Our Wedding Invitations

Been promising to reveal these for a while. Don't get too excited as we just kept them really simple in the end. I did, however, have my first go at printing by hand and it was quick, easy and fun. We were running out of time posting our invitations out so they were a little bit last minute. I didn't have time to look into buying proper lino so I decided to have a go at cutting my design from a sheet of soft foam that had been knocking around the office for a while.

Using Illustrator, I designed a simple monogram of mine and Dave's initials and printed it onto thin paper. I stapled this to the foam and cut out the design all the way through the sheet, like I do with my cards.

Once I had my foam monogram, I glued it, right side down, to a piece of cardboard. I covered the piece of card in PVA glue first and left it to dry so that it was a bit more 'paint-proof'. I was just making all this up as I went along but, actually, the PVA coating came in really handy for cleaning the stamp halfway through prints and once I'd finished.


I made a little handle out of a couple more small squares of cardboard glued together and stuck that onto the back of my 'stamp' to make it easier to pick up and use without getting too messy.


Then I got stamping! We decided a grey colour would be nice as our 'save the date' designs, which we'd emailed out to guests, were grey...


I used acrylic paint and just mixed black and white to make a light/medium grey shade. I added some water to make it a bit more fluid too. Using a small brush, I painted it onto the stamp for each print and was careful to make sure there wasn't too much excess paint in the gaps between the letters. After a little practise on the back of an envelope, I printed onto off-white linen-textured A6 cards (A5 folded) and just tried to position the print roughly in the middle of each card.







I like that each invitation card is unique, the charm of handmade as always. For the information inside each card, we printed the wording onto a textured off-white paper inlay and glued a small round doily to the outside of this to sit between the outer card and inlay. Why not, eh? A bit of frill! We also included a slip of paper inside each invitation with accommodation, travel details and a hand-drawn map so decided to embrace the frill theme by cutting them out with patterned scissors. I knew those scissors would come in handy one day!

The photo's aren't the best as we were doing most of this in evenings but you can kind of get the idea. I'll nick an invitation back from someone one day to take some nicer pictures. You can kind of see through the paper to the doily on the pic below...




Dave wrote all the guests names inside with his much-nicer-than-mine handwriting and they were good to go! No cut out details on the invitations, but, fear not, there will be cut out details on other wedding bits. I will post photos of our handmade place names and table numbers soon as I loved seeing what other people had made/chosen for their big days while we were planning. I will also be offering more wedding-related stationery in Storeyshop soon so keep an eye out.

Not long to go until our big day now! We have lots of lists but are quite sorted with most things I think. Need to finish making table numbers, plan the table decorations and layout, make some favours and some 'Order of Services' and a few other bits. I really want to get some wood to make signs to put in the country lanes on the way to the church and reception too, if we have time!