DIY Wedding Invitations

I've been waiting to write a blog post about my invitations for ages! They've been the biggest crafting project I've had for months and took an absolute age to make. So now they've all been sent, received and RSVP'd to (apart from the laggards, you know who you are!) I can let you in on how I actually made them.

You may want to frame yours when you realise the hours of toiling under a hot sewing machine lamp that went into them. To maintain anonymity, and avoid any gatecrashers, I've blurred out the important bits. Sorry chaps.

So. To begin. I made a sample back in August and, to be honest, alarm bells should have started then. It took about three hours, start to finish, and I only had one. One!  However, unperturbed I carried gallantly on and went shopping for all of the ingredients.
This included -

• Acres of ivory card of exactly the right size and weight (oh yes, you measure card in weight! Who knew?)
• Double-sided sticky tape (obv)
• Black wool
• A hot wax gun (sounds dangerous doesn't it? The woman in Hobbycraft just started at me blankly when I asked for directions to one)
• Black sealing wax
• A sealing wax stamp with appropriate initials
• Miles of black thread
• Fabric (which I already had. Oh, so thrifty!)

The first job was printing all of the buggers out. I will spare you the details, but it was painful. On a separate note, did anyone else know there where three different sizes of A4? No, me neither!  Once printed I trimmed them all to the right size and began cutting out and attaching the fabric. The aim here was to create a band of colour at the front and a handy pocket at the back - ingenious! So after hours of toiling, here's what I ended up with -

 and another from the side to get the true impression of the size of the pile.

From here I attached three lengths of black wool with a twist in the middle. The boyf helped a little on this job, purely so that he could claim the invitations were a 'joint effort' I think. Here is my wonderful workstation about half-way through the mammoth task.

The final step was to machine stitch a beautifully neat line around the whole thing. I'll be honest, about five invitations in, I was desperately regretting this design feature. However, once done - perhaps 30 hours later - I think they looked rather good. With an artistic flourish the boyf added the wax seal and - ta da - the finished invitation.

Now repeat the first few infuriating hours with the printer to get the inserts and RSVPs sorted. With just over two months to go, it's time to kick the planning up a gear.

See you next time!