Our Wedding Invitations

After an exhasting 2 weeks at Summer camp I'm back in Scotland and in the midst of wedding preparations. It's pretty hectic but hopefully I'll manage to keep my blog up to date over the next few weeks. Finally, here is the post about my invitations.

I must have considered 100 different designs for my invitations before we settled on one we were both happy with. One thing I knew from the start was that I wanted to make them myself. In the end we settled on a very simple idea but sourcing all of the materials was quite tricky and time consuming. The Internet is a wondeful thing but at times very frustrating!

Here are all of the materials we used:

1. Woodware brown Kraft card pack with envelopes from Crafts U Love

2. Rubber stamp made by a local company from an image I drew myself

3. Douglas tartan ribbon from tartan-ribbon.com

4. Calligraphy pen from a local stationer's

5. Martha Stewart lace edge paper punch bought from Crafts U Love

It doesn't seem like much but I spent many hours online and trailing around shops in Perugia before we found exactly what we wanted.

The first task was to stamp the front of the cards. The reason we chose a hedgehog is because Matteo's surname 'Ricci' translated into English means Hedgehogs! I drew the image myself and we emailed it to a local shop which makes rubber stamps. I was really pleased how well it turned out.

The inside of the invitations we designed on the computer using a font downloaded for free from here. We then punched the bottom edge using the Martha Stewart punch.......

Matteo's job was to stick the paper inside the cards using double-sided sticky tape........

and then cut the ribbon ready for me to tie in a bow round the cards........

I addressed all the envelopes by hand and finally we stamped the back of the envelopes using a butterfly stamp which is a bigger version of the butterfly on the end of the hedgehog's nose.

The pretty Italian francobolli (stamps) finished off the look and eventually they were all ready to be posted. We visited 3 post boxes before I was finally able to part with the invitations I'd spent so long making. The first one was right next to a muddy puddle and the second one was already full.

Overall I'm extremely pleased with the finished result. They do look a bit

amateur and home made but then home made is exactly what they are and how a lot of our wedding will be. I think they reflect our personalities and are unique and personal to us. We had a lot of fun making them together and they were sent off with a lot of love tied up inside the ribbon!