This post is about invitation…I know this sounds crazy since we still have a year before our wedding, but our wedding invitations have already been made. Like most couples, originally we were thinking we would order from some company, so we only need to pick a design, come up with the wording, press the pay button and put a check mark on the list of completed tasks. After searching online for a few days, nothing seemed to satisfy us. Like I said before, we would like to be more involved in our wedding arrangements, so we came to the conclusion to make our own invitations.
The first step was to look at the techniques and tools available for DIY invitation cards, most importantly manageable ways for amateurs to handle a card project. We visited several art & craft shops in Edinburgh to gather ideas and recommendations. After looking at several card making machines and tools, we agreed upon using an embossing technique on a square gate folded card design.
We went to Paper Mill Direct to purchase a box of light grey card stock, a pack of linen paper, a corner rubber stamp, four colors of embossing powder, two pigment ink pads, a butterfly punch, a border punch, a sheet of foam pads, a bag of flower sequins and one hundred envelopes. Then I went on ebay to buy a glue gun, a heat gun, a card scoring board and tool kit, and two rolls of ribbons. Lastly, we got a paper trimmer and some double sided tape.
We began to make prototypes and practice embossing at home. The embossing process was difficult to master, it took us at least a dozen tries to come up with the first satisfactory product. First, you have to dab the pigment ink pad onto the rubber stamp and press it firmly on the paper. Then cover the wet ink with embossing powder completely. Slide the excess powder off the card by holding it upward and clear the excess near the edges with a small brush. Lastly, hover the heat gun an inch away from the paper until the powder appears to be melted to create a raised effect. The steps are certainly easy to follow, but when you are actually doing the embossing it is not as easy as you think. To make matters worse, at the end of each session we were surrounded by powder and glitter everywhere.
By the time we got better at the embossing technique, we went to Paperchase to purchase three big sheets of high quality paper (one in purple and two in white fabric material) and two boxes of metal brads to begin making the card shells. The three big sheets of paper were trimmed into small pieces of rectangular shapes to paste onto the front gated panels. Some shells have both panels decorated with the nice paper, others only have one panel. There's no particular reason, we wanted to mix it up a bit so that the manufacturing process would be more interesting. The shells with only one panel covered usually have two butterflies on the other panel and two flowers inside the card. Whereas the shells with both panels covered will have only two butterflies inside. When the white fabric paper was used, the corners were secured by the metal brads. Each time I could only work with a certain number of shells with the fabric paper because my right thumb and index fingers needed to rest from pushing the brads through the thick card stock.
The wording of the invite was printed on a light purple background, surrounded by a bright red border. The upper left corner has an embossed image either in blue, green, holographic or red tinsel. Each card tied with a purple organza ribbon on the outside to keep the panels closed. Remember the list of items we purchased for this DIY invitation project? Just so you know we did use every single item we mentioned here, however not everything was fully depleted. BMM registered a domain (http://winnie.ritterman.info/) for our guests to RSVP and to provide them with further information about the wedding. We want to be environmental friendly and cut down the use of paper wherever possible.
Due to respect to my elders, I created two Chinese invitations especially for my grandmothers. Everyone else in my family is English literate so there's no need to mass produce invitations in dual languages.
We shall begin sending out our invites about three months before the wedding. All of BMM's family members and guests need to make travel arrangements to Vancouver; the majority of my friends will have to make a special trip to Vancouver for the occasion as well, so we think three months ahead is appropriate in our situation.
