Saying "I Do": menu cards

Monday, October 24, 2011

Wedding Recap: Menu Cards

My menu cards were another DIY labor of love, and was another project that had me going back and forth to Staples many times.

I used a lot of downloaded fonts for these, which I created in word. I had to save each sample as a PDF so Staples could print it exactly the way I saw it on my screen. After talking to someone in the print center and dropping off my purchased ivory cardstock, I emailed the file to my local staples for them to print a sample. The first few samples weren't right. The margins were way off and it wasn't perfectly centered on the page. They suggested I print just one at a time meaning that half of each page I print would just be garbage. Plus it would cost more because I'd be printing twice as many sheets!

I realllly had to play around with margins on this many, many times to get it right and honestly, I'm not even entirely sure what I did to get it right, but it finally worked. I have .17 margins all around and in page setup I selected "Mirror margins" instead of Normal. That seemed to even it out just right.

To break down the fonts:

The top fan decoration and the dividing line between appetizers and entrees is called separates and can be downloaded here. This offers TONS of different ornate symbols for you to use in your printing!
The word MENU is "Engravers MT"
The "Appetizer, Pasta, Salad, and Entree" is in Chopin Script (Downloaded Here)
The meal name is "Copperplate Gothic Light" and
The description is written in regular old "Times New Roman."

So Staples printed and cut all my menus for me, which was great, but it needed a little something else. We tried a ton of different corner punches. I really wanted an ornate corner punch in these, but after each of us ruining about 5 of them, we realized we just didn't have that kind of margin of error. I guess if the cut wasn't exxxacctly a 95 degree angle, it wouldn't work. I was really disappointed in these punches. (But was able to use them for our out-of-town bag postcards)

I bought a Martha Stewart Crown Corner Punch. That one worked better, but was wayyyy too big and looked awful on these:

We finally settled on a simple Martha Stewart rounded corner punch, which I was still happy with and lots of people told us they liked how that looked.

Chris working on the corner punches