And this is what happens when you don't have a job....

Photo courtesy of marthastewart.com

Sorry, loyal readers, that I haven't been terribly up on posting as of late. I've been suffering through this bout of shingles, and have been super doped up on pain meds and pretty sleepy. But, luckily, the shingles seem to be almost disappeared and I've decided it's time to rejoin the productive members of society. So yesterday I decided to buckle down and work on one of our DIY projects - envelope liners for our Save-the-Date cards.

It's not that we NEED envelope liners, but if you don't have a job yet because of the crappy economic climate, and you're spending your days rearranging furniture, making calls on behalf of a presidential campaign (go Obama!), and doing wedding planning (i.e. playing on The Knot), envelope liners start to almost look like fun.

So....if you find yourself as bored as I have been lately, here are some instructions for some handy dandy envelope liners to spruce up your boring envelopes.

What you"ll need:


Paper
I went with wrapping paper from a neighborhood store in a black and white almost-but-not-quite damask print. Each role was 5' x 30" and only cost me $3.99 (yeah, even wrapping paper is expensive in NYC ;)). I ended up using a little over two rolls to make 85 liners.

A cutting surface
I pulled out my handy dandy rotary cutting mat from the DIY pocketfold project

A cutting tool
Again, I pulled out the rotary trimmer from the pocketfold project, but a paper cutter or even a pair of scissors would also work - though I believe the process would be much slower)

Metal ruler
Pretty self explanatory

Adhesive
I used Elmer's washable glue stick (it's what FI came back from the store with ;)). You could also use glue dots or double-sided tape, but this actually seemed to be the easiest and most cost-effective way to do it.

A bone folder
Indespensible. If you don't have one, go buy one. You'll use it in sooooo many projects.

Oh...and don't forget your envelopes. ;)

Step 1

The first thing you'll need to do is measure your envelope. The width of your liner will need to be the width of your envelope MINUS 1/4 inch - ours ended up being 8 3/4" (for a vista print envelope that matched the oversized postcards).

The height of the liner can be a bit more tricky. Our envelopes were flatter (not pointy) flaps (hurray for easy!) so I just measured from the bottom of the envelope to right beneath the gum on the flap to get the height of our liners - 6 7/8".


Step 2

Cut your paper. I realized that I could fit three liners in the width of the paper, so I simply cut the roll into 6 7/8" strips. I then cut each of these strips into 8 3/4" chunks. I was able to get 3 liners per strip; 24 liners per roll.


Once each liner was cut, I needed to cut the corners for the flap. Getting the right angle was a bit tricky, but here's what I did. To get the angle, I measured the distance from the edge of the flap (where the flap meets the body) to where the glue strip ended. See picture.


And this is where having a cutting surface with a grid and edge rulers comes in INCREDIBLY useful. I was able to simply line the top edge of the liner up with the edge of the board (conveniently next to a ruler) and the side edge of the liner with a grid square. I was then able to place my metal ruler on the liner at the corner of the grid square at the appropriate height (in this case, 1"), and on the corresponding measure on the ruler at the enge of the mat (in this case 3/8" away from the edge of the liner). Then I was able to simply cut along the ruler to get instant perfect angle. I know it sounds incredibly complicated, but one's you do one or two, you'll fly through the rest of them. (Enlarge the pic and you'll be better able to see what I mean).


Step 3

Insert liner into envelope, print side up, trying to make sure the liner is centered in the envelope.

Step 4

Fold down the flap of the envelope, and use your bone folder to make a light crease. Don't press to hard at this step, or your likely to have a double line when you do the next folding after the glue.

Here's FI FINALLY helping. He wouldn't agree to do the glue, but he finally stopped grumbling enough about me asking him to stop playing Final Fantasy to do Step 4 for me.

Step 5

Life the flap of your envelope, but leave the liner folded down.


Step 6

Insert a scrap piece of paper between the liner and the bottom of the envelope, then use your adhesive to lightly coat the back of the liner.

