Another little wedding invitation

Yes, we’re back to the wedding theme. With another wedding in the family, a request was made to us for some handmade invites and of course we couldn’t resist! Now, if you’ve read my post on ‘The little wedding invitation’ (http://thelittlepomegranate.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/the-little-wedding-invitation-2/), you’d know I’m a big advocate for making your own invites! It’s not as time consuming as you’d think, all it takes is a little effort, organisation and know how and trust me, you’ll be in love with the results. Ok, I know you’re looking at the last invites and thinking ‘yeah right that’s not time consuming!’ and to be fair, those ones were a little more complicated-but I promise you, you’ll have these ones churned out in no time! And in this current climate I know what the clincher is, price! Last time we gave you invites which cost ~50p per invite, this time they’re less than 20p each. How’s that for saving the pennies?

Anyway, motivational talk over. Once we had narrowed down a style that our Groom liked, we were on our way designing the invite.

Tree and I have been working on our computer skills so this time we decided to make it completely original- right down to the images (last time we used cliparts from oneheartweddings.com). It’s a little complicated to explain but in basic terms we used a sketch I made [see above photo], traced over it in Paint.Net to give a smooth high quality image and fiddled with it to get the right colour.

As you can see from the picture we went with a layered design. The main card is printed with the information and sketch and layered on top is a sheet of vellum with the same sketch (slightly tweaked) in a paler shade to give a subtle addition to the design below. We layered with vellum to get that frosted look and to finish off we added the satin bow.

Description aside, here’s how we put the invite together!

Wedding invites

Materials

• Card- A6 160gsm in white. Normally we use cropping block card from Hobbycraft which is A6 (£3.29 for a pack of 60 sheets) but just our luck, they were out of stock. So we bought some A4 card (£4.99 for a pack of 100) popped by our local Staples (a print shop) and got it chopped into A6 for the minimal sum of 30p (we’ve actually got it done for free a couple of times).
• Vellum- I tell a lie, we actually used inkjet printable tracing paper (£4.75 A4 pack of 25, Paperchase) . Why? Mainly because it was difficult to buy vellum! Again, we took the A4 sheets down to Staples and got it chopped to size.
• Envelopes- A6 in white (£4.99 for a pack of 50, Hobbycraft)
• 10mm Double satin ribbon in Aqua (£3.22 25m roll, http://www.carnmeal.com)
• Hole-punch

Instructions

1. Design your invite and print it onto your white card.
2. Print your design onto the tracing paper/vellum. N.B. A helpful tip. You may find that your inkjet paper insists there is a paper jam and refuses to print. Basically, the tracing paper is too see-through for the sensors in the printer to detect that its there when it feeds it through. To solve this problem you need to put a small square of masking tape on the bottom corner of the tracing paper (making sure your design isn’t destined for said corner!) and off you go.
3. Place the tracing paper on top of the card and hole punch the invites- two holes ~1cm apart.
4. Cut the ribbon to ~25cm long and thread through, tying a bow to finish off. N.B. Use sharp scissors or use a candle flame to carefully sear the edge of the ribbon so you don’t get frayed edges [see my previous post on wedding invites].

And that is it! The main part is the printing, the rest is simple as can be. We also decided to print part of the design on the envelopes which is also easy to do- just make sure you’ve got your printer on the correct setting and feed the envelopes in the right way!

If you’re interested in this particular design, post me a comment and I’ll see if I can send you the templates so all you have to do is add your names and press print!

love,

little pomegranate