1000 Cranes

221 beautiful little cranes arrived in the post yesterday, wrapped up in a Christmas lights box, newspaper and a lot of sellotape.

I took one glance at the handwriting and the size of the box and said, “It’s our cranes!” – courtesy of my best man, who folded about a quarter of them. Including the 830 we already have, just under 1000 of them will be present at the wedding ceremony, along with a much smaller number of human guests.

The rest of the cranes were used for our invitations, stuck to the front of the pockets into which our paper invites were slipped.

Thanks to everbody who folded cranes, J, K, C, B, C, D, D, me and the Fiance.

How to Make Your Own Wax Seal

This is something we decided to do a while ago, to make our invitations prettier. We considered various DIY ideas – tin, plaster, styrofoam, but in the end couldn’t find something which worked. We were going to have a design printed and pay ~ £30 for a seal, but the resolution of the image had to be very high and it was tricky and time consuming to make.

Then we found this tutorial:

http://ragehaus.com/?p=1215

(this picture is from the website linked above)

Following it through, we bought a wood burning tool with several nibs for £9.83 including p&p from Amazon and had a play around with it.

We quickly realised it wouldn’t do detail very well, so I simplified our design a bit and we had some practices and eventually carved our design (across two sessions… it was very tiring!) onto a piece of wood. I then cut out the piece of wood from the plank it was part of and sanded down the edges (we didn’t use a piece of dowel like the tutorial because we didn’t have any, but did have other wood lying about). I varnished it with light varnish, and then we superglued it to a simple stamp handle (Home Bargains, 99p, original reads “I love beer” and comes with a red ink pad!).

The Fiance purchased two dark blue natural beeswax candles (and we had some clear beeswax in already in case we ran out) and we lit the candles and used them to drip wax onto the envelopes before stamping it. I also oiled the stamp lightly before stamping, using a pastry brush and ordinary kitchen oil.

Here’s our wax stamping kit:

The giant lighter was a Christmas gift to the Fiance from me, though I’ve now used it more than him… for all this stamping!

One the seal was stamped, we had to leave it to dry before carefully peeling it off. The weight of the thing was enough to hold it in place – look: I could even raise up the envelope by the handle of the stamp stuck to the wax!

The finished seals were better/worse depending on how big the stamped wax pool was (and hoe fitted to the shape of the stamp) and whether or not I accidentally turned it sideways (… which I did once or twice!). But in general, the finished products were pretty good, and all of them showed the G&R if not all of the design.

“This is for a Wedding, Of Course?”

So, having slaved away at the design, the proof, and made and sent one invitation to ourselves to ensure the postage would be okay, we finally made the lot of them.

The Fiance was my cutting bitch, and he did a very good job (he was a lot neater than I would have been) cutting and trimming everything. We didn’t use the deckle-edged scissors around the invitations in the end, because we decided they looked prettier like this (but they were used on some other things, and only cost £3.15 anyway, so no loss).

I made the pocketfolds (so I did do a little cutting…) and between me, D, K and several others who got roped in, we now have 699 of these little cranes! Most of them are royal blue, but the grey ones got stuck to the invitation.

And all put together:

By the end of it, we made 72 of these invitations, including the one to ourselves, and specially edited one for my mum (so she wasn’t inviting herself):

Then we went to the post office and asked for 2 European stamps, 7 “rest of world” stamps, and 60 second class stamps. The Fiance said he’d never bought so many stamps before in his life! And then, after we had weighed all the invitations and bought our stamps, the lady at the post office leant across and said, “This is for a wedding, of course.” For some reason, this excited me so much, that she had looked at our pretty invitations with our wax seal on the back (more about that in the next blog post) and this young man and woman, excitedly 81 stamps for all around the world – and known. I just loved that.

And today, several people have received their invitations!

Stationery Spreadsheet

Having *just about* finished making invitations, I made a little spreadsheet to calculate how much paper I had spare (as there had been a *ahem* few hiccups in the synthetic process), mostly because our menu plan has changed (got better) and requires more paper, but is the next thing I’m ready to make. And I don’t want to screw up the Orders (of Day/Ceremony) and Table Names/Place Names, leaving them half done because I miscalculated blue card.

Anyway, because I’m a geek, I want to share my lovely spreadsheet, which you may or may not be able to make hide or hair out of.