Hi everyone! A reader has asked for some ideas for her daughter’s wedding invitations, and one of the styles that they like is “Shabby Chic”. Shabby Chic can mean a bunch of different things to different people, but I tend to like what I think of as “Shabby Chic” and so I decided that I would challenge myself to a few blog posts to come up with different ideas for wedding invitations. I decided to cover different mediums, as well as different degrees of complexity. Creating your own wedding invitations, can be fun and rewarding, but it can also be a lot of work. So let’s start out with an easier project. One that only requires photos, a minimal amount of photo processing, and perhaps some stamping.
In my opinion, nothing says “Shabby Chic” like flowers- especially Roses. I didn’t happen to have any great pictures of roses, so I chose other flowers for this example. A photo of some roses on a white picket fence would be ideal for this project. Grab a digital photo or scanned image of flowers, and open the image in any photo editor of your choosing. For example, I use Photoshop, however any basic image/photo editor (even the online ones for photo printing services) will work for what we are doing here. Use the transformation or re-size tool in your editor and re-size the flower photo to fit on the size of the card that you would like to send. Greeting card size (A2: 4.25 x 5.5 inches) typically, is a great size to use for making your own cards, because the card base can be made from a half sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch card stock. However, this might be too small for wedding invitations. Once you have determined your size for the card base, you can then re-size your photo so that it will fit on the card base.
The next step is to add a quote using the text tool. One of my favorite quotes for weddings, anniversaries, etc., is the one by Rumi- “Be with Those Who Help Your Being”. I loved it so much, I made a stamp out of it. So that is another option- you could print out a photo and stamp or hand write a saying on it. This is a lot more time consuming than editing it directly onto the photo. However, it can have more of that handmade, “Shabby Chic” feel to it. Next week I will cover some ways to get around the time consuming part. But for now let’s stick with simple choice.
If you have a photo editor that has a tool to turn the photo into either black and white, and/or Sepia you could also experiment with that. I chose to make one of my photos sepia toned in this example.
Since I have my own printer that prints photos nicely, I can print my photos from home. However you can also have them printed from a service. I have the option to print on matte, lustre, or glossy paper. I generally like matte myself, but in this example I had lustre paper sitting next to the computer, so I went with that choice. I also printed a sheet of photos at one time, so I could get 4 greeting card fronts from a single sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch paper. If your card base is bigger, you may be able to print only 1 or 2 photos at a time.
Here is how the image sheet looked after I printed it…
You could stop here, but this doesn’t really have the “Shabby Chic” look. So I took the photos and sanded them with sand paper. I cut the photos down and then sanded them each individually, all around the border. I sanded the corners a bit more heavily, and on a diagonal so that the sanding framed the image. I lightly sanded the interior portion of the image on some of them, but for the most part I concentrated on the borders. If you want the card from to look even more shabby, you could also bend and wrinkle the photo, but for my taste, with these images, I liked just the sanding. Here’s how they looked sanded…
Now all there is to do is to attach them to a card base, and stamp, write, or print the interior page with the necessary invitation. This project is not too difficult, and not all that time consuming. This method also works great for making wedding and anniversary cards. Try it out!