I recently had to throw a nice big Tiffany box out (it fell victim to our basement being flooded during a recent storm) and it really bothered me, I love to keep them and use them to store trinkets and paper craft supplies, etc. (why I had put it in the basement in the first place, I don’t know, it probably happened during a mad cleaning session!). Anyway, seeing it reminded me what a gorgeous color it is, and I was inspired to create today’s invite.

This is the invitation we’ll be making:

and here’s how:

1. Start by downloading the vector file we are basing the invitation on. It is called “Leaves on curly branches” and was designed by DragonArtz Designs. You can download it here and please make sure to read the license.

2. Open your downloaded file and copy the entire design. Open a new Illustrator document and size it 5.25×5.25. Paste the design into your new document. It will be much larger than your document, so in the Transform palette, put in 5 for the width (and make sure you have it set to constrain the proportions). It will be smaller than the document, but that’s fine, we’ll fix that later.

3. I didn’t like the roses in the design, so to get rid of them, you want to click on one with your white arrow and then go to Select – Same – Fill Color. That will select all of them, and you can just hit delete.

4. Next, select the entire design with your black arrow and move it up so that the upper left hand corner of the black square matches up with the corner of your document. With the design still selected, grab the square in the lower right hand corner and pull until it matches up perfectly with you document. Take a look at the top of the design once you’ve done that, chances are you need to adjust that again too. Zoom in to make sure everything is lined up correctly. You’ll notice that part of the branches are outside your document – that’s fine, don’t worry about it.

5. Now, to make things easier, I like to put the different parts of the design on separate layers. Select the background square (with the white arrow), cut it, create a new layer (which will automatically end up on top of the other layer, so pull it to the bottom), lock the old layer and paste the box in place (Cntrl + F) on the new layer. Lock that layer and go back to the other one.

6. Unlock the layer with the branch design and with your white arrow, draw a box around the branches in the lower left hand corner (make sure you get every little piece of it). Cut, create a new layer, lock the original layer and paste the branches in place (Cntrl + F) on your new layer.

7. We can leave the other branches on the original layer, since that’s all that’s there now. So now you have three layers to work with. Lock the top two, unlock the background layer, select the box, and now we want to change the color to the Tiffany Blue. With your box selected, double click on the fill square in the toolbar. This will bring up the color selection window, and you want to put 9AE4E8 in the hex color box (the last one in the left column). Click ok and your box is now blue. As you can see, the branches are perfect the way they are, so no re-coloring needed there.

8. Next, we need the “framedoodle” from the “Damask Engagement Party Invitation” post, so if you have created that one already, great, just open that design and copy the framedoodle. If you didn’t, hop over to that post and follow the instructions to how to create one.

9. Once you have your framedoodle, copy it and paste it on a separate layer in your Tiffany Blue document. As you can see, this is not quite right, so select the framedoodle, right click, go to Transform – Rotate and put in 90 in the window and click ok. Now it’s on the right end, but looks a bit narrow, so select it and pull one of the side boxes until you like what you see. Place it in the center.

10. This looks nice, but isn’t quite the look I was going for, so next, select the framedoodle, and change the fill color to C5EFEF (the same way we did it in step 7). Now, we want a nice thin white border too, so select it again, and change the border color to white. Make sure you have the Stroke color selected in the toolbar and just go to the color palette and click on the little white box in the lower right hand corner. If the border looks a bit heavy, like mine did, select the framedoodle again and in the Stroke palette, change the weight to 0.25.

11. This is starting to look nice, right? Just a few more tweaks… next, let’s add the text. Create a new layer and lock all the others. Pick the Text tool from the toolbar and type in the first line. Don’t worry about how it looks right now, we just want to get the text in there and then we’ll style it. Click on any other tool and then go back and select the text tool again and type in the name of the bride and groom. Click on any other tool and then go back and select the text tool again and type in the rest of the text. The reason for doing this is that we want 3 separate text boxes.
If you want the “other text” (i.e. not the bride & groom) in caps, type it in in caps, I’m not using an all caps font for this. It will end up looking something like this:

12. Now we want to make it look good. Change the fonts first. I used Autumn, Regular, 9pt for the “other text” and Ribbon 131 Bold BT, Bold, 24pt (with a 26pt leading) for the bride & groom. You also want the text to be centered, so in the Paragraph palette, select Centered. As usual, if you don’t have these fonts, see my “How to add fonts to your computer” post. Or if you want to use other fonts, you can obviously do that too!

13. Move the text around until you like how it looks and make sure the text blocks are lined up by selecting them and click on Horizontal Align Center.

14. I also changed the colors of the text. The “other text” is 494648 and the bride & groom 873C5B.

15. As you can see, part of the branches are hidden behind the framedoodle, so we want to fix that. Just select the layer (in the layers palette) with the framedoodle and pull it down below the branch layers, so that it ends up just above the blue box layer. Voila – the branches are in front of it!

If you like it like this, by all means leave it this way, but I wanted to pull the branches off of the text and to do that you need to:

16. Lock all layers and unlock one of the branch layers. Select it with the black arrow and either make it a bit smaller by pulling on one of the little white boxes, or just move it out to the side. Do the same thing with the other branch layer, and once you like what you see, it’s done!

I would print this on nice, heavy white cardstock, and you can fit two on a landscape letter sized sheet. Part of the branches are still going to hang on the outside of the invites, but it doesn’t matter, since they will be trimmed to size anyway.

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If you decide to print your own invites, it’s a good idea to start way ahead of time (like the week after you set a date) since these sort of things always end up taking longer than one thinks, and invitations should go out six to eight weeks before the wedding, maybe even earlier if your guests will have to travel far.

I think Save-the-date cards are a fabulous idea too, people get so booked up and this way they can block off your wedding in their calendar before anything else shows up (especially important if you are planning a destination wedding or are getting married during the summer). Save-the-date cards should go out about six months before the wedding, and I love the ones that come with a detachable sticker so that people can put it in their calendar. Another fun option is to print them on magnetic paper (available at Paper Source) and cut it into smaller shapes, allowing your guests to just stick them on the refrigerator.

Once you’ve settled on the look and paper you want, go ahead and order it and quite a few extras. There will always be mishaps (paper gets stuck, ink smears, ink runs out and prints come out faded), and you don’t want to run out of supplies in the middle of everything. Also make sure to order extra ink for your printer. AND keep a close eye on it once you start printing all your invitations. It’s so easy to start a print job of 100 invites, then get distracted by something else and not check them until they’re done, only to find that half of them are printed crooked because the paper wasn’t pulled into the printer straight. What a nightmare. So stay close to the printer, and try printing in smaller batches, 10-15 at a time, that way you can stop it before it turns into a huge disaster.

Related posts:

1. 6 Ideas For Giving Your Printable Wedding Invitations A Unique Look With so many great looking invitation choices, how do you...
2. 5 Ways To Get Inspiration For Your Printable Wedding Invitations Printing your own invites is a great way to add...
3. Text Layout Ideas For Your Printable Wedding Invitations If you decide to go with homemade save the date...

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