Black And Ivory Wedding Invitations - How To Create Them

by Jaime
(York)

I'm making black and ivory wedding invitations. I had an idea to use gatefold card in black and have a cream organza ribbon with thinner black ribbon to close it. Inside would be an ivory insert.

I was thinking about including a feather, but don't know how. I had also considered some half pearls or a bow at the bottom of the feature, but I don't want it to be too much. I also don't want it to be too plain with just the ribbon.

Originally I wanted an illustration of a castle on the invite but not sure now. Also maybe a cut out stencil inside on the insert of a flower or the castle but my ideas stop there. I'm not very creative!!

Any other ideas you have for black and ivory wedding invitations would be welcome.

Please help!

Answer:

Well, for someone who doesn't call themselves creative, you've got plenty of ideas! Whatever you do, I'd try and keep it simple (not boring, just simple).

At the moment you have a black gatefold card which is secured with ivory organza ribbon. A gatefold card has the opening in the middle with the two panels opening out. This limits what you can put on the invitation as the two panels are separate and when closed and tied with the ribbon, the ribbon will cover most designs. You also run the risk of the invitation becoming over-fussy if you start adding feathers or other large embellishments.

When the card is closed and tied with ribbon, I would opt for something simple. I really like your idea of using half pearls stuck onto the front of the card. I would do them in a row and put an odd number of pearls on each panel. Stick with an odd number, either 3 or 5 and evenly space them. See my sketches above.

You can glue them down with a hot glue gun, some UHU clear glue (but this may be messy, so use a cocktail stick to apply the glue) or you may find self-adhesive pearls.

There are also plenty of other small embellishments around that you could use including gems, buttons or sequins. All would look good in black and ivory wedding invitations.

You could also use a line of ivory glitter (run a glue roller over the specific area and then sprinkle glitter on it), a row of lace or you could use a decorative hole punch to create a pattern at the bottom and top edges of the panels. Since your insert is ivory, the colour will show through when you look at the front of the invite.

There are plenty of decorative hole punches around in all sorts of patterns. I personally love Martha Stewart's creations – they're so pretty.

Inside, I'd use a traditional script font in black. I think this will work nicely with your castle setting. If you really want to incorporate something more into your wedding invitation, then consider adding a small illustration of the castle in the bottom left or bottom right of the invitation in the same colour as your text (which I imagine will be black, given your color theme).

Alternatively, you could use a larger image and grey it out. It can then sit in the middle of the insert with your text over the top. It is important to ensure that the castle illustration is greyed out enough so your text is easy to read, so you'll need to re-colour it, or ask for it to be a pale grey.

There are plenty of castle sketches and drawings on dreamstime.com and istockphoto.com that you can buy for just a few dollars and use on your invite. Just search for castle sketch or castle drawing on these sites.

Or check out fontspace.com for castle dingbats, there are loads of fun and traditional images of castles that you can use for free. Just search castle on the site.

I hope that has given you some inspiration and I look forward to seeing the end result of your black and ivory wedding invitations.
All the best