Wedding Blog

Part I
Part II 

With the exception of the flower graphic (which I describe at the bottom), I designed everything in MS Powerpoint, a) because I don’t have Illustrator, and b) because Powerpoint is pretty easy to use. For the layered inserts, I wanted to maximize the use of each sheet of paper. I drew boxes with an extremely light and thin dotted edge to help guide myself, exactly where the paper would eventually be cut (and thus eliminate the lines). The dimensions were as follows:

Here is a screen shot of what my fully designed page looked like. I made some of them upside down so that the text wouldn’t get cut off, since the printer doesn’t like to print too close to the margins.

Don’t forget to first make sure that each slide is set to 8.5″x11″ paper (under “Page Setup” select “Letter” under the drop down menu “Slides sized for”).

For the main invitations, I similarly first drew a 4.75″x4.75″ thinly outlined box. I then added all the text and images and grouped them together. “Grouping” is essentially a function in Powerpoint that will turn all of the selected items into one image, and can be done by selecting all the items, right clicking while they are still selected, and going to “Grouping –> Group”. Once the whole thing was grouped, I was able to copy it by holding down “CTRL+SHIFT” while dragging it across to the other side of the paper.

On the bottom of that sheet, I made the little monogram labels that we would use on the front cover. After these were cut, I pasted them on Metallic Brown paper, cut in 1 7/8″ x 3 1/8″ rectangles using the leftover paper from the invitation backing.

Here is what the full sheet looked like with the actual designs:

Now for some of the details…We used the following fonts:
Lainie Day
High Tower Text
Bickham Script Pro-Regular (for the monogram)

We printed everything on Luxe Glass Text Heavy paper from Paper Source, using the Canon MP530 printer, which I absolutely heart. It was completely reliable and the colors were true to form. It’s actually a photo printer and scanner as well, which is why the print quality was so great!

And finally, the graphic itself. I couldn’t find a graphic I liked, so I created this out of a combination of three different rubber stamps! Here is my original stamped image:

I scanned it in, emailed it off to my friend who has Illustrator, and had her smooth out the edges and even out the black. Once she sent it back to me, I filled in the color with my perfect shade of pink using The Gimp, which is basically like a free software with similar capabilities to Adobe Photoshop (thanks Mrs. Lemon for introducing me to Gimp with your lovely tutorials back in the day!). And voila, the finished image:

That should cover the details, the design, and the dimensions. Next up, the finishing touches!