Start with the occasion
Christmas has the most choice. The Christmas Party Invitation & Card Suite is for hosting: a party invitation and a separate Christmas Eve invitation, then a reply card, dinner menu, place cards, potluck sign-up and gift tags in the same snowy storybook art. If the party is a cookie swap, the Gingerbread Cookie Exchange Invitation & Party Kit spends most of its twelve pieces on running the swap rather than on dinner. For cards to send, the Vintage Storybook Christmas Cards are ten folded designs with angel children in the snow.
Winter without Christmas. Winter Woodland Wishes Greeting Cards keep the snowy picture-book look but never say Christmas. Nine covers carry general winter wishes, and card 09 wishes a Happy New Year.
Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving Dinner Invitation & Card Suite has two invitations, one for a family dinner and one for Friendsgiving, plus a harvest menu and a potluck sheet. Little Harvest Stories Thanksgiving Cards are the ten-card set for the season, with children picking apples, baking pie and visiting grandmother.
Halloween. Halloween Cottage Party Invitations & Cards is a party suite built around a purple-roofed cottage and a black cat. It is the only suite that offers its invitation in four layouts and adds two folded greeting cards.
A wedding. The Lemon Wedding Invitation Suite runs from the save the date to the favor tag, in watercolor lemons and blue flowers, with a painted seaside village on some pieces.
Type your details, or write them in
All five suites edit the same way, through a START-HERE.html file you open in a desktop browser. You pick a piece from a list, type over the sample wording and watch the preview change. A few habits save trouble:
- Each piece is edited on its own. The date you type on the invitation does not carry over to the menu or the welcome sign, so fill in every piece you plan to print.
- Save before you close. The editor forgets everything when the tab closes. "Save my edits" downloads a small file of your wording, and "Load my edits" brings it back.
- The big headings stay. Script titles such as "Come for a spell" on the Halloween invitation and "Gather & Give Thanks" on the Thanksgiving one are part of the artwork, along with colors and fonts. In the wedding suite that includes the Italian headings, from "La tavola" on the menu to "Grazie mille" on the thank-you card, so it can't become an all-English set.
- Long lines shrink. In the four holiday suites, text that runs too long is scaled down to fit, and the editor warns you when it has shrunk enough that you should cut a few words.
If you would rather not use a screen at all, four suites include a blank PDF that keeps the art and headings and puts labeled lines where the names, dates and addresses go: Christmas party, Thanksgiving, cookie exchange and Halloween. The wedding suite has no blank version, and its sample PDF shows an example couple, so the editor is the only way to put your names on it.
The three card sets work differently. They come as print-ready PDFs with no editor, so personal words go inside, by pen.
What the suites put on the table
The twelve pieces change from suite to suite, and the mix is often what decides it.
The Christmas and Thanksgiving suites are dinner sets. Both have a tall 4 x 9 menu, place cards, an 8 x 10 welcome sign, and a potluck sign-up with columns for name, dish and allergens that guests fill in by hand. Both also add a card with three writing prompts that guests finish by hand.
The cookie exchange kit is about the swap. Its rules card is filled in for five bakers who each bring 24 cookies in 4 bundles of 6. The guide gives the rule for other group sizes, bundles per baker equal the number of bakers minus one, but the editor does no math, so retype the counts on the rules card and the tracker yourself. The blank PDF keeps the five-baker numbers. There are also cookie labels, an ingredient card for each batch, a tasting ballot and a sign-up sheet. The sign-up and the tracker have five rows each, so a bigger group needs a second copy.
The Halloween suite rounds out the party with a details card for what to wear and what to bring, a reply card, a welcome sign, a treat tag and a table label for the food.
The wedding suite adds what a reception needs: a reply card with a meal choice, a table number, a bar menu, a wedding day timeline and an 18 x 24 inch welcome sign. There is no seating chart.
Sizes, paper and folding
Suite pieces come out at their own sizes, mostly 5 x 7, 4 x 6, 5 x 3.5 and 8 x 10 inches, with small tags and place cards. Most pieces are flat and printed on one side. If your printer won't feed a small card or an 8 x 10 sheet, take the exact-size PDF to a print shop, and send the wedding welcome sign, bar menu and timeline there anyway. The Halloween suite also has US Letter and A4 sheets with crop marks, but they show the sample wording, so they are good for a test print and not for the real thing. Its two folded greetings print on both sides of one sheet.
The card sets print one card per landscape sheet, on US Letter or A4. Cut at the corner marks for an 8 x 6 inch piece, score down the middle and fold to 4 x 6. Each card has an optional inside verse to print on the back of the same sheet. Printers flip paper in different ways, so mark a corner on a test sheet first and check that the verse comes out upright. Leave the verse out and the back of the sheet becomes a blank inside for a handwritten note. Winter Woodland Wishes has a colored border that runs to the crop marks with no bleed, so cut exactly on the marks.
Each card set also has the ten pictures as plain JPGs with no greeting, for 4 x 6 postcards. None of the three card sets comes with envelopes, so buy ones made for a 4 x 6 folded card.