One of the first things that has to be completed about a wedding are the invitations. After you decide on venue, ceremony time and other stuff that has to go in the invitation, that is.
We didn’t really have a theme, or a theme colour either. Looking back, I’m guessing the theme was “country chic” and out colour scheme was…erm…”summer ice cream”. Anyway, I never missed the non existing theme other then when we were designing the invitations. If we’d had only the blues or the greens or the pinks to choose from, it would have saved us a lot of time.

We came up with the general design pretty early; “tags” in an inner envelope with a sort of ticket carnet/postcard feeling. Then we ordered cardstock from a couple of different webshops and spent a few afternoons in craft shops in Stockholm and prototyped colours and size for a couple of weekends. The cardstock shades we decided on came from a nearby scrapbooking store, Handarbeta, where the owner Sofia even lent us her paper trimmer, as she had none in stock to sell. It helped us immensely, needless to say.

We did the text layout in Power point and printed “a few” test tags on our printer before we cut the cardstock and printed it, four tags at a time. The tags are cut in different lengths and embossed with little squares on the edge of the top two. We coloured sticker dots the right beige, punched holes through them and tied the tags together with a friendship knot. The green inner envelopes are just folded over to make a snug tunnel to keep the tags in place. The ‘stamp’ is a photo of two of our many ducks cut with shape scissors and the postage stamp over it with the text Emma & David - We are getting married – 12 June 2010 we designed and ordered from My cards.

Our wedding invitations

From My cards we also ordered the stamp in the bottom right corner. It is based on an Egyptian passport stamp and has our names, the date, the place etc on it. We changed the words around a little and printed magnets with the RSVP date on them so people would remember to answer. I don’t know if that’s why, but of our 78 invited guests only one had not RSVP’d on the date!

Well, can you? This is a question we are all bound to ask sooner or later…or not. Anyway, I asked it and tried it and here is the answer -No, you cannot.

You can stamp the fabric and get the embossing powder to stick, of course, but when you heat it the gluey-plastic-stuff that makes it embossed melts into the fabric and does not raise. I tried on three different materials:

Cotton canvas (grey/white) – the stamp does not sink through the fabric but doesn’t stay on top of it either

Thai silk (green/silver, bottom left) – the stamp melts right through the fabric and can be seen from the other side

Cotton-polyester stretch mix (blue/white) – the heat melted the actual fabric as well as the embossing powder…

The stamp motif also became a little fuzzy due to the melting, but I guess you could use this technique if wanting to stamp fabric and make it stick – be careful when heating synthetic fabric though, as mine melted.

Butterflies "embossed" on fabric