One of my very good friends from high school will be getting married in October of this year. As one of her bridesmaids I've been helping her with some of the planning and I took on the task of designing the invitations. I jumped at the opportunity to create something awesome and unique (perhaps a little too enthusiastically actually). The theme of the wedding is "Enchanted Forest" so my friend and I discussed giving the invitation and aged fairy tale feel without going overly feminine and Disney looking.
Around the same time I discovered this wonderful product:
A Pazzles Inspiration Creative Cutter! With this machine you can cut just about anything straight from your computer! It's designed for scrapbookers and hobbyists but the more I read about this machine, the more uses I saw for it. What I would give to have had one of these in art school!
Of course, it retails for about $600 off the shelf (a little expensive for my tastes) but after shopping around a little bit, I found a great deal on one on ebay.
My friends invitations seemed like a great opportunity to see what this creative cutter was made of. I begin sketching forest inspired designs and we ordered the paper.
An unfortunate feature about the Pazzle is it is not made to work with a Mac, which was a big hurdle for me. After a lot of trial and error however, I was able to get a version of Windows to work on my Mac so that I can run the program for the creative cutter. It's a little time consuming to have to restart the computer in Windows every time I want to use the product, but it was worth it for the result.
It took a little time to cut out each invitation individually, and we had to enlist several other friends to help man the machine while we folded and cut the corresponding reception and RSVP cards, but it is still a miracle to me that we were able achieve this quality without shelling out lots of money to pay for custom die cuts or risking loosing a finger cutting out 150 of these with an xacto knife.
I'm looking forward to hearing how they are received after my friend sends them out.
