laser cut wedding invitations
Looking throughout the internet for an interesting, yet unique, idea for wedding invitations I stumbled upon a tri-fold design that has three elements, a silhouette of a couple, a city skyline, and an accent piece. After more research to find who makes these and how they are made, I found out that most, if not all of these designs, are just stock images with no customization. So, being the guy I am I set off on the creation of a 100% custom wedding invitation for our special day.
The first thing first was the paper. We wanted something nice that would be able to hold up against the laser cutter and be able to survive the mail. We ended up settling on a 105 lb latte-colored pearlized 12"x18" card stock. Due to the weight and size of this paper, I was, unfortunately, unable to print it on my printer so we brought it to the lovely FedEx Kinkos. They were able to print 125 sheets for a very reasonable price with no smudging or ink splatter.
Moving onto the actual design... I needed a silhouette of the two of us. Luckily I had hired professional photographers, who love silhouettes when I proposed to my wife in New York City in 2014. So I chose one of those pictures to take our silhouette from. Isolating our bodies, I removed everything else from the picture leaving only us. Using Adobe Photoshop I just made the image completely black; this helps the Adobe Illustrator image trace program work as well as reduces any jagged lines when outlining. Using Illustrators image trace, we get a very nice outline that we'll use when putting together the laser cut file. This same process is used for both the city skyline, in this case, Villa Balbianello in Lake Como, Italy, where we got married, as well as the accent piece, which is the same trees that are located outside the Villa.
Now we finally put the pieces together to create our final laser cut file. Using the same principles as the other tri-fold invitations out there, the accent trees will go on the first fold, then our silhouette, and finally the Villa. We just create an Adobe Illustrator file set to the size of the invitations, in this instance we wanted a folded 5"x7" invitation. Once we put all of the pieces together we just need to change the line color to red (255,0,0) and throw it into the laser cutter. The laser made quick work of them and churned each invitation + two well wish cards out at an average of 4 minutes per sheet.
After the very long and drawn-out cutting process, we got to fold each sheet, put them in envelopes, and stamp and address them. It was a long process but it was worth it to get a completely custom wedding invitation. I would definitely do it again.
