Crafting My Son's Wedding Invitations: Step by Step

There are so many steps to planning a wedding invitation design! 

But I love card-making so none of it was really like work!

Picking out the colors was up to the bride and groom. Some greens were too bright some were too dark. Purples too....too pink too plum...finally it was decided moss/olive green and an eggplant deep purple.

I cut each linen textured deep purple 12x12 sheet in half. Then scored at 2 inches and 5 inches.

I am not a graphic designer so I had to really work at getting the picture of the Pepperpot Tower in Ireland (where my son purposed) to look right and give me the color and space I needed for the text to show and the tower to show through. And I needed Kira's help to get them to print out four on a page the right size to use on the inside of the card.








I used a Word file to create the text for the inside of the card. I read through numorus wedding invitation wording to find what I thought they would like. Finally, I came up with the right thing. I sent it to the bride, she chose the font and I printed four to a page.
I measured the olive paper 4 1/4" x 5 5/8". Then I found a beautiful punch to punch the corners and hold the papers.

I trimmed the tower picture and the vellum with the text to fit. Then used tape runner to glue to the inside of the card.









I cut 70 pieces of peach colored ribbon in to 5 inch lengths. The doves were so cute.. I had to punch 140 of them (2 for each card) and glue them to each end of the ribbon I had tied like a pretzel.

Half way through this process I started to second guess myself and think I should be tie them into bows, which would have been so much harder. So I texted the bride to verify "pretzels" were right.  Ahhhhh... ~sigh of relief~.

 

I used a rubber stamp and embossing powder with a heat gun to emboss a metalic purple tree to the front of a 3x5 5/8 olive green piece of  paper for the front (you can read the previous blog post to see that process).

I then glued the doves with the ribbon over the tree and cut strips of vellum with "Help Us Tie The Knot" on them and glued them just above the doves.

Using tape runner I glued the front panel to the center of the purple card.

The RSVP card was made to fold in half and seal with sticker provided and mail back with response and dinner choice for each guest. We also provided a map of the location of the wedding.

There needed to be a pocket on the inside of the invitation to place the RSVP and map...









...So I had to use tape runner on two at a time as to get only a small strip (half size) of glue in order to glue the pocket on each edge. I placed two cards side by side and ran the tape half on one and half on the other.

Per Adam's request, I place a stamp of a tree with a tire swing on the back because he really liked that stamp. (It must be his association with trees and tire swings with his childhood)

Then I placed each one in an envelope and mailed them out to the bride on 04-23-12