Aside from the photos, the paper goods—save-the-dates, invitations, and programs—are some of the only tangible keepsakes you’ll have from your wedding. They’re great to frame with a wedding photo or two, and they are the first taste of your celebration that your guests receive, setting up a precedent for what they should expect at your wedding. All this to say: your invitations matter. So why not give them the ultimate personal touch and make them yourself?
Banish your ideas of sloppily-cut ribbons and cheap printer paper: Old City Press & Co.’s wedding invitation workshop pairs couples with an instructor who will walk you through the fine art of designing and printing invites on the shop’s 1950 Vandercook letterpress using Crane cotton paper.
The workshops are scheduled on your time, so make a weekend of it with your sweetie and schedule out six hours on two consecutive days. But if that sounds like a lot of time to block out, Old City Press & Co.’s Pete Juratovic says that most couples don’t need that much time to complete their invitations. “Normally, everything can be completed in one day with the exception of cutting,” says Juratovic. “We do that on off hours and have the invites ready within a couple of business days.”
The design part is where you can show some creativity, though Old City Press & Co. has plenty of templates to choose from for those who’d rather stick with the tried-and-true layouts. “We have a design element book with borders, monograms, fonts, and motifs. (Couples) can select out design elements and design their own invitation or tweak a current pre-design,” says Juratovic, who noted that couples often bring in a design of their own, and spend the workshop focused on printing.
The workshops run between $400 to $1,000 on average, depending on the number of invitations. In addition to a 5×7 invitation card, the workshop’s wedding suite includes an RSVP card and an information card—a pretty good deal when compared to other paper good suppliers.
“As far as how our pricing compares to other vendors, we are 30 percent less then other vendors offering the same value and quality,” says Juratovic. “Since we do the design, make the plates, and print on site we can offer an amazing product in half the time, and almost half the cost as other letterpress vendors.”
If you’re still not sold, Old City Press & Co. offers $75 letterpress workshops on Saturday, so you can test out the process, get your hands dirty, and maybe even make some of those “Thank You” notes you’ll be needing down the road.
To schedule a workshop, fill out the form on Old City Press & Co.’s website, and check out the pricing for their wedding suite package pricing below.
Old City Press & Co., 102 N. Fayette St., Alexandria, 571-858-5940.
Caroline Cunningham joined Washingtonian in 2014 after moving to the DC area from Cincinnati, where she interned and freelanced for Cincinnati Magazine and worked in content marketing. She currently resides in College Park.
