Grab our holiday planner to have your most organized holiday season yet. On sale now! Learn more

Decor Adventures

A Home Decor and DIY Blog.

You Might Like These Projects Too

Passport Wedding Invitations

Uncategorized

Welcome to weekly chronicle of my wedding planning and fun. My husband and I got married on September 18th 2010. Catch up on previous posts here. One of the most creative project I think I’ve ever taken on was making our wedding invitations.  Being the crafty people we are {and one of us – The Chef – is a graphic designer} this was a perfect way to personalize our wedding and utilize our talents – paper cutting! Not to mention do some serious pre-wedding bonding and save a lot of money.Going along with our travel theme, we decided we were going to make passport wedding invitations. We thought we’d customize them, make them look like the real deal, anything we could do to make them fun but useful.

Passport Invitation – This was a multi-step process that involved a lot of cutting, gluing, addressing and more. Here is how the final invites turned out.

Passport Wedding Invitations
First The Chef made a mock up of what they might look like so we knew what information we should include. We used the same ivory and brown paper that we used for the Save the Date Boarding Passes. Once we finalized the text to go inside and The Chef did all of the graphic design, we started printing. And we printed and printed some more. Double sided in fact. After that we glued the inside and back covers to the actual cover paper, and ended up having the word Passport embossed on the front at a local print shop. We also had them cut that outer paper to size.

The passports ended up being:

Cover – Passport embossed and compass stamp that I got a craft store {seen above}

Passport Wedding Invitations

Inside cover – Our photo, ID info similar to what is on a real passport {bottom half of the below image}. This was actually the very first photo we had taken together when we volunteered at an event.

Passport Wedding Invitations

Passport Wedding Invitations
First page – All the details about the ceremony and reception {top half of image above}
Page 2 – Important Information About Hotels which were addresses and numbers of the hotels where we secured rates for our guests
Page 3 – Important Information While Traveling which is where we put directions

Passport Wedding Invitations
Page 4 – Proper Etiquette While Celebrating Our Wedding.  For this fun page we made up cute “advice” for our guests which included the following:

3. Dancing, though not required, is strongly encouraged, particularly after enjoying a few beverages

4. An exception to #3 will be made during the playing of ‘Billy Jean’ – the bride’s favorite song – at which point dancing is required by all 🙂 You should have seen the people on the dance floor at that time of the night!

Passport Wedding Invitations

Page 5 – Visas with Entries and Departures. This was the page where you would typically stamp a passport, so we made it look like that. After we had all the pages assembled, we rounded the corners and stapled the pieces together.

We did a lot of cutting for these. Did I mention that already?

Passport Wedding Invitations
Reply Card Post Cards – The most important part of the invite are the reply cards which were a collection of postcards I had from travels over the previous 15 years. I was a postcard collector, everywhere we’d go I’d pick one up. Turns out they were handy! So I picked the best ones {we even tried to match them to the state guests lived in} and put on a label with our address and a pre-made stick on label with space for the attendees names and dinner choices. With a postcard stamp {less postage} they didn’t require another envelope, another money savings.

Passport Wedding Invitations
The best part about this was we got them all back, some with fun notes from our future attendees.

Passport Wedding Invitations
I keep these in a photo album with the rest of our pictures. Once they were all assembled, stapled, labeled and stamped, we sent them off {checking on postal weight of course first}. It was a TON of work, but we saved ourselves hundreds of dollars by doing this on our own. The design, some of the paper and most of the materials were free. It was truly a labor of love and our guests raved about them. Doing something fun and creative like this set the mood for our wedding. It was great to send to people to make them feel like a special part of our day.

What do you think of the passport wedding invitations? Did I leave out any details you want to know about them?

*Update* I have had a lot of people ask about sharing the template for these invitations, but they were made on professional design software so I’m not able to share them. Sorry! If you’d like to hire my husband who made the invitations, you can contact him here.

Get our free home decor and DIY printables

Get access to our free DIY and home decor resource library of printables today.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Comments

  5. Jaclyn says

    These invites are AMAZING! It’s exactly what I want to do for my wedding. What program did you use to get the layout of the invites so perfect??? Where did you order the stamp? Would you be willing to email me the final document for me to modify? :)))))) My email address is: jaclynnnn@gmail.com

    Reply

  8. ellen says

    hi jessica! randomly came across your blog and i love, love this invite. i’m planning my baby’s 1st b-day party and am thinking of using a passport as an invite. would you be willing to email me the template? thank you!

    mellen16@yahoo.com

    Reply

  10. Rhona says

    Hi Jessica!
    Thank you so much for letting the world in to see you and your husband’s project of making your wedding invitations. As I’m sure you’ve read in all the comments above, they are truly amazing! Like Ellen (above), I would very much appreciate if you could email me the template you used to create this invitations? My email address is ertq7@hotmail.com.
    Blessings,
    Rhona

    Reply

  12. lanie says

    Hi Jessica!!! this is actually im looking for.. Would you mind to share with me what kind of paper that you used?? and how about the stamp? where to buy or to order?? please send me because im getting married in December..
    Thank you and more power!!!

    Reply

    • Jessica says

      Hi Lanie, For the pages of the passport we used regular cardstock, which is a heavier paper. The compass stamp was from A.C. Moore craft store, but I’m sure you can find a similar one at any craft place. Hope this helps and congratulations!

      Reply

  13. Carmen says

    Hi Jessica! I am a new follower and was blown away by your passport invitation.. Is there any chance you can share the template you used for it? Where I can modify it for our own use.. Our wedding is not until March 2015 and i’d like to DIY too. If you’d be kind enough to share, please email it to cmm0218@yahoo.com. Thank you!

    Reply
[instagram-feed num=7 cols=7 showheader=false showbutton=false showfollow=false]