Weddingbee Blog

Last time we talked about the Locket invites I was frustrated and unsure of how my YUDU was going to work out. In the end, due to time constraints and lack of patience, I ended up going in a different path and revamped my design. As you may have guessed, this isn’t the first time I’ve changed my invite design vision.

When I showed you my branched out-invite inspirations, I had mentioned that I had created my first invite prototype (pictured above). But as you know, indecision got the best of us, and we decided that an illustrated flower might better suit us. We ended up with the design below.

After much printing play, both Mr. L and I began to realize we were sick of our new design, and it was back to the drawing board. After a few hours I created our newest (and final) design suite and am happy to say I am satisfied with what I created.

And in case you are curious, here are the deets:

Design Details:

• Flower illustration is hand drawn and edited in Photoshop (to get the antiqued look I colorized it to purple-reddish shade).
• The main invite design is 4.75″ X 6.75″, and the RSVP and Ceremony cards are 3.5″ X 5″.
• The main font is Calamity Jane, and our names and headings are in Chocolate Box Decorative.

I wanted some sort of way to hold it all together but didn’t want to spend a ton of money on paper to make pocket folds. So I thought of a unique idea and created my own version of a pocket using that same floral print.

Creating The Lockets’ Pockets:

To create our lovely invitation pockets I made a new image of that same floral design but scaled it up to be a full 5″x7″. I then laser printed the design to its own page of Stardream Metallic Paper in Quart (105lb). After about 30 minutes of feeding the printer, I ended up with 80 pages of printed perfection.

Then came the super fun part…trimming these babies and piecing them together. I was actually pretty excited about this because I had just purchased my brand new MakingMemories Precision Trimmer (on sale for $29.99) and couldn’t wait to put it to use. First off, I cut off the floral end, so I was left with a blank piece of paper that could be trimmed to 5″ x 7″.

After what seemed like many hours (but was probably less than one) I had two piles of paper. One pile of blank 5″x7″ pieces and another of the floral image. Can you guess what came next? MORE TRIMMING! I was already starting to lose my mind but trekked on to trim the excess paper from the floral border.

I am not exactly sure how much I trimmed off, but I left about a one-inch white border around the image. With the edges trimmed, I then needed to pull out my itty bitty scissors and trim around the detail parts of the flower (pictured below). You will notice that I didn’t cut around the full part of the flower on my left side because I wanted to have something there to fold down in the next step.

Once all of the flowers were neatly trimmed, it was on to the next step: scoring the three sides around the flower and cutting off the corners.

And after much scoring, cutting, and creasing, I eventually ended up with this neat pile ready to be adhered to that blank 5″x7″ piece of paper.

This last step was by far the easiest and least time-consuming part. I used a glue stick on the white edges, adhered it to the end of the 5″x7″ pre-cut sheets, and placed it under a heavy book to keep things secured and well pressed.

All in all this was a laborious process of trimming, creasing, and gluing, but I’d like to think it was well worth it even if it drove me crazy. Did you have any redundant projects? What are you doing for your invites?

Next up, you will get to see me put these pretty pockets to use!