How to Make DIY Wedding Invitations at Home? 🖌️

Making your own wedding invitations

If you’re thinking about making your wedding invitations yourself, this article is for you. We’ll cover everything you need to decide whether it’s the right choice for your wedding. Making DIY invitations can be a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to trim your wedding budget - but it’s worth going in with your eyes open, since a project like this takes real time and commitment. To get a polished, cohesive result that fits your wedding theme, you’ll need to plan carefully and make sure every piece of the stationery works together.

In this article, you’ll learn:
Is it better to make your own wedding invitations or buy ready-made ones?
How much does it cost to make DIY wedding invitations?
When should you start making the invitations?
Making wedding invitations by hand
Making wedding invitations on a computer
Wedding invitations in Canva
What do you need to make wedding invitations?
Can you actually make them look good?

Is it better to make your own wedding invitations or buy ready-made ones?

Deciding what’s right for you comes down to a handful of key factors. DIY invitations are the ideal choice if you value personalization and want a hands-on touch woven into every part of your wedding. Making your own gives you complete control over the design - you pick the paper, the colors, the fonts, and any unique decorative touches like dried flowers, ribbons, or wax seals. It’s also a wonderful way to show off your creativity and get family and friends involved in the run-up to the big day. You can even choose a meaningful quote that captures what matters to you both, or that’s stuck with you for years. To make that part easier, we’ve put together a list of the most beautiful quotes for wedding invitations that could be the perfect finishing touch for your design.

On the other hand, ready-made invitations offer convenience and save you time. Professional stationers offer a huge range of styles and designs that can easily be matched to your wedding theme, and ordering ready-made invitations means you know exactly what quality you’re getting. It’s the ideal choice if you’d rather skip the stress of hand-crafting a large batch of invitations and just want a fast, polished result. There’s no shortage of companies making custom wedding stationery these days, so you’ll have no trouble finding invitations that fit your theme.

How much does it cost to make DIY wedding invitations?

In principle, making your own wedding invitations should be a lot cheaper than ordering ready-made ones online - but a lot depends on exactly what you’re going for. If you’re picturing elaborate, multi-piece invitations made from pricier materials with lots of extras, you might actually find it cheaper to buy ready-made ones instead.

The cheapest ready-made wedding invitations run up to around €2.50 a piece. So if you need 100 of them, that’s an easy calculation: about €250. And that’s for the simplest, no-frills designs - go for something fancier, and the cost can climb several times over.

How does that compare to making them yourself? You can find attractive colored envelopes for as little as €0.25 each. Heavier-weight colored paper (250gsm, say) runs about €25 for 100 A4 sheets. So the basic materials for 100 invitations add up to roughly €50 - genuinely a fraction of what you’d pay for ready-made designs. That’s not quite the whole picture, though: depending on whether you’re making everything entirely by hand or printing it, you’ll also need to budget for printing, ink, or scrapbooking supplies.

All told, making your own wedding invitations can easily save you a couple hundred euros from your wedding budget. Of course, nothing’s free - you’re trading that saving for the time you’ll spend putting the stationery together.

When should you start making the invitations?

To figure out when to start on your invitations, first decide when you actually want to send them out. Invitations usually go out around 6 months before the wedding, though the exact timing depends a lot on your date. If you’re getting married during a busy stretch like summer or the holiday season, give yourself even more of a buffer so guests have plenty of notice to plan around it. You can cut that window shorter if you like, but keep in mind that family and friends may already have other plans by the time you reach out.

The best time to start actually making the invitations is about a month before you plan to hand them out. By then, you should already know your dates, venue, and wedding theme, so everything comes together cohesively. Give yourself more time than you think you’ll need - it’s common to realize partway through that you’re missing something or need to pick up extra supplies. Handmade projects like this almost always take longer than expected, since it’s manual work and our first estimates tend to be a little too optimistic. That said, it’s also worth not starting too early: if your plans, theme, or even your wedding date change later on, you may have to redo some or all of the work.

