Merrylee's DIY MIB invitations Round 2

[Sharon99]

Awesome job!!

[merrylee]

Thanks so much I will be posting instructions shortly

[merrylee]

Instructions etc...

 

Paper, we used Southworth 24 lb parchment paper from Office Max in Ivory (located near resume papers)as we wanted something that had it's own texture, and I didn't want to start with white, I wanted something that already had dimension.

 

I created the invitations in word and found an antique map of Cancun that I used as the back drop of our "treasure map" invitation, the words are mine and hopefully that makes them even more special.  Printed using a Laser printer as an inkjet didn't hold the character of the map as well.

 

Step One after printing:

 

We hand tore all the edges to make the invitation to the size we wanted, and hand tearing made it feel more battered and fun

 

Step Two:

 

You definitely will not believe how easy this was:  since we started with the ivory paper and the invitation had the map that was a slightly deeper ivory we used regular old tea bags to age the paper further.  

Soak the invite front and back with the wet tea bags, and then we beat the front of the paper with the bags and they would split open and the tea leaves would dig into the texture of the paper.  Preheat your oven to 200 degrees bake for 6 minutes and voila!  We had to clean off the baked and dried tea, but in total the tearing, teaing and baking took 3.5 hours.

 

We had researched how to age paper online, and read different ways to do it and we decided to see what would could do using our own ideas mixed with those of others and I am so happy they turned out so well.  

 

This forum is an amazing source of inspiration and I can't wait to send these out to our guests.  However, FI told me today everyone loved our DIY Boarding Pass STD's and they will love the MIB invites, what on earth can we possibly do for our thank yous that will out do these. In reality I have NO idea but I have about a year for you all to inspire me further.  

 

Thank you so much

 

 

 

[JayKay]

Wow, those look amazing!!!

[merrylee]

Thanks Jay Kay

[merrylee]

Okay so umbrella or no umbrella, we are having the philosophical discussion about whether the umbrella adds to the the bottle or cheapens it somehow.  What do you all think?

 

[ellenj01]

So creative and beautiful!  They are so sweet!  Congratulations!

[MrsHemmings]

No umbrella, without it, the invite has more vintage feel.

 

Really nice job

[kayysums]

I say no umbrella. They look better without it.

 

btw if you dont mine me asking, where did you purchase the bottles? and for how much?

 

they look awesome!!!!

[merrylee]

Kay-

 

I got my bottles at http://www.sandartsupplies.com it was the best deal we were able to find.  And $$ depends on quantity ordered.  Thanks for agreeing with me  I don't like the umbrellas either.  When we originally started working on it, the idea sounded fun and our prototype had one but when I put the actual invitation in that we designed it didn't seem to fit anymore.