My fiance and I looked at several websites known for wedding invitations and while those graphic designers know what they are doing, none of the designs really struck us as something we really wanted. We wanted something elegant but knew we were not going to pay $5+ per invitation for what we wanted. So came our crazy idea- we create them! After lots of trial and error, we finally came up with a design we absolutely love!
We used a wax seal, tissue paper, and corner cut outs for a "fancy" invitation. We even went all out with the envelope and included a liner in there.
Items Needed:
- Invite design (we took to our local print shop and had it printed on 110 lbs card stock in a cream/ivory color)
- Corner punch- you can pick anything and can find them on amazon or any craft store such as Hobby Lobby
- Paper cutter- You can have the print shop cut the invitations to size but with as many as we had and doing trial and errors at home, we decided to spend the $40 on a pretty nice new paper cutter. I tried my scrap-booking cutter at first but quickly realized that it is not meant for cutting that many invitations and the blade dulled far to quickly.
- Wax stamp (we bought ours off of Amazon for less than $10 shipped)
- Wax- we tried several different ways to actually put the wax on the ribbon and found that for as many as we were making, the most efficient way was using the wax sticks. They use the small glue guns which you can buy for less than $10 amazon or target. The wax we purchased from Oriental Trading under their wedding part of the website.
-Glue gun (small and regular)- we used the small glue gun for the wax and the regular glue gun to hold the ribbon together. If you do not have a large glue gun or two different glue guns, no big deal it will likely just take a little longer. I would suggest doing all of one part and then moving to the next step if you only have one glue gun to not waste any of the sticks.
- Clear glue sticks
- Ribbon- the silver was 1.5" wide and the purple was 1" wide. We experimented with several different widths and went with those as the wax looked great and did not spill over to the actual invitation
Directions:
The invitations was the easy part once we figured out our design. We printed them to a 5x7 size. I would suggest investing n a nice paper cutter for a very clean and crisp edge. The print shop will usually also cut these for you as well for little to no charge but I am kind of OCD and wanted complete control. If it got messed up at all, it was only my doing.
After the invitations are cut, sit down in front of a good TV show or movie and start punching out your corners! Make sure you have a trash can near by for all of the scraps- you will have lots of them.
Now onto the ribbon and wax seals...
I used a 5x7 card board as my template to make all of the wax and ribbons. Each ribbon was cut 11" in length- just enough to overlap but not waste the ribbon.
We used a regular glue gun to adhere the ribbon on the back side. We did an assembly line version and had several of the ribbon backs being glued and drying while the front was getting the wax put on. Once you get the hang of it, it actually went fairly quickly.
Next, we added a small dab of the colored wax (not to exceed the size of the smaller ribbon) to the front of the ribbon band and quickly placed the wax seal on the wax. I would suggest letting it dry for at least a minute and then in between each time using it, I would also suggest putting it on ice. When we did not let the stamp cool, it progressively took longer for the wax to set. If you find that the seal starts to stick to the wax to much, we took a paper towel with a little bit of coconut oil (the only oil we had in the house) and rubbed it on the metal part. This helped to keep it coming on and off of the wax much easier. I found reapplying the oil every 6-8 seemed to work the best.
For the tissue paper, we cut it ever so slightly smaller than the 5x7 invitations. This was to prevent the paper from getting to crunched when inserting it into the envelope.
We really liked the way the invites ended up turning out. My sister even made the best RSVP cards for us! Way more on the fun side than the fancy and formal invitations. (The invitations in the wedding I think are going to be the most formal part of the whole day)
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