Step 7

(Doing it this way definitely helped to make sure that the liner laid flat with no wrinkles). Push the liner onto the flap, and lightly tap it down. THEN fold over the flap and liner, and use your bone folder to smooth it out and make sure the liner adheres to the flap. This time you can press harder, because you want a smooth, sharp crease.

Step 8

Open the flap and admire your handiwork. :)

Step 9

Admire handiwork when combined with DIY STD's. Pat yourself on the back for being awesome. ;)

Questions? Leave 'em in the comments section, and I'll get to them as soon as I can. Happy lining! :)

And here's what I did with my bar trip...

And here they are. The long-awaited directions for making you're very own fabric covered pocketfold invitations.

As a disclosure, I found the original directions on how to make these here. However, I found the pocketfolders to be a tad small, and I found some easier and less wasteful ways to build the actual folders, so I thought I'd share my way, too.

Enjoy!

p.s. I still have aout 12 yards of black dupioni silk fabric if anyone's interested. *hint* *hint*

Note: I'm going to echo the original designer's (Tanya) warning to test your fabric before you go buying the entire stock you'll need for this project. You'll want something that will stick to your cardstock with adhesive, but that the adhesive won't bleed through. Like she mentions, stretchy fabrics won't work well, and neither will heavy fabrics (i.e. velvets, suedes, etc.). You'll also want to test the fabric with whatever cutting tool you're using to make sure it doesn't fray. To be honest, silk dupioni CAN fray - quite extensively - because of the nature of the interwoven threads. That being said, it looks so entirely awesome when it's finished that I highly recommend it anyway. ;)

Stage One

Determine what size you would like your actual invitation (the part with writing on it) to be; you can then extrapolate from these measurements. When I ordered a sample pocketfolder from www.cardsandpockets.com, I realized that the size of the pocketfolder was 5x7, making the inner invite quite a bit smaller; I wanted our actual invite to be 5"x7". I knew I wanted this larger invite, and I knew I also wanted one layer of backing betweeen the invite and the pocketfolder. So I took the size of the invite, added 1/4" all around for the backing, and 1/4" for space between the backing and the edge of the pocketfolder. To make a pocketfolder for this size invite, the cardstock needed to be 17.975" x 8" (the missing .025 is to make folding easier and make the folds lie flat). This will give you a pocketfolder with the following dimensions I doubled the width on these when I ordered the cardstock so that I could cut two pocketfolders from each piece, meaning fewer cuts and less wasted silk.

Stage Two Order your supplies - see my last post too see exactly what I ordered.

Stage Three Lay your fabric out, and place your cardstock on top of your fabric. I was able to get two sheets of cardstock - or four pocketfolders - per each "row" of fabric (I could have fit three pieces per each row had I turned the last piece on it's side, but then my neurotic brain would have had a fit, because one piece of cardstock would have had the threads from the dupioni going vertically instead of horizontally - use your own judgment as to whether this would annoy you). Cut out your cardstock and silk, leaving at least 1/2 inch between each piece of cardstock, and between the edge of the fabric, like so:


Stage Four

Tanya had it right. If you can do this step outside - do it outside. It WILL be messy. If you can't do it outside for some reason (like you're staying at a beach house and sand is flying everywhere, or you live in a major Metropolitan area (e.g. Manhattan) it can be done inside, but you'll need to do it in a non-carpeted area, and you'll probably still want to have a few old newspapers handy to lay down to soak up the overspray.

You'll want to lay out the fabric near (but not so near as to be contaminated by overspray) your spraying area, and smooth it out as best you can. Then, lay the cardstock on the ground (or newspaper if doing inside) and LIGHTLY mist the cardstock with your adhesive, following the directions on the can. Like Tanya said, "IF YOU CAN SEE THE CARDSTOCK GETTING WET AND DARKENED FROM THE ADHESIVE, YOU'VE USED TOO MUCH." Try to avoid streaking and wet spots - these will just soak through your fabric. The cardstock should just look slightly tacky - in my experience, it developed a *slight* sparkle sheen when it had the right amount of adhesive on it.

