DIY Invitations

This week, I started working on the invitations some more. You’ll remember that last year, I started working on the hand stamps I planned to use for them. You can find that post here.

First came the wording and the placement of the text on the card stock. I have been saving wedding invites, save the dates, programs, etc for years now. I gathered them all into bag and have been reading through them, getting ideas on verbiage and layouts. Matt and I discussed certain details we wanted, needed, and didn’t need in the invitations. One detail was that we didn’t necessarily need to have the names of our parents in them. We love our parents, but we are kind of pressed for space. Also, it seems that couples include the parents’ names when the parents are the ones throwing the wedding. Given our age and stages in our careers, we’re able to handle most of it on our own, so we’re throwing our own wedding. We, therefore, settled on including the line “Together with their families.” This includes more than just our parents in the invitation as well, since we are both close to our siblings and others.

Another tricky wording was that of the reception. Our ceremony is open, but the reception is a closed event and by special invitation only. However, how do we convey that in an invitation that we will be sending to everyone? After some wordsmithing and testing phrases out, we decided to include after the ceremony details this sentence: “Private reception to follow.” For those who are invited to join the reception, there will be a separate insert with reception information and instructions to RSVP on our wedding website.

Now we’re just trying to figure out how to print them from Matt’s printer. It works really well, but so far, I haven’t been able to save the file as a .pdf with the right parameters of the invitations. Oh well, that problem is fairly easily solved.

Next is how to easily replicate the same pretty look of the invitations using my homemade stamps. I really wanted to use paints instead of inked stamp pads. One major problem with the stamp pads is that I could not find a good, sweet looking yellow. I looked in a bunch of different shops and couldn’t find anything…even on the Stampin’ Up page. I was shocked!

So, I opted for my old reliable medium: acrylic. I grabbed a paintbrush and painted some yellow over the stamp and then pressed down. The image was alright, but I knew I’d have to rinse off my stamp before the paint dried. FYI – acrylic paint will not wash off after it has dried onto a stamp. Wash it off immediately. This went directly against the “easy to replicate” stipulation. When I bought the rubber pads and tools to make my stamps, I also picked up a Speedball roller and some paint for it. I tried it out just for the heck of it, but that paint is also acrylic, so that’s a no-go.

The next idea was to get some washable markers and try inking the stamps that way. The image turned out a little faint and I ended up having to use the markers to fill in spots that didn’t transfer. Also, I wanted to have more of a watercolor image and that meant using a wet paint brush to extend some of the ink. This also went against “easy to replicate” so I went back to the internet to search for some yellow ink pads.

Success!! Amazon carries a couple different shades of larger ink pads, so I ordered them and now I just have to wait for them to arrive before I can test them out more. The following pictures will give you an idea of what my Thursday afternoon looked like.

I can’t wait to finally get a finished product and get started on the rest of them. It will be quite a project, but I’ve got some wonderful ladies who have volunteered (right? You all did volunteer, right?????) to help me finish them. Just have to find what works best!

Did you buy your own invitations? Did you make them? What kind of roadblocks did you have?

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I’m getting married to my, you guessed it, best friend on June 1st, 2013! Matt and I are super-excited and since we have quite a bit of time to plan this thing, I decided it’d be fun to blog about it. Well, maybe not always fun, but at least informative and it might give me a welcome distraction. You can find all the posts by clicking the “Getting Married” tab on the right of this page, or by clicking here. Thanks for stopping by!

My Pinterest Wedding Board

Our Wedding Website on WeddingWire.com

Getting Married: 21 Weeks – Happy New Year! (xapatotheworld.wordpress.com)
Getting Married: 22 Weeks – Festivities (xapatotheworld.wordpress.com)
Getting Married: 23 Weeks – End of the World…Psh, I Got This (xapatotheworld.wordpress.com)
Getting Married: Countdown Post (xapatotheworld.wordpress.com)

As much as possible, I want to DIY our wedding. One easy thing to do yourself is the invitations. Let me say that I love stationery. I love letter writing, sending postcards (which is why our guestbook will be postcards instead of a traditional book), and sending Thank You notes. In fact, I’m a compulsive Thank You note buyer. I have two shoe boxes full of Thank You notes I’ve accumulated throughout the years, which I know will come in handy after the first bridal shower and such. I have never really tried to make my own stationery, though, and my only attempt at scrapbooking was in high school when I took an old binder and filled it with pages, photos, and even a book I had to make in French class about what I was like as a child.

That kid at the bottom is my now 20 yr old nephew…eesh!

I know what you’re thinking…SIGN ME UP! But I love trying new things and I really think that this will work. 🙂

My first order of business was to brainstorm what I wanted them to look like. I saw these invites and fell in love with them. And then I saw these and thought they were a bit more feasible. So I set out to make my own stamp. I’ve never done this before either, but it sure looked like fun, and considering I have 37 weeks to go, I’m ok with trying some things out before we need to get serious. I’m not going to show a finished product of the invites until we send them out, but you are welcome to see the process of, at least, this attempt.

I went to Michaels and bought a Speedball kit and a soft rubber stamp pad. Since I’m new to this whole process, I thought better start with the soft than the harder linoleum block. I sized my stamp and then pulled up Powerpoint. This is my picture manipulator of choice. I’m probably super old school saying that, but you make do with what you have and I have Microsoft Office! I typed up the wording and positioned the pieces where I wanted them.

Then, I took the little bit of tracing paper that came in my kit and put it up to the computer screen, sketching the letters out lightly with a No.2 pencil.

Once I had the design on the transfer paper, I flipped it over and pressed down the back of the paper so that the pencil marks went onto the rubber. It’s really important to do this gently, since you don’t want the design to get smudged. It goes on backwards, too, which is just want you need for a stamp!

Once the design was on the rubber, I began to carve. I probably didn’t do this the right way, but it turned out really well once I had it all cut out. The kit I bought came with two sizes of blades, one for larger areas and another for the detail cuts. Here was the finished product for that, and the sample stamp.

The hard thing about these stamps is that they’re a bit flimsier and tough to get a consistent image. So, I ran over to Home Depot to see what kind of scrap wood I could find to mount it and the other stamps on.

I know they’re not really scraps, but they will do the trick, and with a little wood glue, I have nicely mounted stamps to use!

That’s an ampersand, by the way. I think it’s gorgeous. So there you are. My stamps so far. Matt and I were super please when a month ago, we went into Michaels and they were having a crazy huge sale on blank cards. We got a steal on the basics for our invites…now I get to play around and figure out what I want. In the mean time, I’m enjoying experimenting on the left over pieces of rubber I have now.