Weddingbee Blog

Building up from the bottom, let’s create some manvites!

We’ll start with some black 8.5″ x 11″ linen card stock. Cut it down to 6.25″ x 11″ and slap a nice bold stripe of red washi paper on. Since the washi paper is so-very-thin, use spray glue to keep it from warping.

Cut out a 6.75″x 3.25″ pocket with notches and everything. I’m so glad I don’t have to do this part, just looking at all the angles gives me hand cramps!

Emboss a double happiness stamp to the corner using embossing gel and clear powder. We experimented with black, white and red powders, but clear seemed to look the least obtrusive. Plus, it’s harder to spot mistakes when you use clear powder! Mr. Sewing’s tip for fast embossing is to stamp and apply powder to several pockets, assembly line style. Then line them up and wave the heat gun over all of them at once. (Note: If the sizes look “off” in the below pictures, it’s because they are from our practice runs!)

Score the pocket fold! If you don’t have a scoring blade on your paper cutter, use an empty ballpoint pen and a ruler instead. It works just as well!

Next, glue the pocket onto the card using Zip Dry. The glued pocket fold needs to dry flat, so squish them between some heavy objects. I knew those engineering books were good for something!

Print out your main text block. I should mention that we first tried to YUDU the text, hoping to emulate the nice texture achieved with its cousin, the Gocco. Unfortunately, the text was too fine and didn’t work out so well. I’m not saying it’s impossible to get a fine line with the 220 mesh screen, just that we didn’t. We only tried twice: first at a 10 minute exposure and again at a seven minute exposure. Neither worked, and instead of figuring it out we decided to forgo the YUDU in the interest of time. Printer it is!

After printing, Mr. Sew embossed the cards in the Cuttlebug, and used some spray glue to attach the embossed main text. Sewing-Mom was a little sad that we didn’t include any parent names in our text. Etiquette-wise, I didn’t need to, but she brought up a good point -

“When I get an invitation I like to know the parents’ names so I can greet them at the wedding.”

Unfortunately, I had already printed everything out already, so there was no going back. But I added some information about our parents to our wedding website, so if anyone wants to know who’s-who ahead of time, they can find it there!

That’s it for the main body - it looks like a vampire ball invitation, doesn’t it? I have a feeling my teenage girly guests may be disappointed at the lack of undead heartthrobs at our shindig. I’m such a tease.

Cost breakdown thus far:

• Black linen card stock: $42.26 for 250 sheets, or $22.65 for 134 sheets used.
• White linen card stock: $32.79 for 250 sheets, or $3.28 for 25 sheets used.
• Double happiness stamp: $3.50
• Embossing gel: ~$4.00
• Embossing powder: ~$2.00
• Spray glue: ~$10.00
• Red washi paper: $3.00

Total so far: $48.43 or $0.48 per manvite for 100 total. Next we’ll get jump into the pocket and see what’s inside!

If you kept any of your old textbooks, what do you use them for?