Day 1 - Vicki's Wedding Invitations

Hello, Crafters.

I hope you've had a great weekend.

Overall, yesterday was a brilliant day working on Vicki's invitations. By the time I tidied up after dinner, I had twenty invitations that were ready except for the ribbon and the inserts! Not a bad day's work!Vicki is happy for me to share the following photographs with you, but asked me to hold back on the actual design! It took me three hours to get the precise plan together, and to actually make the prototype invitation to make sure our plan would work! 
 
Photograph 1 & 2: one of the ladies in my team very kindly sent me a Stamp Perfect last week, which is the same kind of stamp guide as Misti. I was looking forward to using this so I could make sure all my stamping was in the same place. It worked brilliantly except I was using photopolymer stamps and I found I stamped so much ink onto the acrylic board, I was getting myself in a mess trying to clean it up with baby wipes.


I think this happened because photopolymer stamps are so slim, you really need to keep the ink pad perfectly straight - and as you know, straight lines and I just don't get on together! I do wonder if I would have done better if I'd bought some SU Un-inked Ink Pads, because they are much smaller and it would have been easier to control of where I was putting the ink! Too late for the invitations but I'll get some next time I place an order!
I eventually gave up because I had so much ink on my fingers, I was getting smudges on the invitations! I'll be very pleased to receive any advice if I sound like I doing something glaringly wrong!

I moved onto plan B and mounted the stamps onto a large clear block. To help me make sure I stamped in the same place each time, I picked a position on my green self-healing mat where I'd be able to make sure I placed each card in exactly the same position as the previous one! I marked the centre above the top of the card and the centre on the right-hand sideof the card with strips of washi tape. Then I placed my block where I needed to stamp it and put two pieces of Washi Tape on my block so they lined up with the Washi Tape on my green mat!

 I still managed to get a lot of ink on my block but it was easier and less messy to clean up because Iwas able to use my Stampin' Scrub.

Photograph 3: this shows part of a wedding invitation I'd made for a customer, about four years ago. Vicki and Leigh liked the embossed onblong that went around the embossed parcel but they didn't want the parcel. I assured them that would be easy to do using my Score Board, but oh boy, how wrong was I!

Photographs 4 & 6: I found that the vellum buckled and actually tore in one place! Again, onto plan B. I remember seeing a Dawn Griffiths video on YouTube a few years ago where she said, to achieve a non-embossed area when embossing with an all-over design, she cut the middle out of the actual embossing folder! So I cut the parcel out of mine!
 
NOTE: in a later video, Dawn demonstratted how you could achieve using the same effect by putting a piece of cardboard the shape you want the non-embossed are to be, on top of the embossing folder before cranking through the Big Shot.

Photograph 7 & 8: I did consider this but I decided it's be quicker and easier just to cut the parcel out. I'm glad I did it that way because the frame is embossed beautifully each and every time!

Photograph 9: the only other problem I encountered was that one of the photopolymer stamps started to disintegrate. At the moment, it's only parts surrounding the actual words but my concern is that, will it last long enough for the last forty invites! Neither of the stamps I'm using for these invitations are Stampin' Up! products. I don't know which company they're from as they're out of their original packaging! The only thing I can say with absolute certainty is that these stamps are at least five years old!

My final thoughts are that this is another situation where it's best to be using either unmounted or photopolymer stamps. Wood mounted stamps would have to be stamped individually!

On that note, I'm saying cheerio! Until tomorrow, happy crafting.

JanB.