Message In a Bottle Problems

[Chickadee]

I have been working my invitations. We are getting married in St. Lucia on the beach, just the two of us. The reception will be month later with all of our friends and family. In a book I saw directions and photo of a message in a bottle invitation and fell in love with it. I ordered my bottles, strung beads on embroidery floss, then made a mock-up of the invite so I could get an idea. I love how the bottle looks but hate how the invitation inside looks!!

 

Because I had to roll the paper tightly to get it inside the bottle, the paper refuses to lay flat so someone could read it. You have to hold it open, literally. Secondly, the paper has to be thin so it can be rolled tightly. I played with lots of types of paper and found out the harsh truth of this. So I guess I hate the paper as well as the fact it will not lay flat ever again.

 

I want to go with an elegant tropical theme and this is not cutting it. I brought the mock-up to work, and another teacher suggested that I make other invitations that I like better but use the bottles to serve a small portion of our signature drink. I could put the corked bottles in an iced filled pail (tied with ribbons), with the beads tied on, cute labels on the bottles that say "Drink Me" and festive straws also in the pail.

 

What do you think?? Is there something essential I am missing on my Message in a Bottle invitations that would make me love them? Or should I do with the drink idea? Or is there a better way to reuse the bottles?

[OROBride1008]

Chickadee, Where did you get the bottles at? I was thinking about doing this for my bridal shower.

[Butterflyf369]

Sounds good. Why don't you post photos so we can offer our advice/opinion?

[becks]

I'm sorry you're not loving your MIBs! I know you've said you've tried lots of papers. Have you tried using a softer paper that won't keep the curl so much or maybe a vellum that has a bit of rigidity to it?

 

A last thought (and this gets very DIY) might be to print onto cotton fabric or use iron-on transfers to put your invites onto cotton fabric. The cotton won't hold the curl. It's a lot of work, but talk about WOW factor!

 

Good luck!

[Chickadee]

Thank you everyone! I really wanted MIB invites but I couldn't get them like my inner vision saw them - which probably was not possible. My fiancee, Rob, was very understanding and along with several girlfriends, we all designed, printed with a gocco, cut, assembled, lined envelopeand actually mailed all of my invitations in a span of 5 days! That's 100 invites! Whew!! Rob asked me in my teary moment what I envisioned a perfect invite to look like. Once I actually told him what I wanted, it was easier to leave my beloved MIB behind.

 

We are getting married in St. Lucia on June 19th all by ourselves but the invitations are for the reception a month later. I've provided some links to the process as well as my finished invite! What do you think??

 

Here is the finished invite suite. We used ivory and orange cardstock plus parchment ivory text paper for the invitation, a turquoise ribbon belly band with an attached flower with rhinestone sticker in the center, ivory cardstock for rsvp and turquoise cardstock for the info card. The envelopes are ivory and then we lined them with some gift wrap paper we found:

 

Here we are gocco'ing away:

 

Here is the ivory cardstock that is layered with orange cardstock prior to the invitation being attached:

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Invites drying on the floor at work:

 

And the invites along with the diy lined envelopes, rsvp, and info cards:

[SDSteph]

Any update on the message in the bottle invite? I was thinking of the same kind yet have not started with the logistics yet. What were you planning on mailing them in? Any more luck with the paper?

[Ebbie475]

Go to sandartsupplies.com

They have bottles, sand, shells, umbrellas and boxes. The prices are great. What I didn't like is that you don't know the shipping costs until they bill you. Kinda expensive.