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| image from calligraphybycami.com |
So I had a slight dilemma. My Wedding colors are Navy and Hot Pink / fuchsia. I could go with the cheap option and do white #10 envelopes with Navy writing. That would be oh-so easy. I'd just feed my envelopes right on through my printer with my pretty calligraphy font of choice. But if you know me, you know I can't do anything the easy way. I wanted navy blue envelopes...it doesn't get much darker than that. So the question remained. How do you get beautifully caligraphered handwriting on a dark blue envelope?
Option 1: Find a calligrapher to write out all my invitations in a white or silver ink and pay about $2/ envelope. So times that by 150 people + all the return envelopes and you have a $600 cost. Yikes!
Option 2: Take up calligraphy classes. Very pricey and time consuming...
Option 3: Labels - yuck. Talk about cheesy and cheap looking.
However there is a solution. You can have your beautiful calligraphy and make people think you paid lots of moolah for handwritten envelopes. How is this possible you ask... tracing.
I know what you're thinking. How can you trace on dark? A light box won't shine through. Ahhh, but you must think differently. I used my printer to print the invitations in black ink on my navy envelopes. Then trace in your pen color of choice.
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| Here is the envelope with the black printed on blue |
My next dilemma, which is something you can't really see right now is the pen. I purchased a silver gel pen that is supposedly fine tip (0.7mm). Well, it's not fine enough for what I'm doing. After purchasing the gel pen, I thought I'd try another option. I then bought a Pen-touch 1.0mm fine point marker in silver. Immediately when I opened it I thought, "who is the jerk calling this thing fine point?". So now I'm on a journey to find the perfect gel pen/marker. I don't care if it writes in silver or white, just that it's thin enough for this application. My next option is that I will try to print a test envelope in my beautiful font bold, rather than regular. Hopefully that will give some leeway in the teeny scrollwork of the font.
If you're asking where to find a lovely font, there are plenty of wonderful fonts out there. Scour dafont.com or where I found mine, fontstock.net. They're free for personal use! There are so many to choose from you're sure to find something you like. Below is a combo of Beautiful ES & Beautiful Caps ES swash for my caps. I got them
here.
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| My trial with the gel pen. It didn't flow nicely and gave me spots where I needed to go over the text several times |
Frustrated in trying to find a perfect pen, I ran across this
link which should help me in my pen search. It's a comparison video of gel pens and gives me hope. I think I'll be able to find my perfect pen after all. I'll keep going with the search and let you know how it goes and what works for me.
The moment you've been waiting for has arrived. Its the begining of my 4 week DIY free downloads! 
design on everything. However, after creating the invitation suite, I was bored and felt it was too impersonal. So I moved to the anchor
with the ship wheel in the center. I then added our monogram to the center in our contrasting color (pink). I think they turned out really nice and the anchor will look great on all our paper goods.
The Outer and Inner Envelopes (as you know from an earlier post found here) I tried to do my own calligraphy
. I went and printed the font I wanted from my computer onto the navy envelopes in black ink. I then tried tracing over the print with white ink. It ended badly. I got skips and blobs of ink coming out randomly from each pen I tried (I think I tried a total of 3) not to mention all the waste envelopes I was using. I knew If I had to address all of the inner and outer envelopes myself it would just end in tears and frustration. 
This is one of very few times in the wedding DIY process when I saw my limitations and DIY just wasn't the answer. Even if you're a DIY Queen like myself, you need to realize when it just makes more sense to have someone else do it for you. (as an aside see my "Guide on when to let someone else do-it-for-you").
. You can design your own or choose from other designs. Only problem is the ugly barcode on the side of the stamps as well as the major price hike. They're way over the .44 cent mark and then if you need a more expensive stamp because of your envelope shape or weight, it can really get expensive. It's only worth it if you happen to find a coupon code for stamps, which is rare.
I was using for the invites and replies. 
for a while before coming to a final decision. I also wanted to include the parents of the groom. I really think that the final wording I came to works well and includes both families. I really love bling and wanted to incorporate it everywhere I could. I added rhinestones to all of my invitaions on the points of the anchor and for the reply I added one to the hole in the anchor.
, you now can! 
1. Visit the Style Me Pretty Website and create a username and password.
Even though this is a great tool, If you're a DIY bride I still highly recommend purchasing Photoshop, Corel or another art program similar to it.
You can edit photos, create invitations, monograms, logos, paper products, iron-ons and more! 
It took a few revisions and a lot of creativity to get to my final result (left), my cute little sailboats. This post is all about my process of how I got there and how you can do something similarly cute for your invitations or your save the dates!
What you'll need:
