It’s not every day a girl is presented with the gift a bridal shower (wheee!). Mine will be in almost one month at a gorgeous hotel in Buffalo, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Our invite list is small, but to take a little bit off my mom, aunt, and grandma’s plate I offered to assume responsibility for the invites and mail them out earlier this month. Because it made sense to have the shower invite to have the same theme and appeal (forever working towards a unified brand, wink), it was easy for Pete to pick up those same design elements and whip me up something pretty.
I had them printed and trimmed to size at FedEx Office for a bank-busting total of $11, and they turned out wonderfully. Who’s ready for some serious I-don’t-want-you-to-know-the-deets smudging?
Doing something different with the envelopes of these shower invites doesn’t exactly put me in the rebellious category, plenty of people do plenty of cool DIY efforts when it comes to mailing beautiful bridal-infused invites, I just fell into a little crafty mood without a lot of concern over how the end result would appear. I’m low-expectation central about some projects, and for envelopes that are going to be immediately thrown away, bring on the lax state and bring on the fun. Fortunately, spoiler alert, these envelopes turned out really great for the most part.
The 48-pack of white envelopes and the box of Rit dye cost me less than $5 with some coupons at JoAnn’s, and I’ve already eluded to this a little bit, but the dye has gone a long way. A third use for leftover dye is in the works as I write.
I mixed the dye in an old plastic container (with a lid for safe storage) and performed my first envelope test run on a warm day in the backyard. Without much care if the dye dripped onto the gate between the house and the garage or onto the asphalt below, I hung them with paperclips to dry for a few hours.
I’d call it this test run success, although I did learn that my ambitious desire to over-saturate the base of the envelopes had an adverse effect on the adhesive used in this particular product. You can see above and again in this up-close shot how the dye really took to the glued edges. It didn’t effect how the envelope opened or how well it remained glued, it just didn’t look so pretty.
The bulk of the envelopes were completed on a colder day in the basement; I strung twine from the rafters and clipped them one by one to the string as Julia took over dip management.
Turns out that a kid’s impatience with holding an envelope in still water results in beautiful, impecable, natural waves of fuschia color. Only letting them dye for a few moments, unlike my attempts which kept the bottom of the envelope submerged for nearly a minute, left behind no sign of over-saturated adhesive, and so nearly all of the envelopes that ended up going out in the mail were from her batch. She was proud not only to “win” (because everything, even dip dying shower envelopes, is a competition), but also to be trusted with adult-strength-permanent-dye that stayed cleanly in the plastic container and not at all on the basement floor, her shoes, her hands, her face, or her clothes.
Because I’m on the topic of awesome dip-dying, I’d be remiss not to point out this great etsy download that I found, an ombre digital paper pack by Sarah Stearns that I think would look totally amazing if used as the background in your own DIY invite design (they’d act as the background and add that dip-dyed detailing to your printed invites without actually having to spend the time hand-dying. For only $1.99, think about it.
Up to anything fun this weekend?
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