Design Your Own Invitations with Paperless Post - Review

You may have noticed that I love to make birthday cards, and have even made other greeting cards and invitations by hand. You may also have noticed that I haven't had a lot of time lately! My daughter is 13 months old now and takes up most of my time and attention, and when she's with my husband or having a nap, I'm doing housework or preparing her meals or one of a myriad of other chores.

So the opportunity to review Paperless Post couldn't have come at a better time. This is a site that allows you to create online cards and invitations, either by using one of the thousands of designs they offer, or uploading your own.

I had a go at making a few cards - I started with an invitation to my birthday celebrations and a photo upload Easter card.

The site is very easy to use and the end result looks really professional. The cards are received as an email where you can watch an envelope opening and the card coming out, and there are options to reply or leave a comment on the site. My friends and family thought the cards were lovely and I was impressed with the site.

The card are fully customisable. To make my birthday invitation, I searched for 40th birthday invitations and chose one of the designs. I was then not only able to enter the text I wanted but change the font, colour and size of the text, choose a background pattern to go behind the card, and pick the design of the envelope. You can also add a particular stamp and postmark to the card if you like.

For my birthday invitation I included a RSVP card; if you are making wedding invitations and want extra options like a card for guests to fill in their menu choices you can add that as well. You can also use the site to send messages to guests if there is information or a change of plans (or just send them an event reminder) that they need to know.

I was pleasantly surprised at how many different cards are on the site with themes like invitations to a barbecue or picnic, a hen party, a moving house announcement and so on. There are even designer collections like Oscar de la Renta and Kate Spade cards. I can definitely see myself using this on a regular basis!

There are also lots of cards were you can upload a photo so I also created Easter cards for friends and family featuring a photo of me, my husband and our daughter and a giant Easter bunny from a farm we visited recently. This is what the card looked like:

 

The site uses its own currency called 'coins' which you buy in packages, starting at 25 coins for £8 but the price per unit decreases eg 100 coins for £18 and 200 coins for £28. You get 25 coins free when you sign up for an account and can get extra coins for doing things like liking Paperless Post on Facebook.

 

My fairly simple birthday invite plus envelope and reply card cost 6 coins per invite. There are e-flyers which are free of charge to make and obviously the more you add to a card (eg extra sections for a wedding invite) the more they cost, but these are still pretty reasonably priced and much cheaper than buying and posting a physical greetings card - plus they are better for the environment. But if you do want a physical printed invitation or card there is an option on the site for that as well. I was very happy with the online cards and another benefit is that they are very quick - I didn't do the Easter cards until Good Friday and they only took a few minutes to create and send, whereas if I had bought cards and put them in the post, they wouldn't have arrived until after Easter!

 

 Thanks to Paperless Post for some coins to use on their site. All opinions are my own.

Afternoon Tea Greetings Card

I made this as a birthday card but it would work for any kind of greeting or even as an invitation to afternoon tea.

 

I had a set of 6x6 printed papers with different tea and cake motifs; on this one, the background pictures are quite large which limits what else I can put on the card as it would make the design too busy. I have some tea cup stickers I got from Paperchase that I have used several times before, and decided this would work in the centre of the card, mounted on a pink die-cut shape to create a distinction from the background.

DIY Wedding: Handmade Wedding Invitations

 

If you’re getting married and are into crafts or baking it’s very tempting to decide you are going to make everything for your wedding yourself – but even the most ambitious bride (or groom) will realise they are just not going to have time. There is so much to do in the run-up to a wedding: OK, you’ve booked a photographer, but you have to give them a list of what family photos you want; OK, you’ve found a florist but you need to choose the flowers, find out who in the wedding party wants buttonholes or corsages, arrange when the flowers are going to be delivered, and decide what to do with them afterwards – every task on the to do list seems to split into multiple sub-tasks.

 

I realised this from the outset, but at the same time wanted some handmade elements for my wedding. As well as the personal touch, it also meant we could save money on certain things – though you have to be careful not to go overboard, thinking you’re saving money by making every guest a take-home gift when you can probably order a job lot from China on Ebay. But I do think that saving money is not the point of a DIY wedding – it’s about putting time and effort into something, making sure things are made with love, and getting exactly what you want because you’ve designed and made it yourself. Also, if you are into crafts it can be quite frustrating to buy something and think “but I could easily have made that myself!”.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, when I get married my name will be Caroline Cowe – pronounced cow. I’ve embraced my inner cow and am looking forward to being named after an animal (even though it’s a bit of a shame I didn’t ever meet a Mr Al Packer) so my fiancé and I felt that we needed to have a cow theme to the wedding. A subtle, elegant cow theme – we are not talking full on bridesmaid dresses in cowboy boots or a bucking bronco at the reception, but instead a few cow print touches here and there.

 

The wedding stationery was a good way to include cow print, we thought  - it would hint at the fun and relaxed atmosphere we are trying to create at our wedding (it’s mainly outdoors and the meal isn’t a formal ‘which fork do I use’ affair). I started thinking about how to include the motif and design something simple that I could make in bulk without it taking huge amounts of time, and this is what I came up with.

 

 

For Christmas I received a set of three heart hole punches of varying sizes, and I already had some cow print paper in my craft stash (when it ran out and I couldn’t find any more to buy, we just photocopied it!). I used the largest hole punch to cut out paper hearts and stuck them onto blank white cards I bought from Hobbycraft.

 

  

The words ‘wedding invitation’ came from a sheet of outline stickers that only cost £1 in Hobbycraft and had 22 sets of word, so I bought three of these.

 

 

 I stuck the words underneath the heart, but felt it still needed something else. After we first got engaged on a whim I bought some cowprint paraphernalia from a website called Cow Cool Stuff (can you believe there are other people obsessed with cows as well?) including some cow table confetti which I planned to sprinkle on tables at the wedding.

 

 

 I found that the little cows looked really cute in a row across the bottom of the wedding invitations, so glued them on. On some of the invitations I interspersed the cows with hearts cut from cow print paper using the smallest of the three hole punches I’d been given.

 

 

 

We printed out the wording for our wedding onto A4 paper, and bought a guillotine, again from Hobbycraft, to cut the right size so we could stick it inside the cards, which were 6x6 inches. I glued the inserts into the cards, and glued a piece of ribbon (which I bought from Ebay, in the same colour as the bridesmaid dresses) along the centre of the card, and tied it in a bow on the front. Each card didn’t take that long to make and even though they definitely look homemade, I was really happy with them. We have used the same motif for our order of service and menu cards as well.