While Miss Manners says that your guests have one year to give the Bride and Groom their wedding gift, you on the other hand, do not have one year to give them a thank you card.  Generally, six weeks after receiving the gift is acceptable.  While I *did* have good intentions, my procrastination meant that mine went out about three months after our wedding.  Oh well…

But this is not to say that you should do as I did!

In my attempt to get my thank you cards out really quickly, I decided to DIY my thank you cards shortly after making my invitations – that’s right, *before* my wedding.  The goal was to write in the cards as gifts came in so we could send them out as quickly as possible.  In the end, we decided to send out some wedding photos with our thank you cards, so we waited to send them until after the wedding. Since a lot of the cards were written in though (many of our friends sent our gifts to us prior to the wedding), it saved a lot of writing time later on.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I made my thank you cards match my invitations – this saved a lot of design time.  Here’s the finished product:

I purchased the 8 1/2 x 11 brown cardstock and matching brown envelopes at the same time as ordering the paper for my invitations.  I cut the cardstock in half, width-wise, with a paper trimmer.  I had a paper scoring blade on my trimmer, so used that to cleanly fold all the paper in half.

I did the fronts of the thank you card in two batches – for those guests that gave us a gift prior to our wedding, I used an engagement picture on the front (photoshopped “thanks!” onto it).  Shortly after the wedding, I had our photographer send me one of our wedding pictures so that I could get it printed and added to our thank you cards.

I had some leftover off white linen paper from making another friend’s wedding programs a few years ago, so used that for the inside. I think I just glued it down with a glue stick.

Since the envelopes were brown, I got some sheets of Avery sticker paper (8 1/2 x 11 sticker) and fed it through my printer to make Martha Stewart wrap around labels.  This time, since I wasn’t using green wrapping paper, I made the background of the label lime green in MS Word, and changed my font color to white.  They were  a breeze to print, super easy to stick on, and I just cut them all up with my paper trimmer.  Yep, I shoulda done it that way for my invites! (You live, you learn!).

Now, if DIYing your Thank  You cards seems like complete overkill, I guess you could just buy some regular ones from Target.  But that’s no fun, is it?

For your interest, here’s the cost breakdown for 100 cards:

• Brown cards – 10c each (50 sheets cost $10.99)
• Envelops (A2) – 26c each (100 cost $26)
• White Linen paper – free (I had it laying around)
• Photo (mini from MPix) – 8c each (13 sheets of 8 cost $8.19)
• White cardstock (leftover from invitations, I think we got 15 to a sheet) – 3c each (7 sheets at 50c each cost $3.50)
• Green handmade paper – 6c each (1 sheet cost around $5 and I got about 80 strips from each one)
• TOTAL: each card: 53c, total cost: $58 approx + tax, shipping and double sided tape (I used up all the green hand made paper for my wedding, so *my* cost was 53c per card – I factored in the cost of 2 sheets into the grand total).

Tags: diy, Etiquette, thank you cards