KCB2011's Passport Invites - finally! DIY info for Canadian Brides!

I finally finished my passport invites and I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out considering how much work they were!  I should also mention that I am a very frugal bride so my goal with these was to save as much money as possible.  I used the free template from www.ayleebits.com (which was so helpful) and then just changed colours and added background graphics.

I thought I would post a thread on these because I had SUCH a hard time figuring out how to do this and where to get everything I needed here in Canada for reasonable prices so here is my list of supplies etc (brands in italic) as well as pics of my finished product.  Steph's how to was posted after I had already started so I could only use a couple tips from there but it was definitely helpful so thank you Steph!

Cover Paper:  Stardream Fairway Metallic Paper - Text weight (81lb/120gsm) from www.paper-garden.ca - I couldn't decide whether to do this paper or the heavier card stock (105lb) but this paper was perfectly fine for me.

Front Cover: Because Metallic Paper doesn't absorb ink very well (I have an inkjet printer), I decided to stamp the covers so I ordered 3 custom stamps: Passport, Kelsie & Tom July 19, 2011 and the palm tree from www.simonstamp.com - I got "Custom Art Mount Stamps" where you can pick your sizes, fonts, etc. The stamps were SO cheap and shipped really quickly for very cheap shipping cost (~$3) - they have free shipping if your order is over $40 but my order was cheaper than that.  I used a Color Box (Gold) stamp pad - from Michael's - definitely the best one I tried and the ink was dark enough that the gold colour showed up well on the green paper.  Archival Brilliance (also from Michael's) was also really good and would work if you were using different colours (their gold colour was a little too light for what I wanted).

Page 1: I used the same palm tree graphic from our STDs and made it a watermark (Recolor - "washout" under Format Picture in MS Word)

Passport Stamps:  I made a bunch of different ones on MS Powerpoint (using shapes and text boxes) and I made them personalized to our dates, location, etc.  I made these watermarked the same way I did for the palm tree on the first page and arranged them randomly on the pages behind the text.

I made these Passport type stamps the same way - they just aren't watermarked.

Last Page:  I printed the little note from us on linen paper (see below for brand etc) and glued (Elmers Craft Bond stick from Michael's) it on to the inside back cover - I tried card stock and it was didn't stick very well.  This actually made the back cover seem thicker.  (I used a page from the ayleebits template to get the correct size for the note and I just printed 4 per page)

Paper for inside pages:  Staples Cover Stock AND Synergy Bond Linen finish paper (also from Staples) - I started with the cover stock but ran out and wasn't going to buy a whole package for 10 more invites!  FYI:  both weights of paper worked perfectly fine so whichever you prefer would work - if you had more pages than me, you might want to use the lighter/thinner paper.

I used a cheap paper cutter (Fiskars) that I bought from Michael's on sale to cut all of the pages - then I used a corner punch (Marvy Uchida) to round the corners of all the pages - also bought at Michael's on sale.  I folded everything in half so I knew where the line was that I needed to staple and then I staple from the outside.  The last thing I did was stamp the front as the ink wouldn't really soak in to the paper so I didn't want it to smudge.

A few notes:

- I would suggest leaving the finished invites out to let the ink dry on the cover as there were a few that I smudged because the ink hadn't had time to dry - It was never completely dry/soaked in but it was not a problem once I started letting them sit for a bit.

- I printed everything on my home inkjet computer with no problems but it did take a couple trials (I just used grayscale printing on cheap printer paper) to make sure that the inside pages were perfectly lined up for printing double-sided.

Hopefully this will help someone!

Those look awesome! Great info for Canadian brides. How did you get the pages to print double sided? When I printed a free one off aylee bits I found they didn't align very well. How did you order the pages when printing? I'd love to see your template for these!

For the alignment I found it helpful to turn on the gridlines on Word (under the View tab) - On my printer I had to do the double sided manually (wait for all the first pages to print, then re-insert the pages in the printer for the second page to print) so I had to check the "manual duplex" box on the print settings.  I know that some printers don't have this capability, but you can still specify only to print page 1, then go to print again and print only page 2.  Like I said, if you print a couple trials, you can see how far off they are from lining up, then go to the Home Tab and on the far right click "select" then "select objects" - make a box with the arrow around EVERYTHING on one of the pages (ONLY ONE PAGE), then hold down CTRL and use the arrows to move everything side to side (make sure you don't click anywhere after this or it will unselect everything and you will have to do the select objects thing over again).  Vertically, both pages had to be even when compared to the gridlines, but horizontally, both pages did not match up on the gridlines (one looked way further to the left than the other).  Does that make any sense or is it more confusing? haha.

To get the right order, I printed the template with just page numbers on it, then I cut it out as though I was making the invite and that's how I knew what page I wanted things to be on - I made a print screen of the two pages that I printed back to back to get my inside pages if that helps:

Those look fantastic!  I love all your custom passport stamps - I had lots of trouble trying to print words in an arch so I finally gave up and paid for Aylee's template with the watermarks.

780chick - the $10 Aylee template has 2 formats - one like the one shown above and one which prints 2 of the same thing on each page.  I used that one and found it much easier to line up and order the pages.   

These came out great!!! You did a great job, love the stamps too!

You did a great job! I am working on my passport Save the Dates using the same template. I have been going back & forth about the cover color b/c I really wanted navy blue or dark green, but couldnt figure out how to print on it. Thanks so much for posting about those stamps...I'm headed to that website now!

These turned out so well! I love the idea to stamp the covers.

They look fantastic!!

i love your colors and thank you so much for the detailed step by step soo very helpful!

Kelsie they look beautiful. The stamps turned out really well. I wish I had known about that stamp company before so I could have had one made.