Wedding Invitations

A thoroughly enjoyable few months were spent early in the year, designing, preparing and making invitations with my friends for their wedding.

The bride had been pinning ideas to Pinterest, so I set up an account to keep track of this and come up with some ideas based on the pins.  With this fantastic virtual mood board to go over, we discussed some options; how easy things would be to make in large numbers, what colours to use, what images, which stamps I already had that would work etc., etc.



Stamps

The invitations were going to have some Chinese style elements - plum blossom branches and Chinese lanterns in orange and turquoise.  Stamps from my collection were suitable, a Claritystamp (plum blossom), a little flower from a Stampin' Up! set and Chinese lanterns from Artemio - a two part stamp, one part for the outline and one for the colour block.

The invitation for the day ceremony and afternoon tea would take the form of a card with a printed, decorated insert and a pocket containing an RSVP postcard and information on the venues. Both were decorated with stamped images, all tying in with each other, but not all the same.  The evening invitation was a single A5 printed and decorated sheet matted onto coloured card.

I stamped some mock ups of the invitation components, worked out the sizes of the cards and the space available for the decoration.

Drafts

The stamping was all done in black with accent colours being applied roughly, using Distress Ink and markers (Spiced Marmalade and Broken China).  The drafts got the thumbs up, and with some playing around with rounding off the corners and the addition of a decorated panel on the front of the main daytime invitation the final design was approved!

The biggest discussion came over the choice of card colour.  A large box of orange card was purchased as a back-up to the greeny-blue-turqoise-teal which was proving quite difficult to get hold of in just the right colour.  After lots of samples, 'tempting turquoise' from Stampin' Up! was selected, which had the bonus of matching ink pad colour. 

The Final Colour Choice

Building up the decoration on the daytime invitation insert was achieved by stamping the images in black waterbased dye ink.  The clear stamps are excellent for positioning as you see exactly where you are stamping.

Plum Blossom stamped on the right of the insert

Some larger flowers were added

The outline of the lantern was stamped 'hanging' from the blossom branch.

Then the colour of the lantern was applied using the second part of the stamp inked up with colour.

A couple of attemps at the pocket went in the bin, but once I was happy with one, I made a template for the rest, including a second one to help punch the half circle in the top of the pocket in directly in the centre.  The folds were made along scorelines made using the scoreboard.  Once scored and folded all the pockets went under some heavy books for a couple of days to flatten them out completely.

All the individual elements of the invitaitons that required printing, were cut and printed (thankfully) by the groom, then I decorated each one with the stamps and some colour (Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink and Stampin' Up! in Tempting Turquoise).  Here's how the decoration for each element looked;

RSVP Postcard

The line stringing the lanterns together was drawn in by hand using a fine line marker.  A postcard image was stamped on the reverse.

Reverse of RSVP

 

Information Card

 

Evening Invite

So, with the elements made, all we had to do was finish some colouring, round some corners, score some card and put it all together.  We had a little production line in mind.........

I really liked the look of the final daytime invitation with all the elements together, the pocket was a great idea.