I grew up with an artistic mother who had a great attention to detail and loved unique things. She would take me into little boutiques to find perfect gifts for people and then take me to stationary shops or paper stores to get beautiful handmade paper and stamps with embossing powder to make the sweetest cards. Everything she does is like this, so thoughtful and beautiful. I wanted something like that for my invitations, so I started looking at hand-stamped invitations that I could kind of copy to get the look I was going for.
Months earlier I had pinned these cute floral border invitations that combined two floral stamps that you carefully intertwine to make the border and a big stamp in the middle with invitation wording. There is nothing like the look of hand-stamped words. I loved it! But I was the only one who did, so I kept looking. I landed on these amazing watercolor/stamp combo save the dates with a tutorial. Oh my god. Perfect! Here they are.
So the elements of these invites were the paper, watercolor, invite stamp, envelopes, and return address stamp. So simple, right? I totally underestimated the loads of work this would be.
The paper recommended was thick watercolor paper that wouldn’t ripple after it had gotten wet. That stuff is expensive! The tutorial mentioned buying big pads of paper and having them cut down. The people at my local paperie balked at me. Wasn’t going to happen. So I went and bought enough paper to make 250 5x7” cards. $70 later I had no way of cutting this stuff. Luckily I’m a teacher and, after some brainstorming, realized I have access to those big paper cutter things that totally scared me as a kid, the guillotine looking ones. So Ben and I went to go do this one evening after work. This was the easiest part of the whole process. It just worked! I didn’t mess up any of the cards and they were all perfect and straight and everything! Here’s a pic of them. Sorry it’s blurry, but I was too excited to worry about taking a good picture.
The next part was ordering the envelopes. This was also ridiculously expensive, and shipping took a while, but turned out easy. I ordered the same envelopes as the tutorial used. They are gorgeous and come highly recommended. Here’s the link. I used the color curry.
I want to make something clear at this point in my invitation process. I am not an artist. Crafty, yes, but my art skills are lacking. I had to watercolor all these invitations so carefully. When I went to buy the paper I asked the sweet woman at the art supply store, The Art Location in Fayetteville, about the watercolor process. I had a mental image of the watercolors I used with my preschool kiddos and that stupid little brush that comes with the blocks of color. Boy was I wrong! The woman told me about these, I didn't get this particular brand, brushes that you put water in the handle and squeeze out as you need it. They’re amazing! And she sold me some tubes of watercolor I previously didn’t know existed. This woman saved the whole project for me. I was lost and then I was found.
The watercolor process was waaay easier than I expected. I only had to practice a few times and then had the whole process down! 250 cards and 3 days later all my invitations were painted. They looked AWESOME. Just what I wanted. Only messed up 1 or 2.
My timeline is off a little bit because I worked on the invitation stamp before all this, but didn’t get around to getting it or doing anything with it until now. I bought some stamp pads at Hobby Lobby, StazOn teal blue. The color of the pads is what I matched the watercolor to so that the colors would match. My oldest friend, Elizabeth, who is an artist, did the calligraphy for me for the invitation stamp and return address stamp. Amazing. The reason I didn’t go with the stamps from the website the tutorial used was that they were expensive and took 4-6 weeks to be made. I didn’t have time or money, so I used simonstamp.com. The stamps were less than half the price, and I could upload a custom image. Oh yeah, and they shipped the SAME DAY! My invitation stamp was 4.5”x4.25” and the return stamp was about 3.5”x1.5”. When I uploaded the image of the calligraphy it didn’t work right, but I emailed the image to their help email, and within an hour got a perfect upload image right back. These people have timely awesome customer service perfected!
The stamping process was a little tough because you only get one shot at making the words go on right and making sure there is the right amount of ink on the stamp. A few got messed up, but no biggy.
250 watercolored invitations and 1 day later, they were all stamped!
Then my envelopes came in the mail! Stamping those was the most fun!
A lot of custom invitations have the mailing address handwritten. For all the work I had done on making these the most perfect and beautiful invitations ever I didn’t want to ruin everything with my handwriting. I also didn’t want to beg Elizabeth to write them all either. She had been so nice to do the invitation and return address calligraphy that I didn’t want to ruin our friendship with asking her to write on each envelope. I decided to find the perfect custom font online and print addresses on the envelopes. I finally found the font and made a little template, worrying about character spacing and placement on the envelope. Then I
I had forgotten about stamps, but managed to find these darling vintage flower ones from the post office. They were super easy to buy! Just went in to the post office and got 200 of them. After the printer hell this was a welcome break!
Here’s the final product.
This post is more a review of the tutorial I found and linked above than my own tutorial.
P.S. I work from home at an online job. You can, too! Click here to learn how.
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