Weddingbee Blog

Originally published on October 21, 2008

Miss Dalmatian nominates Ms. Fondue’s tutorial on embossing invitations. Miss D says, “There have been a few excellent embossing tutorials. The one that I bookmarked was this one from Ms Fondue—I plan to use it when embossing our invites!”

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Don’t worry; I won’t keep you guys in suspense!

You’ve previously seen the damask stamp I ordered from Impress Rubber Stamps on projects like our coasters. However, I originally purchased it when I was working on our invitation design last spring.

I showed you all the original designs we considered. But as I was designing all of those, as I mentioned, I decided I wanted something with a little more texture. Now it’s time to reveal the real thing.

Note: If you are invited to our wedding, please do not proceed beyond this point!

Our invitations were created in four stages:

1. Print the wording onto card stock
2. Emboss the damask design
3. Add ribbon
4. Assemble card stock pieces

For the first stage, I simply created a Microsoft Word document using the dimensions of my white card stock and printed them all on my home printer.

The second stage was the longest, and so I bring the tutorial I promised in my coasters post! (Would you believe I took these step-by-step photos back in April, just in case I was ever blogging for Weddingbee one day? Ha!)

Supplies:

• Stamp
• Stamp pad - make sure it is pigment ink, not dye ink, as dye ink dries too quickly
• Embossing powder - I used clear for this project
• Heat gun
• Stamp-a-Majig - Optional, but useful

The Stamp-a-Majig is a nifty tool that allows you to line up where you want to stamp before you actually stamp your image. I used it for the first few invitations, but I eventually got the hang of where I wanted the stamp to be without it. But, if you are using one, the first step is to line up your Stamp-a-Majig where you want your stamp to go. I also placed my invitation on top of a scrap piece of card stock so I could stamp the edge of the paper and not stamp my table. (While I might not mind a damask dining room table, I have a feeling Mr. Fondue would.)

And then stamp!

After you have stamped one invitation, cover it in embossing powder. Be very generous. I used two pieces of folded card stock for this step. One was used to pour and the other caught the excess powder. Then they would switch places for the next invitation.

Tap the paper a lot to get all the excess powder off the page.

You can go ahead and put powder on a lot of the pages before you heat them. I just lined them all up.

Then get your significant other to do something and melt the powder with the heat gun. It’s really easy to tell when the powder has been melted, but my gun takes a minute or two to heat up all the way.

You can tell in this shot that half of this one has been melted and half hasn’t.

And that’s all there is to heat embossing!

For the third stage, I just cut a strip of ribbon to the length I needed, ran some adhesive down it (I used Tombow Mono Permanent Adhesive), and stuck it to the card stock, with the ends folding over the edge of the paper.

Then in the fourth stage, I again used my Tombow to attach the white card stock to the red, and the red to the pocketfold. Voila!

Here’s a close-up so you can see the texture.

Our programs will also be mimicking this design.

Have you used embossing in any of your DIY projects?

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Catch up on Weddingbee’s “Helpful Posts” Series!