|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We definitely wanted to do something different for our wedding invitations. For one thing, neither of us relished the idea of going through book after book of wedding invitations with doves and bells on lavendar paper, trying to decide on the perfect invitation. That just wasn't us. Somewhere along the way, while looking at various bridal magazines, we saw a picture of a ring box with a scroll coming out of it. It immediately struck us that we could do something along those lines. |
|
||
 |
The only problem was, you can't
fit very much information on a scroll rolled up in a ring box. Since we
were going to have a wedding website anyway,
we decided that the scroll would invite the recipient to the wedding, tell
them the date of the ceremony, and then direct them to our website for further
instructions. No phone number, no address -- nothing but the website.
This was definitely going out on a limb, though, for not everyone we were inviting was web-savvy, or even had a computer. We eventually figured that everyone we were inviting would know how to get in contact with (a) us, or (b) someone who knew what was going on and had access to the web. Voila - we had a plan. |
||
|
As with anything, of course, the devil is in the details. We were on an accelerated schedule, since we didn't have as much time to plan as most couples and since both of us procrastinated quite a bit leading up to the actual planning stage. |
|||
| For the scroll itself, we found some wrapping paper at a craft store that was shiny silver on one side and plain white on the other. We cut the wrapping paper into 11x17" sheets and printed out a single page of 26 scrolls on an Epson inkjet printer. We then cut the large sheets into individual strips with a straightedge and a sharp razor. We put guide marks on the ends of the sheet, between each line of text and on both ends, so that we would have something to line up the straightedge with. The end of each scroll was then cut off so that the guide marks wouldn't show. |  |
||
|
For the ring box, we had to find a supplier -- we were pretty specific in that they had to be the velour kind that has a spring in the hinge, snapping open and closed. We had already decided that the theme color of the wedding would be silver, but for the ring boxes we chose black. The supplier we found was JewelrySupply.com, logically enough. They had the kind of ring box we were looking for, which actually turned out to be an earring box. In order to have enough room for a rolled-up scroll in the box, the inside of the box needed to have a velour-covered cardboard insert instead of a ring cushion with a slit. Earring boxes fit the bill, except for the fact that they had two holes in the cardboard insert. This was not much of a problem, as the holes were small and almost disappeared behind the velour coating. The cost of the boxes was about US$1.00 per box in the quantities we were interested in. Trivial, compared to conventional wedding invitations. |
|||
 |
The construction was simple enough -- The paper strips are wound up (we used the shaft of a ballpoint pen) into a tight scroll, and then placed around a small stick (a toothpick would do) and hot-melt-glued to the back of the ringbox cardboard insert, such that the scroll pokes through the hole and looks like a ring in a box. | ||
| The one pitfall of this design is that the scroll tends to hang around the stick instead of sticking up out of the top of the insert (gravity sucks). We were quite dismayed when we finished making the first one, as it wasn't at all what we had envisioned. To correct this, we wadded up some of the same silver wrapping paper and stuck it in the bottom of each ring box. This got the scroll to stand up properly and look as we intended. |  |
||
 |
Finally, all the ring boxes were stuffed into 5x10" padded mailers and mailed off. We thought about mailing them in little cardboard boxes the size of the ring boxes, but decided that the padded mailers were less likely to get lost along the way. | ||
