Zine Wedding Invitations: A How To

We wanted something different for our wedding invitations. The idea of paying 393823 dollars for someone to make invitations that we’d find lovely enough was out of the question since we put most of our budget toward renting out an awesome hippie lake resort where we could host 40 friends and family. We’re both pretty artsy so we thought we’d just make our own invites. After some discussion, we settled on a zine format.

Neither of us has ever made a zine for distribution (just goofy ones in zine workshops), so we just did our best and endured some trial and error type setbacks. That said, it was super fun, we enjoyed having a project together, and it got us in the mood for planning the rest of our weddingness.

I’m going to share some photos of our finished product, then get to some step-by-step type instructions. For further reading/exploring, please consider the following:

YOU CAN MAKE ONE, TOO!

Step 1. Figure Out What You Want to Say

This sounds easy, but it’s harder than you’d think. At first you’ll have just a few important bits: time, place, yadda, yadda. But soon you’ll start blurting out things like “We need to tell them to bring galoshes!” and your fiance will want to include directions to every single hotel in a 40 mile radius. TOO MUCH INFORMATION! You only have so much space, even in a booklet.

What helped us was the decision to create a website that would hold most of the important but not critical information. We wrote everything down and put the information for the website aside to be dealt with later. We kept the fun, vital stuff for the zine, and made sure we had lots of room for visual elements.

 

Step 2. Organize Your Thoughts

We used an organization technique often used when building websites, called Card Sorting. I talk about it a bit in this post. Basically you grab a bunch of notecards or pieces of paper and write down individual information bits on each piece, then move them around until you feel like they are grouped in a meaningful way. This is also a great way to double check that you’re not missing a crucial piece of information, like, say, the time (cough).

You don’t need anything fancy to card sort. In fact, when we did our card sort, we didn’t have anywhere to post our finished product, so we used a piece of wood and a staple gun. A cork-board, whiteboard, or tape & a wall would all work equally as well. Also in the realm of organization: we used an accordion manilla folder to keep all our original pages of the zine in one place, which proved to more and more difficult as the clip art started flying all over the room.

 

Step 3. Map Out Your Pages

There are a gazillion ways to create a zine. Some are really fancy, some are super low tech. You can read up on some common methods here: Zine Making – Putting Pages Together. We went with an easy layout: 2 sheets of 8.5 x 11 paper. We marked out our page numbers using a highlighter (because highlighter ink doesn’t show in photocopies). We make a fake zine with hand scribbled info and made sure it all made sense before we started on the Real Deal.

 

Step 4. Get Some Art & Supplies

Now it starts to get really fun.
I’m a collector of Dover clip art and collage art source books. These books are rad for all sorts of projects and just plain old inspiration, but they came in extra handy for making zines. I photocopied Victorian ladies, bugs, animals, textures, and more to use in our zine. You can also use old magazines or books from Goodwill/garage sales that you’re willing to cut up if need be. We photocopied some of our favorite comics (writing our own copyright credits like “We love you J.H.!” and “Lynda Barry Rules” in the margins).

 

I wanted something that could be taken off of the zine and used to put on a calendar. At first I was going to create little buttons or magnets with the date on them (this was in the stage where I was 100% sure I was going to handmake EVERYTHING). Quickly I realized this would take forever and that I’m not a patient person. So instead I found a few sheets of those stickers you put on file folders and I typed our names and the date on those instead. We glued them, with backing attached, to the zines and they worked like a charm. Also they looked a little punk rock.

 

Step 5. Cut, Glue, Sew, Draw, Write, Glitter! a.k.a. The Fun Part

This is definitely the best part of the whole operation. Drink wine. Drink tea. Have some cookies. Stay up until 3am re-centering little photocopied versions of your cats all over the center spread. HAVE FUN!

Glue was most helpful in two formats: as a stick – get the super strong stuff, and the kind that comes in the dispensers that look like they hold correction tape. We had mixed luck with glitter and glitter pens. White-Out pens were also a mixed bag. Stamps and stickers were great for filling in odd spaces.

We both thought we had perfectly OK handwriting, but once we saw more than a few lines in our script it just didn’t look like we’d imagined. So we dragged out the old typewriter that one of us (can’t remember which) had bought at a yard sale and started pounding away. We soon grew impatient waiting for our typing turn, so we grabbed another typewriter from Goodwill Bins for a whopping 72 cents. It was super fun to pretend we worked in a busy big city newsroom, jabbing at the keys and arguing over how to describe the BBQ lunch. Which leads me to…

 

Step 6. Copy Edit, a.k.a. The Part Where You Argue and Use Dictionaries

I thought “BBQ luncheon” sounded fun and summery. Sky thought it sounded like a light snack. I wanted to write a lot about the location, while he wanted to include more details about the weekend. You’ll find yourself “discussing” how to phrase every. single. thing. Or maybe you won’t. It depends on you and your partner. If either of you is the least bit anal retentive, though, be prepared to discuss the finer aspects of your wording. When the going get rough, take a few make-out minutes before you get back in the ring.

 

Step 7. Photocopy and Assemble

We thought this would be the easy part but it took longer than expected to get things copied so that they looked good. I’d recommend doing several tests and try flipping between “photo” and “text” mode on your copier to get the best contrast and detail. You’ll find that something that looked super busy pre-photocopy looks kind of dull once you’ve taken away the 3 dimensional aspects of the pasting and different colored markers. Likewise, some pages that seemed not too crazy will look jam packed and cluttered once copied. So be prepared to go back and make changes once you’ve seen how it looks in copied form.

You’ll want to ask the copy shop to cut your pages on a big cutting device. Either that or use one at work/ask a friend to do it for you. Handcutting? Ridiculously time-consuming and never straight. You may also want to borrow a long-armed stapler from a friend or generous workplace – makes things easier.

We made separate RSVP cards that we copied on HOT SALMON PINK card stock. We took those to Kinko’s since photocopying onto heavy weight paper can be too much for your standard cheapie copy shop machines.

 

Step 8. Lessons Learned: Addressing & Mailing

We thought it would be fun to just write the addresses on the back cover of the zine and use a sticker to seal one of the edges of the zine. We’d double checked, before we started, that our size was OK for mailing. What we didn’t think about was the blank space required at the bottom of an envelope or postcard for the tracking mark. When we took a sample invitation to our local mail store, the guy told us that a) the mark might not take and b) sorting machines would tear our little masterpieces to shreds. So we opted for some packages of size C5 envelopes in a crazy safety yellow color. We were bummed that we couldn’t make these “authentic” zines but we poured a couple more glasses of wine (and dragged Jaime into helping us) and got through the addressing in one evening.

Expenses: We spent about $20 on the RSVP card printing, $36 on stamps (including the return postage for RSVP postcards), and $24 on the zine printing, so all-in-all we spent $80 to send invitations to 50 people. Not bad!

I hope you found this helpful — if you end up making your own zine invitation, let me know how it goes!

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