Weddingbee

Today’s diy project entry comes from Hapahaole.  Check out her gorgeous cane paper tube invitations!

So I got way into our paper materials.  I thought our save-the-dates were time consuming with much sewing involved, but they couldn’t compare to the daunting task (IMO) I undertook for our wedding invitations.  My FI’s only comment when looking at various invitation designs at different stores was he liked the “one in the tube”, so of course to keep him involved in the process, I set out to make our invitations in tubes. 

I had used the common destination wedding cane paper in our save the dates and needed to incorporate that into our invites, so I decided to use the paper to cover the outside of tubes - both the outer “envelope” and the rsvp “envelope”.  First off though I had to figure out how to adhere an address label to it that wouldn’t come off.  I ended up tearing very thin japanese rice paper into strips and had a calligrapher do the addresess.  I used spray glue to adhere the paper and used a bit of overlap at each end to wrap it around the cane paper.  I then had to use more of the spray adhesive and regular glue on the edges to glue the cane paper to the tube.
 
For the actual invitation, we had a calligrapher draw up the invite, we printed our Hawaiian quilt motif on the thin japanese paper, and then had the invites letterpressed on top.  The Bhutan paper came in much larger sheets, so we tore each one into the size we wanted for the invite, the map and the rsvp.  To give it more of an antique look vs. just torn, I dabbed the edges with a wet sponge and rubbed them a bit with my fingers to rough it up.  Oddly enough, it worked quite well.  To adhere the rice paper to the Bhutan background paper, I had to use Xyron Cheetah roller glue so that there wouldn’t be bubbles.  For some reason, the spray glue wouldn’t adhere the rice paper to the almost-glue-resistant Bhutan paper. 
 
To roll the papers, we got cylinder dowels the size we needed to keep the paper from getting too crinkled in the wrapping process.  We wrapped the rsvp sheet around the dowel, inserted it partially into the rsvp tube (so that folks would understand what it was for), then wrapped the invitation around the rsvp tube, wrapped a japanese lace paper around that and a strip of the Bhutan paper with the invitees’ names on it as our “inner envelope” around the lace paper and tied it and closed it with bronze thread and drops of wax.
 
To give the invites the “Hawaii” flavor where our wedding was taking place, I swabbed pikake oil around the edges so that the invites were aromatic.  And after all of that work, the most comments generated from our invites were from the stamps which we did in about 30 minutes - we spelled out “A-L-O-H-A” on individual stamps.  It was funny to see how long it took our guests to figure out 1.) what the stamps said and 2.) who was in them.
 
Enjoy.
 
From, 
 
hapahaole

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