Final Results of the Invitation Making Party

So I thought that it would take me only a day to do the invitations by inviting some friends and family to an "invitation" making party, but in the end, it took about 2 weeks. On the day of the invitation party we did a LOT of work. I did some pre-cutting of most of the main part of the card. It came in about 4 pieces. I had a whole assembly line going with Jennifer cutting out more stuff (I still had to cut more silver envelopes), Chris, Kathy, Sarah, Mom Mendoza, Charissa, Jared, and Michelle gluing, folding, and taping. I even had Saqi cut some paper with his good hand since he had broken his left hand recently. Another reason for the delay in finishing the invitations was at that moment, I didn't have all the supplies ready for the invitation so we only focused on the main card. Paul and I would do the rest later.

Well, we had a really nice rhythm going, and it was a good party. Everyone was talking, drinking wine, and having a good time, but then Chris reached out to grab something, hit Sarah's glass, broke it, and spilled wine all over a whole bunch of cut envelopes. I tried to salvage whatever I could, but most of them were damaged, and we had to recut 30 more envelopes. I wasn't too upset. We had a lot of paper. So we did what we could that night, and it was enough to make it slightly easier for Paul and I to finish. At the end of the night we had made about 130 cards and about 70 silver envelopes. There were still a few more little touches I wanted to add to the invitations. The final goal was to make a 130 plus extra final invitations.

The hardest part of the invitation was...well, there were two hard parts to making the invitation and they both had to go into the envelope. It was the silver "Admit One" tickets and the map/bridal party card. I designed the Admit One ticket by looking at various movie ticket images on the internet, and I ordered a customized stamp through Staples. Paul's mom also had a cartridge that made ticket shaped paper cut outs, and we decided that we liked the embossed look. There were several steps to the stamps, first of all the silver paper had to be cut, then, Paul had to prep the paper with baby powder so that the embossing power will only stick to the parts with ink, Paul would then line up our stamp on the cutout, and I would cover the ink parts with embossing power brushing off the excess, and then I had a heating tool that would melt the powder to create my special look. We had to do this after work; so we only had a few hours to work with everyday. There were also a few other obstacles that we had to overcome, first of all, Chris (he has the darnedest luck) burned out my embossing machine so I had to buy a new one. It's a good thing, I had 40% off coupons at Michaels. Also, we miscalculated about how many tickets we needed, and after we thought we were done, we had to do dozen more.

The map/bridal party cards were made in Illustrator. I copied the directions by looking at a map of Oahu. I used the lines I made for the streets and wrapped the words along the same path. It was a little time consuming, but in the end it turned out pretty good. I also had to match perfectly my design for the bridal party on the front to the map on the back. It wasn't perfect, but close enough to make it work.

I stole the design from my reply postcards that I made on vistaprint.com by screen grabbing, took it into photoshop and made a vellum print out of the main information. It looked really good on vellum. Then, I attached the vellum with the Bedazzler. Paul stamped the monogram behind it so that a little could show through.

We finished cutting/pasting/stuffing the last elements. Then, I spent 2 hours at the post office pasting stamps and sealing envelopes. Overall, I feel very proud of everything we did. It was a lot of work, but I think it was all worth it. How about you?

Posting pictures very soon...