It has been so fun sharing more of our wedding plans and projects with you! I am steadily making progress on the dress and I will have an update on that very soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share my process for the custom invitations we sent out a few months ago. I designed and block printed all of the invites and I am so happy with how they turned out!
I’ve been getting more and more into block printing in the past year. I love sketching out ideas and carving them out using Speedy Carve blocks. They are a lot like erasers so they are very soft and easy to carve. It’s amazing to see my designs translated into prints and I love how tactile this art form is. The carving is really satisfying and the printing process is a lot of (messy) fun.
We are having an outdoor summer wedding with lots of flowers! There isn’t an official ‘theme’ but I suppose if I had to pick one it would be ‘summer garden’. I made our Save The Date graphic about a year ago using watercolours and black pen. I photographed it and we emailed it out to our guests. I wanted to tie in this design with our invitations.
I started by sketching out some ideas. I was really drawn to the concept of a big sun with a heart on top. I made a couple of heart blocks with different flowers inside so I could experiment with the prints. I also played around with the gold and red ink as well as black. I had a feeling the red and gold would really pop and I was right!
I love the effect of the layered prints. The gold ink is slightly metallic so it adds some nice shine. I did have a moment where I was feeling that it was a bit Christmassy, but I was re-assured by everyone that it was beautiful and I proceeded with the red and gold.
I had to make around 50 cards so I set myself up at our big dining table and got to work printing! I did all the suns first and then paused to let them dry. I used this pack of black cards from Amazon. The cardstock is nice and heavy and it includes envelopes.
I tried not to be too concerned with misprints but I did mess up a few along the way. A little bit of extra ink or not enough ink is fine, but sometimes the prints just go sideways and they aren’t salvageable. I printed more than I needed so we could pick the best ones!
Once the suns were all done I went over with the red hearts. This was nerve wracking! The red was so much brighter and positioning the heart on the sun was a bit tricky. Often printers will make a template with registration marks for getting perfect placement but I just eyeballed it. After a few I really got into a flow and I like that they are all a little bit different!
I love how these turned out and it felt really special to make the invitations and send them out to all our loved ones. We are counting down the days to the wedding now - less than one month!!! Wish me luck with all the rest of my wedding DIY projects!
