Sunday, March 29, 2009

Invitations in Detail


my work station. only 1 table of 2 shown. 2nd table is underneath.

Our invitations were created by DIY, and unfortunately, as I got deeper in my work, I did not take any pictures of the process as it had become so tedious, and I just wanted it done!

We had 2 different versions of our invitations. One in Vietnamese (as requested by his parents) and our English version. The Vietnamese ones were a surprise project, and I had 1 week to complete it. I somewhat resent these as they were unplanned and totally threw me off my invitation printing schedule.


We started by attaching the backing to our pocket folders.


I started with the text first, which I embossed. It looked great.


I then went straight to the invitation. I used a flower patterned design made by Darci.


And then the next task...tackling the inserts.

I loved the embossing on the black text so much that I had decided to emboss everything. Probably not the smartest thing I thought up to do because it totally prolonged the process.

Okay, so we only needed 30 of those Vietnamese invitations for his parents, so that was all I was planning to do. So I burned my "accommodations" and "directions" insert on my Gocco screens and got to work. And here are the problems I ran into:

1. an indentation on my Gocco screen caused 1 letter to print out darker than the rest
2. my Gocco PG-11 only had a print pad size of 3.75x5.75. my invitations were at least 4" in width and 6.75" at its longest length, which was my bad. i should have measured accordingly, but I didn't, and this led to my next problem:
3. each insert needed to be Gocco'd at least 3 times (except for the Vietnamese invites)
4. not all embossing powders are created equal; I found the Judi-Kins embossing powders (fine) were best.
5. Gocco screen can be reused, BUT they are better (like 100x better) when you first apply fresh paint. Refrigeration can only save so much. I ended up having to burn new screens as the other ones weren't printing as well. =( I just couldn't simply finish EVERYTHING the weekend I did the Vietnamese invitations. I only needed 30 of those done, so I set out to only complete 30. It would have killed me if I did any more.

I'll continue in another post. I'm tired from thinking about it. Hah!

But all invitations are out. So WOO HOO!!

4 comments:

Linda Ly said...

Loved your invites! Now please post a recap of your seamstress appt :-)

Anonymous said...

one of my friends is interested in doing her invitation part english part vietnamese.. what program would you suggest she use so that the viet looks proper??

anh said...

Hi! I hope you get a "ping" from this, because I was curious how you got your embossed text to look so crisp. What type of paper you used, printer settings and the heating(?) and embossing process.

My experience thus far has always been some subtle warping of the paper when I tried to heat emboss my paper and the text might not look so crisp because the powder would cling to paper outside of the text.

Your advice and tips would be so greatly appreciated! - Anh

.reese. said...

hi anh. i printed my invitations using a Gocco, which used oil based paints, then i used embossing powder.

i have tried embossing with an inkjet printer. i think the results were fine as long as the paper was thick (card stock like). try not to concentrate the heat in just one spot.

hope that helps! good luck!