Invitation Creation, Part 4: The Finished Invites and Cost Breakdown

After my last three posts on the making of the Cola invites, it's time to finally show off the finished product (along with what I imagine our guest's commentary will be)!

"Ohhh, what a pretty envelope! What could be inside?"

"Oh goodie, it's from Mr. and Miss Cola!"

"Wow, this envelope is lined, what a fun surprise!"

"Let's get this out of the envelope so we can see what's inside."

"I just love ribbon belly bands!"

"Yay, the RSVP card and envelope are on the back, I'll be sure to send this back right away!"

"What a nice touch to find another flower on the pocketfold after removing the belly band."

"And yet another flower inside the pocketfold flap, wow, I just love all the small touches!"

"It's so beautiful when the pocketfold is opened, The Colas must really have put a lot of time into making these!"

"What a cool, laser cut design, I've never seen that before!"

"I must have a closer look at the amazing texture of wood grain paper, laser cut text and flowers!"

"What informative, helpful inserts."

"This is such a beautiful invitation suite, I think I'll frame it....right after I promptly fill out the RSVP card correctly and put it in the mail!"

Yeah, yeah, I know none of our guests will pay this close of attention to our invitations, or appreciate them as much as my fake commentary, but if they like them even half as much as I imagine, I'll be happy!

Now for a look at what these cost us. I already had a lot of the supplies we used, like the x-acto knife, printer and ink, corner and flower punches, etc, so won't be counting those in my total cost. I'm also only counting the cost of each sheet of paper used, since I definitely will use the leftovers elsewhere (click the spreadsheet for a larger view).
I should also note that this total doesn't include the outer postage stamps (I'm getting them this week), or tax. But I'd still say that $406 is a pretty good price, compared to what they'd cost to buy, and especially considering that at my mom's count, there are 25 individual pieces that went into these invites (I'm pretty sure her count didn't include the outer stamps either). But it is certainly a good thing that I am considering the time Mr. Cola, my family and I spent working on these as free, or this price would be quite a bit higher. All in all, I estimate these probably took about 150 total hours to complete, including the 30 hours of laser cutting just the wood grain paper portion. And now you know why my recent blog posts have been light on the DIY--these took up a lot of my attention!

For anyone who is wondering, I got my green paper from here, cream paper from here, wood grain paper here, my purple paper and envelopes here, and the ribbon I used was from Michaels. And if you are really interested in doing your own laser cutting, and don't know someone with access to a machine, you might want to try Googling public workshops in your area. In the Bay Area we have a place called TechShop that will let you rent time on their machines.

Well, that concludes my posts on our wedding invitations that are going out this week. Next I'll finally show you all the pocketfolds that could have been, with the additional laser cutting I wanted, but that would have been to time consuming.

Were you relieved to send your invitations out? I'm not looking forward to the upcoming stress of missing RSVPs, but I'm sure glad mine are done!