Invitations - Part I

Our invitations are going to be a labor of love.  I spent about 2.5 hours working on them today and I'm not quite finished with the first part.  Naturally I ran out of eyelets, so I am stalled for now.  In my defense, we were going to only use 2 eyelets per invitation which has now been upped to 4.

Part I was all about cutting, printing and mounting the vellum.  I used regular 8.5" x 11" vellum which I cut into 4.5" x 6.5" pieces.  I then printed each page individually.  With inkjet printers and vellum, you have to be careful to let the ink set otherwise it will smear quite easily.  We had done several test runs to get to the perfect design and discovered the problem - passing it along to anyone else attempting this.

I used Medina Green invitation mats and 1/16" black eyelets to mount the vellum.  We decided to go with an eyelet in each of the four corners.  Originally we were going to use the vellum for the wording over a printed engagement picture of ourselves.  I went a little crazy one weekend and redesigned all of our paper products, in the process deciding that I didn't like the vellum over picture look after all!  

This process was time consuming although after the pomander experience of yesterday, this was down right breezy.  It also helped that I had good tools to create a mini assembly line.  We found this really great eyelet setting tool from Making Memories that has 3 different sized heads for all sizes of eyelets.  You need a hard surface to use it but otherwise it is quick and simple.

Find the template here:  Invitation Vellum Publisher Template

All paper products courtesy of:  Cards & Pockets

Eyelets:  Eyelet Outlet

Making Memories:  Eyelet Setter
Fonts used:  Adios Script Pro & Copperplate Gothic Bold

Poms - The Great Time Suck!

Today's project was creating the first aisle decoration - a sample tissue paper pomander.  I was duly warned that these little gems would take hours to create however I was unprepared for just how long it really would take.  Let me tell you, they aren't kidding when they say 3-4 hours for each one.  I assume it will go slightly faster as I get better at it but not significantly.

First of all, I have to give a shout out to a Wedding Bee who provided the instructions on her blog:  DIY Wedding Blog.  I used it as an outline for my creations.

I started out by cutting my tissue paper as indicated and then began folding.  I discovered that it's not an exact science and was able to do the final folds more quickly because of that.  I used wrapping paper tissue as that was the only kind available at my local craft store.  It meant that I had to fight with the existing folders, which was a little bit of a pain.  It was fine once the pom folds were in place and the floral wire attached.

I would recommend using a lighter weight floral wire.  I used a pretty stiff package on this one and will seek out lighter for future ones.  It works fine however it was a little hard to bend and twist.  I felt like my flowers were a little harder to "fluff" because of it.  My first attempt at fluffing was terrible however by the end I think I had gotten the hang of it.

 I also may cut less rounded tops on the next set of flowers.  It appears that the example had a slightly more pointed tip than mine.  As with all DIY projects, experimentation is key!

The picture to the left is only 3 flowers.  I ended up using a 3" Styrofoam ball as 4" was too large for our purposes.  I would estimate it took between 10-12 flowers to fill the ball.  I packed it fairly tightly and you could definitely use less.  This picture was on the 4" ball and before I decided I want to pack the flowers more tightly.

All in all, the project took about 3.5 hours and 2 trips to the craft store to finish up one pomander.  While I am pleased with the outcome, I'm not looking forward to several more Saturdays spent on this project.  Luckily I have two wonderful friends who have offered to help one of those days.  I need one more green and 5 each of black and white.  If the next green one comes out better, I may just use this as a sample. I'm only kind of a perfectionist! ;)

Save the Dates

 As with all of the "paper goods" for our July wedding, the Save the Dates (just can't bring myself to abbreviate it) were a labor of love.  I went through 2 or 3 iterations of the design before I finally came up with one that I was really happy with.  Once we decided to spread the orchids from just the real flowers throughout our entire theme, things started to gel.

I knew that I wanted to create them myself however I also knew that I wanted them to look as "professional" as possible.  We acquired a really nice printer over the summer and that as proven to be one of the best investments we have made.  I highly recommend spending the extra money to get a really good inkjet printer before starting out on these DIY projects!

These were really quite simple in the end.  I used regular 8.5" x 11" white cardstock for the main card which I cut into 3.5" x 5" pieces.  Once the main image was printed, I trimmed the edges by 1/4" on each side.  I also cut 8.5" x 11" black cardstock into 3.5" x 5" pieces.  I used a regular glue stick to paste the two together and voila! we had a ready to send Save the Date.

I printed the envelopes with the return address and the recipient's address although given the choice again, I would forgo it.  The size of the RSVP envelope (what we used for this purpose) didn't work well with our printer - just couldn't feed it through properly.  I wasted about 20 envelopes with crooked or blurred printing.

Find the template here : Save The Date Publisher Template
All paper products courtesy of:  Cards & Pockets
Fonts used:  Adios Script Pro & Copperplate Gothic Bold