Wednesday, June 8, 2011

invitations, check

Over the weekend I finally got all our wedding invitations finished, with 106 days to go I think it was about time.
  
The origami heart idea came from the boy, on Valentines Day we had a sweet brekky planned but as he had just done a night shift he came home pooped and fell straight into bed but not before he crafted me this sweet little heart.

I swear he can be so goddamn cute sometimes.

I don't know where he got the instructions from but I found this website to use. I looked up the size of a bank bill and cut my book pages to size (though I believe I scaled it to be slightly bigger). My Mum suggested using an actual book to make them so we went to Vinnies and picked up a copy of Great Expectations and T.S. Elliot Collected Poems for under $1. I only ended up using Great Expectations and still have plenty of pages left but I think there will be more book related paper projects in the works.

I must admit it took a fairly long time (I made about 50, pressing them in my heavy tax textbooks) but our housemate sat and talked to me while I folded and after the first 10 I got a pretty good system going. The strips left over from cutting the pages to size ended up being the band on the inside of the card.

I got all my cardstock from a shop called Typo which is an offshoot of Cotton On, the first lot I bought was $5.95 for an a4 pack of 20 but when I went back to get more they were on clearance at $2, so I pretty much bought the lot.

We bought a Fiskars cutter from K-Mart for $19.95 and I swear it's been the best investment I ever made as I am the world's worst cutter of straight lines. Unfortunately K-Mart don't stock Fiskars anymore but you can get the same cutters from Spotlight.... but for almost double the price.

The Save The Date we sent out earlier I don't think I have pictures of but it was a postcard printed on kraft card with the tandem bicycle graphic offered on Wedding Chicks here.


This is the unfolded card with RSVP and belly band, unfortunately we moved house after I had printed all the RSVPs and we had to reprint them all .... but had no more kraft card left (I was actually kinda relieved as I wasn't happy with how they turned out). So I ended up using white card each with a page from Wuthering Heights glued on and the bicycle graphic printed in one corner and as the band didn't really go with book page I found some more kraft card at Spotlight for a whopping $12.95 for an a5 lot of 20 and printed an information card to go with it.

For some reason I decided to make the card an abnormal size and had great difficulty in finding some envelopes especially in kraft brown so we ended up making our own. I first looked into making conventional type envelopes but then found this awesome idea through Pinterest (on a side note Pinterest is my addiction).

My fiancee's grandmother was a seamstress, she died suddenly several years ago and left a wealth a sewing and crafting materials behind including a roll of kraft brown paper on one of those great old dispensers complete with guillotine type thing. So the envelopes ended up costing nothing except my time.

  this is how I put it together:
1. I measured a piece of paper which was wide enough to accommodate 3 'cards' across and length long enough to go over both sides (you can make the gap as wide or small as you want), we folded the corners in to create a less bulky end result
2. fold opposite corners down as shown
3. fold and secure - this last step is a little tricky and involved what I like to call 'spider fingers' you have to spread your fingers out and fold in both sides at the same time making sure all bits lay flat

I also glued the flap down with glue tape (my other best friend) as I didn't want them to come undone

and voila! finished

Costing:
Save the Dates - 1 pkt kraft brown card $5.95
RSVPs - failed ones 1 pkt kraft brown card $5.95 and final ones 1 pkt white card $2
Information card - $25.90 2 pkts kraft brown card (I do have plenty left over though...)
Invitation - 3 pkts white card $6
Envelopes - FREE!!
Books - around $1
Stamps -   50 at 60c = $30
Misc. - cutter $19.95, glue tape x2 $8 approx., ink about $30

Total $134.75  

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