Love Birds...

Once upon a time my daughter had a room mate. I'll call her Jessica, (because that's her name). Jessica finished her college education and took a job in a tiny town for the summer. In that tiny town there was a boy. I'll call him Jacob or Jake for short.  Despite the fact that  Jessica was only in the tiny town for a short while, Jessica and Jacob fell in love and decided to get married. Since my daughter is one of Jessica's bestest buddies she offered to help with the wedding. And in the process of offering her own skills in cake making, decorating and other friendly wedding duties somehow I got volunteered to "help" make the invitations.

Jessica wasn't sure exactly what she wanted but she wanted to somehow incorporate trees. I went to my favorite place for inspiration...PINTEREST. I found and pinned lots of ideas for Jessica as a place to start. This is the pin she liked best. It is from an Etsy shop and can be found HERE.

I thought, "I can do that" and starting thinking of stamp sets and colors that I could use to recreate if for Jessica and Jake. I made a few samples using different color combinations. And met with Jessica to make some decisions.

This is the prototype we came up with.

 Then I waited for the numbers, how many were they going to need? Jessica waited for the lists to come in from both families but she thought they would need about 150 invites.

"I can do that", I told her (wondering what it was really going to take to hand stamp 150 invites). When the final numbers finally came in it was 250 invites. I can honesty say I thought to myself, "What did I get myself into.". We had decided on the colors (Chocolate, Sweet Leaf, Smoothie and Colonial White) so I ordered the cardstock and we planned a weekend to get the girls together to make them.

I cut all of the pieces ahead of time and my daughter and I started stamping.   First came the trees, I used the CTMH stamp set Grown With Love (retired). Jessica really liked the "carved" heart that was on the original one we saw so we had to figure out how to carve a heart out of our tree. We decided to cut small hearts out of sticker paper using the Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge to mask out a heart shape on the tree trunk. Instead of completely removing the mask before stamping which would leave a white heart we left the stickers on the stamp and inked it with Chocolate and then stamped. Because the sticker paper absorbs the ink instead of sitting on top we got a brown heart with a different texture than the rest of the tree with a nice outline that just happened (I love happy accidents). .

Next come the leaves, stamped in Sweet Leaf.

  

Each invitation has 14 stamped leaf groups. 

 

And then come the birds stamped with Smoothie. 

The birds came from the CTMH Childhood Portrait stamp set 

and luckily there are two birds in that set, one facing each direction. 

We added the initials inside the heart with a Chocolate marker. 

When we were done our stack looked like this.

For a bit of perspective here is our stack compared to the height of three stamp pads. 

Pretty impressive if I do say so myself!

Now that all of the stamping was done we were ready for an assembly party.

I gathered all of the supplies (and a stash of chocolate and Diet Coke)

 and the bride and her friends showed up to help. 

Left to right ~ Lauren, Ashleigh and Jessica (the bride)

Angie and Lauren work on assembling. 

 And here is the stack of 250 finished invites. 

We add a photo of the cute couple (sorry for the blurry phone pic)

 and tie it off with a hemp bow and they are ready for the mail.

Ashton and Lauren line up the envelopes. 

WE DID IT!!

Congratulations Jessica and Jake, glad to be a part of your special day. 

And also glad to know that I CAN make 250 hand stamped wedding invites...who's next?