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| image from calligraphybycami.com |
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.
2 comments:
Labels cheap looking? I think the tracing looks cheaper, Sorry.
I was having so many problems finding a pen that would not randomly skip and blot white ink, I opted to have my invitations professionally calligraphed (not sure if that's a real word?). It cost me $140 for 85 Outer + inner envelopes, but saved me the headache of printing and tracing for hours and fretting over skipping ink and random pen blots.
Sometimes it's just more worth it to have it done professionally, this is one of those times. Unless you can find another solution to the problem I ran into, just get your envelopes done by a calligrapher. I will post her fantastic job soon.
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