Weddingbee Blog

This has been my cunning plan for our invites since about January, when I first saw that H <3 P Miss Giraffe put at the top of our invites. I’m so happy this project turned out just like it looked in my head!

That’s what my mysterious Silhouette project was! Once I had my little H <3 P graphic, I made a cut file that looked like this:

The rectangles are 1.5″ high, and the full width of the paper. It has to be over 10″ long to wrap around a 5″ wide invite, so 11″ long gives a nice bit of overlap. Then, over the course of a few mornings, I cut out about 60 bands from plain white cardstock that I had lying around.

Now, when I first had this idea, I cut out one to see what it would look like. I used the white cardstock because it just sits there by my desk, and it was handy. I grabbed some Glimmer Mist, and sprayed the cut-out band with it, to be able to visualize it better—I had been planning to cut the real deal out of teal cardstock, which I wasn’t going to buy until I knew my plan would work. When I showed Cinnamon Buns my invite mock-up, he loved the bands, and said that he actually really liked the splattery look of the sprayed bands. I did too, so we called that done! Belly bands made of stuff we had lying around? Awesome!

I covered up the coffee table with some freezer paper:

Laid out some bands, and got spraying!

Handy tip: look at how much wasted mist there is on the freezer paper! After this batch, I put the bands out much closer together, so almost all the mist went on to what I was trying to spray, not my freezer paper. As the mist dried, they all curled a little, like paper does. We stacked them in to two equal piles and put a few heavy books on top of them for a day or so to flatten them out. Spraying about 70 of these, including that first try pictured above (when I could have done twice as many as I laid out) used about half a bottle of Glimmer Mist, which is usually about $8. That means our belly bands cost $4 + whatever 15 sheets of cardstock costs. And that cardstock was bought pre-engagement for various other paper crafts, so I’m counting it as ‘free’.

Adding in the book-paper backing was a little more fiddly than I originally imagined, so I’m leaving that for post part 2 tomorrow.

Negative space has never looked so positive!