Stage Five

Turn your cardstock over, and carefully place it sticky-side down onto your fabric. LIGHTLY tap the cardstock to make sure it sticks, then immediately flip over the fabric and cardstock and smooth everything out. Note: DO NOT try to smooth it out until you flip it over - trial and error told us if you smoothed it out on the cardstock side instead of the side you can cause irremovable wrinkles. If you're doing two pieces of cardstock per piece of fabric, it helps if you smooth from the center of the two pieces to the edges of the fabric. Tanya recommended letting this dry for at least half an hour, and if you have the time to kill, it's probably best. We were trying to power through as many as we could in our short time at the beach, however, and found that fifteen minutes was plenty, especially if you were doing them in batches.

Stage 6

Using your cutting instrument (I used a Fiskars handheld rotary trimmer), cut your cardstock in half, and trim away the excess on the HORIZONTAL edges. While Tanya set things up to cut some of the cardstock away along with the excess fabric, I simply used the metal yardstick lined up against the very edge of the cardstock to cut away nothing but the fabric. This is definitely easier with two people (because of the need to hold the yardstick steady while applying pressure with the cutting instrument), it can be done by one person if you need to.



Youll end up with stacks of cardstock looking something like this (the ones at the bottom):


Notes on this step:

(1) Tanya recommends using an exacto knife because her rotary trimmer was dulling to quickly cutting through fabric and cardstock. I found that the exacto knife "ripped" at the fabric too much, so we switched to the handheld rotary trimmer. And because we were primarily cutting fabric (we only made one cut to each piece of cardstock - to cut the two folders apart), the blade lasted a reasonably long time. When you notice that your fabric isn't cutting cleanly, it's time to change the blade - otherwise the fabric will start to fray.

(2) Tanya also recommends that if you do happen to notice the blade not going all the way through the fabric, to use your scissors to cut them apart to prevent fraying. This is a tip worth saving /repeating. Repeated tries with a dull blade will definitely fray your fabric.

Stage 7

Using your fingertip, spread a *small* amount of your liquid adhesive onto the cut horizontal edges of your pocketfold. As Tanya noted, YOU MUST PERFORM THIS STEP TO KEEP YOUR EDGES FROM FRAYING! The brand of glue that I used really did take about 30 minutes to dry - sometimes longer.

Note: All of my pictures of finger smearing from this part are blurry. BUT I can say that Tanya's way definitely was the best. If you hold the bottle with your thumb and first two fingers, you can smear the glue with your ring finger from the same hand, and keep from covering yourself or your pocketfolds in unwanted glue. It took me a few tries to get to the point where I could comfortably hold the glue while smearing, but once I did, everything went much more quickly.

Also note that if you're doing this step on more than one pocketfolder at a time, you will need to have a place to lay them all out to dry. And you CANNOT stack them on top of each other. You will inevitably get *some* of the glue on either the cardstock side or the silk side, and when you lay one on top of the other, they stick together. We learned this the hard way and had to throw out to otherwise beautiful pocketfolders. :(

Stage 8

Now it's time to cut out the "folder" and "flap" portions of your pocketfold and glue your edges. For our pocketfolders, I used the following measurements:


I had originally planned on using the rotary cutter to cut out the necessary portions, but soon discovered that a round blade doth not cut corners well. ;) Scissors really are your best friend here. Then you'll need to do the same gluing you did on the long (horizontal sides) to your flap and folder:

Note: Your life will be MUCH easier if you make a template first so that you'll have the template pieces for the pocket and flap to trace for each one, instead of measuring each and every single pocketfolder.

