A Lovely Day for a Wedding

So here's a quirky fact: until today I've not attended a wedding in my adult life.  Weird, right?  I mean, I'm nearly late 30s and have plenty of friends and yet not been at a wedding since living with my parents.  Apparently all of my married friends got married before I entered their lives or have done so after I moved overseas and attending became a bit complicated and especially expensive.

However, today I enjoyed a very close friend's wedding - very simple, done at the city hall and extremely informal but absolutely lovely.  They also loved our wedding gift (which took four of us to finally land on an idea and it was perfect) - hurrah!  And of course, it gave me the opportunity to finally craft a wedding card.

Wedding Wishes Card

Originally I had the idea to use some pink and red coloured tissue paper to make an overlapping cluster of hearts and layer on some heart stickers and punched hearts, etc.  Only that I discovered my tissue paper stash is pretty picked over and uninspiring so had to ditch that idea.  Also, I think a wedding deserves some extra special glamour so I decided to pull out the free gift from my recent issue (#125) of Papercraft Inspirations magazine.  Now, often free papers like this aren't high quality, either in paper weight or saturation of colour.  However, I was pleasantly impressed with this particular set - it was very nice, perhaps due to the silver foiling.

I settled on this subtle fleur de lis patterned paper with a heart-shaped doily and dove topper.  I wanted to add something that had a luxurious quality about it and added dimension; enter the white organza and satin ribbon in a big puffy bow and softly curling tails.  I had originally intended on including a 'best wishes' sentiment but there just wasn't room so opted to stamp that on the inside.  Then sprinkled some rhinestones and pearls around.

I had been feeling like the edges needed some grounding but once I got the bow wrapped around and done so nicely, I didn't want to take it off to do any sewing or anything else and risk not getting it put back nicely.  It just so happened that I set the card on top of the pink envelope and realised that little border worked perfectly - except that I'd already made the entire card at normal size and again, didn't want to remove the bow to cut it down any.  What to do?  In the end, I cut a new card base that just barely fit inside the envelope, cut the card I'd originally made down the spine fold, layered the front on top of the new and slightly larger pink card and glued the back with the sentiment and writing into the inside of the new card.  Problem solved!  Where there's a will, there's a way.