Happy New Year everyone! Have you enjoyed seeing all the baby announcements and engagements on your news feed this week? I have been SO EXCITED – this year is all about the babies for my friends and colleagues it seems, and what a fun time that is! If you’re part of that newly-engaged crew, then we hope you check out the entire All About Series starting with All About Wedding Invites. These will tell you all you need to know about each piece of a wedding invitation suite, and today we’re going to chat about a favorite upgrade of mine – envelope liners.

This post will be a little shorter than the others, because envelope liners aren’t really informational – they’re one part of the suite that is just pretty and fun, although they do serve an important purpose.

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What are Envelope Liners?

Envelope liners are that pretty piece of paper that’s glued inside the flap of your envelopes – you may not have seen them before in real life, since they’re not common in everyday mail. But they’re becoming increasingly popular for invitations as a fun upgrade that isn’t incredibly costly.

Envelope liners originated because they help protect your invitations from any damage they may incur in the mail. They provide an extra layer between the envelope and the invitation as well, in case your colored envelopes start to rub off on the invites themselves. Plus, they can add an extra pop of fun when your guests start opening your invitations!

Do you Need an Envelope Liner?

We always recommend envelope liners if the invitation pieces are white, especially cotton, and the envelopes are colored, especially black. Otherwise, they aren’t a pure necessity, but we will say they’re our number one favorite upgrade – above gold foil, vintage stamps, even calligraphy! You could say we’re on #teamliner for life.

How to Design an Envelope Liner?

Envelope liners are usually a simple design, and they can make a huge impact on your overall suite. It’s a place to play with any design elements that you maybe weren’t able to play with on the other pieces. We recommend keeping it fairly simple, with a repeating pattern or some simple shapes, so it adds to your suite rather than taking away from it or overpowering it. There’s a lot of space to cover with an envelope liner, but you don’t necessarily need to use huge design elements (unless that’s your vision!).

Make sure you take into account the shape of your envelope flap when designing your liners. If you have a square flap, you’ll want a different design than if you have a Euro (pointed) flap. Euro flaps (and square flaps) also come in different sizes and shapes within that same category. For instance, it’s somewhat tough to make a “square” design in an envelope liner, because pointed flaps are usually more angled than you think, and even though square flaps are called square flaps, they’re more irregular than that too.

One last thing to consider – the envelope liner can get torn when your guests are opening the envelopes, so if you put a design right in the middle of the crease, this may compromise your design. That’s why we prefer repeating patterns, or placing more intricate designs on the flap directly.

Budgeting Tips for Envelope Liners?

An envelope liner is an upgrade in itself, but it doesn’t have to break the bank! Here are some tips!

• You can purchase pre-made liners on many sites (including ours, shamelessly! Here’s the liner section), and assemble them yourself.

• You can also have your designer design and print the liners for you, but not assemble them to save a little on cost. If you’re willing to DIY, you can always cut costs a bit!

• Of course you can use paper that you purchase with a design already on it. Most envelope liners can be made with straight cuts only, so if you deconstruct one of your envelopes and use it to draw a template, you can have your liners stack cut at Kinko’s or Office Depot for around $10. Make the liners smaller than the envelope, so they fit closely but not too tight, and have them fall below the adhesive line on the envelope flap!

• Designing and printing yourself has its own challenges, but it can save some money if you have the chops. An A7 envelope liner (for a 5×7 invitation) fits really well on a typical 8.5×11 sheet of paper. We typically use fairly thin paper, around 70 or 80# text weight paper. If you print the shape of the liner lightly on the papers, then it can make the cutting process easier.

• No matter which method you choose, we like to use this tape gun to attach them.

We hope you’ll check out our envelope liners for some inspiration – the best thing about liners is that you can mix and match them however you like to match your unique Love Story!