Card in a Box - Wedding Invite ideas with Together Forever

Last weekend I attended the second annual Team Weekend Away at Vision Valley, Arcadia, with my fellow "Inklings" , Jayne Mercer's team. We had an awesome time, full of colour and sketch challenges, catalogue quizzes, archery, and lots and lots of late night crafting. One of the activities was "card in a box" where we each designed and cut the pieces for a card, and included everything needed to create the card in the box. We then chose boxes at random to complete the sample. This year there were around 25 different boxes, so to give ourselves plenty of free creating time, we made up half the cards completely to swap, and were thus left with about 12 to actually stamp and assemble.

This picture is of my card, using the stamp set "Together Forever" (IBC page 46, 116426 $39.95). It is a beautiful set, and ideal for elegant wedding and engagement cards. The stamp elements lend themselves to various invitational pieces also, such as place cards, bonbonniere, thank you cards etc. I haven't seen many samples made with it though, so I thought I'd base my card on this set. The card bases are Confetti Cream, a beautiful heavy weight with a random hand-made fleck to it. I stamped all over the front and back of the card with Encore Gold ink, using the floral sprig stamp.

Next, I used the Eyelet Border punch to edge a strip of Basic Back cardstock, and I sponged the edges with Encore ink to accent them. Over this is a thin band of Brushed Gold metallic cardstock. I have overlaid a long strip of narrow black grosgrain to use as a side tie, placing this underneath the central motif. This is made with a circle scallop of Basic Black, with gold sponged edges again. The centre is the floral sprig stamped onto more confetti cream, and punched out with the 1 3/8" circle punch. The inner circle is popped up with a dimensional.

So, there you go. Simple, effective, elegant and eminently suitable for mass production - I made pieces for 25 and fully completed 12 of them all within a few hours. I really should challenge myself to make a matching suite of invites etc, showing the matching wheel. Hmm, onto the never-ending "to do" list it goes...