Making of a Wedding: The Invitations

Step one in preparing for a wedding: the invitations. This first step was undeniably the most difficult of all for me. Mostly because I had never done a wedding invitation before, and also because I was totally clueless about what dd and her fiance wanted. I did know what they didn't want... NO PAPERPIECING.... and NO ASIAN THEMES... *SIGH* I was being denied creative access to the two things I enjoy the most...paperpiecing (what, no Cricut?), and Asian themes (...no cherry blossoms?)

After spending months of working on and creating about 10 samples and variations (all of which were rejected), dd came across a photo of the lovebirds figurine you see in the photo above and announced she wanted to do a lovebird themed wedding. Finally, I had some direction and ran with the theme.



After coming up with the first samples of this invite, I thought, "Okay, this seems simple and easy enough...." But I didn't realize how much time it would take to print and cut all those pieces of paper for all those layers! Thank goodness for all the help dh provided scoring and putting together most of the base card and pockets on these! When dd and her fiance were here in November they helped with much of the layering and assembly as well.

The embossing folder I used on the invites is a Cuttlebug European folder called Jamara. Although there are several beautiful embossing folder designs available in the US, most of them (A2 size) weren't wide enough, whereas the European folders are 5x7. I purchased mine from Crop Stop where I found a huge selection of embossing folders from several different companies. Best thing is that they will ship any number of embossing folders, dies and stamps to you at a incredible flat rate of $2!

To do the embossing (3 embossed panels on each invite!) I used an electric Big Shot machine. Never could have gotten it done without it! I'm sure my arm would have fallen off trying to crank 600 pieces of cardstock through my manual Big Shot. Thank you to my bff, Aunty Pat for letting me use her machine.

The birdcage and lovebird images printed on the invitation are from Cricut's Straight From the Nest Cartridge. LOL! I just had to get my Cricut involved in this project one way or another! The images were imported from Design Studio into Photoshop where I added color and saved them as jpegs. The branch image is part of a digital flourishes package I purchased from my favorite digital craft store, My Grafico.

The beautiful papers and cardstock I used...White Gold (cream colored cardstock with shimmery gold undertones) for the basecard and embossed panels; Opal Text (creamy pearlescent text weight paper) for printing and the mats; were purchased locally at my favorite store for beautiful papers, Creations Unlimited. Colored cardstock is Pinkini and Green Tea from Bazzill.

Two hundred twenty five invites were finally completed by early December and ready for mailing... whew! Now I understand why they charge so much for custom made invitations!