Tips: Handmade Thank You Cards

All of our thank you cards have been mailed - for our wedding, for my shower, and now for my birthday. For each thank you, I used a different card. The thank you notes for the wedding matched our invitations. I purchased stationery from the Walgreen's across from my office for my shower notes. And for my birthday, well, I tried my hand at custom making cards.

When making these cards, I learned a couple of things about handmade, treeless papers. Some are pretty thin, which means adhesives can soak through.

Others are pretty porous and take a lot of glue before you can affix it to something else.

As you can see from the photo, the moonrock paper (off-white cardstock) has a lot of texture. This texture made affixing the other papers a little challenging as the paper wasn't always in contact with the glue.

One thing this experience taught me is I should have taken swatches and tried various adhesives rather than working on the final cards. Luckily I had extra materials and could redo the ones I ruined.

Making your own invitations? Try this to reduce your frustration:

1. Purchase extra supplies to cover any mistakes.
2. Purchase supplies for a mock up.
3. Create swatches of your selected papers and try different adhesives. Note how quickly the glue dries, whether it causes ink to run, etc.
4. Revise your design.
5. Create your cards. 

Did you make your own invitations? What did you learn along the way?