#printing invitations

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The People in Your Neighborhood

The People in Your Neighborhood

Enter a caption Dale Ambrose with Shelley Powell, owner of Covenant Cleaning Services & Conway Village Barber Shoppe. Photo taken at gathering of the South Orlando Business Exchange. We have the pleasure to serve many neighborhoods around Orlando, including non profits, small businesses, youth sports, schools and community organizations. Thanks to printing your brochures, flyers and invitations,…

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Sweating the Invitation Suite

My requirements for the invitations were pretty simple: use wedding colors (pink, peach, charcoal), not too plain, not too formal and something personal--I think this style suits us and the occasion well. The pochette folders made up the base, then some textured gray cardstock, then a casual snapshot of us (I played around with it to make the background lighter and blurrier so it wasn't too distracting, but not as harsh as it would be on a plain white background). I played around with embossing on the vellum overlay and liked the look, although my embossing skills stand to be improved.

Now that I had decided on the look of the invitation, I packed all my supplies and brought them with me so that I could assemble the invites from Cape Town.

Vellum paper presents a problem. I had planned on bringing my printer with me on my move, but as it stood we were in dire straights with the excess charges on baggage--I already brought an extra bag and most of them were over the weight allowance. So the printer couldn't come along. 

Since I had already printed one invitation in my own printer, I didn't anticipate any problems with taking the paper to a print shop. I was mistaken. I took the paper to two different shops.  They both had a problem with the paper being pre-cut (which I had been advised to do).  They also believed that their printing devices would melt the vellum paper.  In fact, they had done it before, the lady told me, and it cost over a thousand dollars to have it repaired. Interesting. 

Finally I found a place that would not melt my pre-cut paper. Score! 24 hours later, I had all my elements ready to be assembled.  No outer and inner envelopes for me...just the pochette folder and the pink envelope it fits in, so no worries there.  The next...shall we say...challenge...presented itself when I needed the gray cardstock cut.  No big deal, the scrapbook size of paper only needed to be cut into quarters.  You wouldn't even need to measure it, just slice it down the middle twice.  My darling groom, who is meticulously precise in most things, by nature as much as by engineer training, told me they had a paper cutter at the office. He said he would cut the squares.  Here they are.

It doesn't look that bad here, but this gray cardstock is the base for the photo, and goes inside the pink petal folder which is a perfect square.  So all elements stacked up and you notice the hack job.  Sorry, honey.

Sunday was invitation day, and we got them almost finished. 

First, I had to provide the muffins, as promised:

In an emergency, I used convenience store margarine--not my best work, admittedly. But they did the job.

Then, I gathered my supplies and made a spot for myself on the living room floor. (we are still furniture hunting, and unfortunately, we have no table in the house.  Except for a TV tray). 

While the groom was relegating to measuring and re-cutting the cardstock, I glued the photos to the gray squares once he'd cut them.  I used glue dots in the corners and the glue stick for the rest. 

Thankfully, we were only making 50 invitations.  Still, after several hours, delirium sets in:

  I love how his pant leg is rolled up to the knee.

After we had the photos glued to the cardstock, we took a break before beginning the embossing.  I had two elements I wanted to emboss: the flourishes on the vellum overlay using clear stamps from Inkadinkadoo, and the back of the pink petal folder, using the stamp I had designed. 

It took a few times before I got the hang of what kind of pressure to apply both when inking the stamp and the actual stamping.  For the record, I used silver ink and glittery embossing powder for the back, and silver ink with a pearly silver powder on the vellum.  I worked for hours in the most uncomfortable position, the floor protected by two layers of plastic that I had taped down.  Glittery embossing powder was everywhere, and when I closed my eyes, I could still see the sparkles.  But they turned out pretty nicely.  Now all that's left is to buy some silvery ribbon to tie in a bow at the top, attaching all the pieces together, and to address the envelopes. 

Voila! The flourishes here are a bit different than what I had originally planned, mainly because I re-sized the text and it changed the spacing a bit.

I also bought the silver wax and seal...so excited!