Last weekend, I printed invitation cards and envelopes for a surprise event to celebrate my parents’ 50th Anniversary. I actually enjoyed the learning process, and I found the entire experience, from coming up with the invitation wording to mailing out the finished invitations, to be very rewarding. Let me tell you how it happened, because this was the first time I’d ever printed my own invitations. In fact, it was probably the first time I’d ever sent out invitations for anything!

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were visiting my parents and their church. After church, the pastor, my parents, my girlfriend and I all decided to go out to lunch. The pastor invited me and my girlfriend to ride along with him. The reason, he revealed, was he wanted to talk to us alone about throwing a surprise party for my parents at the church on their 50th Anniversary. He offered to present a special sermon on marriage in their honor, and to have a reception at the church afterward. I loved the idea of piggy-backing onto a church function, as I wanted to do something special for my parents but hadn’t yet come up with a great idea. This took all the pressure off me to plan, but gave me the opportunity to get involved in an event where anything extra I could do would make a positive contribution.

Immediately, I started thinking about all the special people in my parents’ lives that I would invite-the people who they see often, the people they don’t see very often anymore but, nonetheless, still hold a special place in their hearts, and the relatives who I know would travel to Massachusetts to be part of the celebration if they could. There were so many people I wanted to make aware of the event and give them the opportunity to come if at all possible. Then there’s the fact that I recently joined a company that sells specialty paper, invitations, envelopes, and all things for the “do it yourself” crowd to design their own invitations. With LCI’s warehouse located 50 feet from my desk, I had virtually unlimited product selection to choose from. What about resources? I had Linda at the front desk who does a lot of creative projects in her spare time, Amy who puts together the ensemble kits that you see on the web site, Barry who knows just about everything there is to know about our products, and Mark who has a great eye for colors and textures and who puts together different kits for customers throughout his work day. I don’t think LCI’s President and Founder, Larry, would mind reading that I spent some time picking my co-workers’ brains and walking through the warehouse to look at some items.

Ultimately, I decided on great ensemble based on a beautiful, square, 6 1/2 pocket fold in a metallic gold color-perfect for my parents’ Golden Anniversary. The pocket fold opens to reveal a gold, foil lined invitation card and a smaller card in the pocket that I used as a direction card. I mailed the ensemble in a 6 1/2 square envelope.

I felt confident that I could print the invitations at home, because I had just finished editing the How To video, Printing Invitations with Your Computer & Printer. If you haven’t seen it yet, and you’re wondering if you can print invitations at home, this video is a must. The video shows that an ordinary person can easily place an invitation card into his or her printer, set up a template in Microsoft Word, adjust some settings within the printer driver software, and then print on the invitation. So I ordered my invitations on the web site and saved on shipping since again, since I work 50 feet away from the products. That evening, after work hours, Barry and I printed the invitations on his Canon inkjet printer after setting a template for my invitation wording in Microsoft Word. The blank ink printed on the gold foil square invitation card looked great. If you’re thinking of a foil lined card, I recommend the square version.

Later that night, I printed my envelopes at home, using my Epson Stylus Color 900 printer. I chose a script font that complimented the font that Barry and I agreed on when we printed the invitation and direction cards the night before. Per Barry’s suggestion, I brought my 50 mailing addresses into a spreadsheet. At home, I use a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite called OpenOffice.org. So I brought my addresses into OpenOffice.org’s Calc program which is just like Excel. In fact, Calc allows you to save .xls files. To lay out the addresses, I created a new Filemaker Pro database and a simple layout for my mailing labels with three fields (to compliment the name, address, and zip code fields I had set up in the spreadsheet) on three rows. I sized the layout to match the dimensions of my 6 1/2 square mailing envelope. Then I imported the mailing addresses by pointing to the .xls file I had just created with the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet. Filemaker gave me step by step instructions on how to import these addresses and match them up with fields I had created in my layout. After importing the addresses, getting the layout set up just the way I wanted it, and setting up my printer driver to print on my square envelope, I printed a test on a plain sheet of office paper. Perfect. Then I printed a test on one envelope. Again, perfect. I remembered that Barry had suggested running 20 envelopes at a time, so that’s what I did. Imagine my sense of accomplishment when every single envelope in my batch of 50 printed perfectly.

When I put everything together, I was proud of what I had accomplished. The gold pocket fold with a hint of metallic finish opens to reveal my gold foiled lined invitation with perfectly printed wording that describes the surprise event, and my personalized direction card with my contact information… The process that actually took the longest was carefully placing all 50 invitation ensembles into my envelopes! The next morning, last Saturday in fact, I took my invitations to the post office. Since the envelopes were square, there was an additional charge. I wasn’t surprised at this. I was also prepared for the ensemble to be a bit too heavy for standard letter pricing, which it was. My cost was about 78 cents per letter. After coming back from the post office, I couldn’t help but feel proud of what I had accomplished. I imagined how surprised and thrilled my parents will be when their surprise guests show up at their church in six weeks!

Useful Links:
LCI’s entire line of pocket folds
How To video: Printing Invitations with Your Computer & Printer

Joshua Birch
josh@lcipaper.com