Handmade wedding invitations

One of my favorite things to design freelance is wedding invitations. I pick out pretty typefaces and illustrate the artwork on the computer. But, I always love to include a handmade element to them. It might be as simple as cutting out the invitations myself to adhere the invitations to a pretty border, like my friend Laura's invites.

With our wedding invitations though, we went all out. First, I started with the flower of our wedding, an orchid. I really didn't want to do a flower per-se because it seems very ordinary to me for a wedding invitation. So, the challenge was to make it unique somehow. 


I decided we were going to do die-cuts. But, that can be really expensive. I drew the orchid and vines in Illustrator then cut them out with a X-acto. We layered a nice textured purple paper underneath the orchid to give it some dimension. Then, we layered a larger green paper to border the entire invitation. David found this great vine ribbon at Paper Source. We used that and the same purple textured paper to keep the invitation, rsvp card, etc. together. I really wish the pictures did it justice! 

Now, how did we cut out 60+ invitations with an X-acto knife. Well, we didn't! I have this nifty little machine called the Silhouette. What is awesome about this machine is that I can make my own designs in Illustrator for the machine to cut out. I don't have to rely on pre-made designs! This thing is amazing, there are so many uses! It would even be great to add something extra to a ready-made invitation. 

Silhouette