mom and aunts, we glued all the cream printed inserts to the purple backing, and they were ready to be placed in the pocketfold. Here are some close shots of them so you can see the content I provided for our guests (you can click any of these for a larger view):

For the RSVP cards, we used a trick for countering missing RSVP names that several bees have used, the hidden number that corresponds to the guest's name on our guest list spreadsheet. This was also helpful to keep track of who got what RSVP card, since we have two versions: one for those only invited to the wedding and one for those invited to the rehearsal dinner, wedding and Sunday luncheon. I went low tech with it and just wrote the number in pen, on the back side, so when the cream and purple layers were glued together, the number is hidden, but I can always pull it apart if I need to see the number. We used cut up post it notes to keep track of the numbers once the RSVP cards were glued:

And with that, everything was ready for assembly!

Did you, or will you have more than one version of your RSVP card? How do you plan to keep track of your guests who may forget to write their name on the RSVPs?