Finished custom party favour!
For our wedding, I really wanted to make something unique for our party favours, but I didn’t know exactly what that would be at first. It wasn’t until I attended an evening printmaking class at the Art Gallery of Alberta that I became inspired. I had such a blast carving out a big stamp that I decided, then and there, to incorporate that creative technique into the gifts for our guests.
One of my friends who attended the drop-in class with me didn’t quite finish her piece that night, so she opted to buy her own tools in order to complete her carving at home. She found everything she needed at Delta Art & Drafting Supplies (11116 120 Street) during a sale, and I followed suit by picking up all of the required materials to put my plan into action. I think, all in, I spent about $130 on a few sheets of easy cut lino, an assorted lino cutter set, rollers, a paint knife, a jar of ink, and a metal leaf adhesive pen (that didn’t get used). I collected some quality art paper that I already had at home, which saved me a bit of money, too.
It took a while, but I was really happy with our design.
The hard part was coming up with a design to represent both me and Kirk as well as what our family and friends mean to us. When I finally put everything together, the rest of the project was a breeze.
It’s good to know how to write backwards!
It took me about a full day to trace and carve the piece out onto the lino. Since you’re creating a stamp, you have to remember that, when it’s printed, it’ll put a mirror image onto the paper. I had to be careful to make sure that the picture would be the right way around, especially with any wording. For designs that are more generic, it’s not much of an issue, but in my case, a map of Canada and all of the hand-carved text needed to be done correctly. Thankfully, I didn’t make any mistakes!
With aching hands, I proceeded to print about 60 copies of my design the following day. I made sure to fully coat the lino stamp with ink, but avoided applying the paint too thickly. If there’s excess, the ink will bleed into the crevices where you want the lines to show, so it’s better to be a little light-handed with the paint. A dry roller used to apply pressure to the backside of the stamp will get the ink to stick to the paper for that perfect one of a kind transfer.
Hand painting gold hearts with metallic acrylic.
For our favours, the finishing touch was some gold hearts. I mentioned previously that I had purchased an adhesive pen, which I had intended to use to apply rose gold metal leaf to each piece. Unfortunately, I found the nib of the pen to be too wide, preventing me from drawing more refined hearts. The glue also never seemed to get sticky enough and the foil wasn’t defined at all. Ultimately, I tossed that idea aside and I ended up hand painting hearts onto the maps using metallic gold acrylic once the base layer of ink had fully dried.
Hand folded envelopes using scrapbooking paper.
The final prints were about 11″ x 7″ in size. Rather than sealing them up in plain manila, my mom found some 12″ x 12″ scrapbooking paper that we had held onto. She was like some origami queen; she folded these beautiful envelopes and then stuffed every one with a print. We sealed them with some pretty stickers that we found at Dollar Tree and then I hand wrote the guests’ names on them.
Signed and sealed!
It definitely was a wedding party favour that required thought and time, a real labour of love. I’m so glad that I opted to do this because it was something creative for me to work on, but it was also different and heartfelt. Our guests really appreciated the effort we put into it and they knew that what we said in our print was what we truly meant.
DIY isn’t necessarily for everyone who’s getting hitched. Nevertheless, I hope this encourages some of you to give DIY a try. At home projects can make things a bit easier on the wallet and, if you give yourself the time, it can be so gratifying to create things. In fact, I enjoyed this so much that I worked on a side printmaking project for a special letter given to my husband for our first look. It made our wedding day that much more special with those small details.
Fa(shion).Fi(lm).Fo(od).tography 