Stage 9

Almost there! Now (after letting this new round of glue dry, of course) it's time to fold your pocketfolder. Using the chart above, I drew lines on the cardstock side using a pencil, then scored each of those lines using a ruler and the back side of a common household butter knife, then used the bone folder on the fabric side (gently!) to make the folds as crisp as I could:



Stage 10

I have no idea how I didn't get pictures of this, put the final step in creating your pocketfolder is to create the actual pocket. This is where your adhesive tape comes in useful. I placed strips of tape as shown in the diagram above (the red lines were the adhesive), folded the pocket over and pressed again with the bone folder, and......TA DA!

A "finished" pocketfolder. Of course, I don't have my invites or inserts yet, I haven't glued down the invite backing, and I haven't attached the ribbon or the name card to the ribbon, but here's what they look like in their primal state:

Nifty, eh?

Hope this helped someone else. If so, send me pics. I'll create a lovely DIY gallery of all of our wonderful fabric-covered pocketfolders. :)

Invites - the supplies arrived!

About four or five months ago (I think...time flies when you're planning a wedding) I found "my" invitations. A set of dupioni silk-covered pocketfolds. I was in love. They were magnificent. See?
I found them on Wedding Bee. Me, being the ambitious, slightly neurotic person that I am decided that I simply HAD to have them. But, being frugally conscious, I also decided that I couldn't buy them ($20+ per invite? Hells no!). Which left DIY. Luckily, the Wedding Bee member who posted these fab invites in a contest there was also a knottie, and had put together a bio of directions for making them. What follows in this post (and a soon to be directions post) is an update of her directions (set for making 100 pocketfolders), tweaked with some tips and tricks I discovered.

I put off making these forever (we'll say it was because I was interning, finishing up law school, and studying for the bar ;)), but then finally decided that my bar trip would be the absolute perfect time to get started on this ambitious project. Last Thursday, I took the plunge and ordered the supplies I needed to make 100 pocketfolders. What supplies, you ask? These supplies:


Cardstock
I ordered 55 sheets of black cardstock and 110 sheets of gold cardstock from Anchor Paper's Express Store, for an astonishingly low price of only $76, including shipping. I had them cut the black cardstock into 17.975 x 16 inch squares (to get two pocketfolds per piece), and the gold cardstock into 7.75" x 5.75".

Fabric
I ordered 25 yards (calculation mistake - apparently I'm bad at math when I'm tired *sheepish grin*) of midnight black dupioni from Fabric Freak on eBay for $11.50 per yard + shipping. I actually only needed 12 yards, so I'm in the market for either (a) someone to buy the leftover yardage, or (b) someone to suggest something nifty to do with 13 yards of black dupioni silk. Note: I highly recommend this seller. They had the best price I could find for the quality and quantity of silk I wanted, shipping was super fast (I won on Thursday evening, it arrived Tuesday), and their staff was incredibly friendly.


Spray Adhesive
I used Krylon spray adhesive. For 100 pocketfolds, I needed approximately 1.5 cans.





Clear Liquid Adhesive
I used Tombow MonaAqua, and it worked great. Whatever you use, MAKE SURE IT DRIES CLEAR. Some liquid adhesives dry a milky color.





Rotary Trimmer I used a Fiskars handheld rotary trimmer and it worked wonderfully. Just make sure to buy replacement blades (I purchased a pack of five) and change them when necessary. Cutting through the cardstock wears out the blades, and a worn out blade = frayed fabric.




Adhesive (Tape) Dispenser
I used an EK Success Dotto Dots Dispenser (make sure to get the permanent dots, not the removable ones).







Necessary, but not pictured (I'm pretty sure you know what these look like. ;)):

Scissors
Make sure to get a freshly sharpened pair, again, to prevent fraying.

Metal Yardstick
A short ruler really won't do if you're using cardstock this size. Trust me, you'll thank me later for making you buy the yardstick. Also, make sure to get a metal one. Blades cut through the wooden and plastic one, and the metal makes a sturdier base against which to press your blade to get a straight cut.

Rotary cutting mat The trimmer I bought came with a smaller one (pictured above). That worked...sorta. We left midway to purchase a larger one that permitted us to make one cut instead of many smaller cuts.

Coming soon: Step by step instructions. :)