Making wedding invitations by hand: scrapbooking

Making invitations entirely by hand is, without question, the most time-consuming option. You’ll be repeating the same steps over and over - writing out text and names, decorating each card - and this route demands real manual skill and consistency across every piece of stationery you make. It’s best suited to people with some background in calligraphy or scrapbooking, in other words, anyone with genuine hands-on crafting experience.

This method also leaves little room for error, since a mistake usually means starting that invitation over from scratch. If you don’t have much experience with this kind of work, we’d strongly recommend leaning on a computer for at least part of the process instead - which brings us to the next method.

Making wedding invitations on a computer

Fortunately, these days there’s a lot you can do with a computer when it comes to graphic design, and wedding invitations are no exception. Designing your invitations digitally and then printing them at home or at a local print shop makes life a lot easier. It’s much simpler than doing everything by hand, gives you far more room to make edits along the way, and takes less time overall. All you need to do is design a template (or use one someone else has already made), fill in the required details, and add your guests’ names. You could even put this together in Word and save it as a PDF.

You can also mix techniques, of course - take a design you’ve put together on the computer and add handmade decorative touches to it. Another nice combination is designing the template digitally but filling in each guest’s name by hand.

Wedding invitations in Canva

Canva has become one of the most popular tools for designing wedding invitations and stationery. It’s free to use (there’s a paid tier too, but you don’t need it for basic designs), and it makes designing your own invitations refreshingly simple. The interface is easy to pick up, which makes choosing colors, editing text, and adjusting the overall look a breeze. Canva also has a huge library of free invitation templates you can use as a starting point to bring your vision to life quickly. One particularly handy feature, available on the premium plan, is Canva’s ability to automatically generate a full set of personalized invitations straight from your guest list.

You can find more useful wedding apps in our article: Useful apps for weddings. And if you’d rather skip paper invitations altogether, check out our digital wedding invitation, which lets you invite your guests with nothing more than a link.

What do you need to make wedding invitations?

Exactly what you’ll need depends on which method you choose and how elaborate you want to get. Here’s a rundown of the essentials for making your own wedding invitations:

• Properly sized invitation envelopes (white or colored)

• Decorative, heavier-weight paper in a matching color

• A printer with ink (if you’re printing your designs at home)

• Something to write with (pens, markers, a calligraphy pen)

• Decorative touches (ribbons, stickers, wax seals, dried flowers, twine)

• Extra tools (scissors, a paper trimmer, a hot glue gun, hole punches)

Can you actually make them look good?

We can promise you this: it’s absolutely possible to make beautiful, elegant, high-quality wedding invitations yourself. Of course, a lot comes down to your manual dexterity and artistic eye - but even if handcrafted stationery isn’t really your thing, a computer or laptop can bridge that gap. With the right software, or even templates other people have already designed, you can put together gorgeous invitations without needing any deep graphic design knowledge.

If you’re still on the fence about whether this is the right choice for you, here’s our advice: set aside a single day - a free weekend works well - and just try making one invitation. It doesn’t need to be perfect. See how much you get done in that one day, and use that to gauge whether the full project feels manageable. Look for inspiration, pick the method that suits you, order your supplies ahead of time, and dive in. Even if you end up deciding against doing the whole thing by hand, you’ll still have a lovely time working on it. 🥰

Use the new JustFilm.it app at your wedding

Have you heard about our wedding app? Collect photos and videos your loved ones capture on their phones throughout your wedding, and turn them into a unique keepsake video! We’ll start by preparing personalized poster graphics with a QR code and instructions, matched to your venue. At any point during the wedding, or even after everyone’s gone home, guests can scan the QR code and easily upload hundreds of their photos and videos. You’ll be able to download every file that’s collected, plus a professionally edited highlight video set to the music of your choice. Want to learn more? Head over to our app page: JustFilm.it wedding app.

We also have a special discount for our blog readers! Send us a message on social media or at [email protected] with your wedding date and the code BLOG10, and we’ll check whether your date is still available - if it is, you’ll be able to purchase access at a discount.