In our household, green is really good, and we reduce, reuse, recycle and refuse as much as we can. So, what better way to incorporate this aspect of our lives into our wedding than to handmake our own wedding invites from recycled paper?
I had so much recycled paper due to my line of work that I got into papermaking as a hobby. I guess it made me feel better knowing that although I was cutting so many trees down, I was using them in a good way. It’s one of the ways I reuse and recycle. I save practically every scrap of paper I get my hands on – the unprinted borders on white paper, glossy magazines, direct mail pieces- and I turn them into handmade paper crafts.
These are just a few of the things I’ve come up with over the past several months:
PRESSED FLOWER PANEL – I took some of the petals from the bouquet Corey gave me for our 1st anniversary, embedded them into the paper when I was making it and weighed the sheet down with a heavy book. A new twist on pressed flowers for the incurable romantic!
RUSTIC JOURNAL – Corey loves journals, so I made him one using recycled paper. I used a twig and a leather string for the binding, pressed some leaves I found just outside into the “cover”, and used a coconut shell button that fell off one of my handbags and string as a “lock”.
POSTCARDS- I always have ziplocs of “found” items that I initially never know what to do with, and the ladybug just happened to find the perfect spot to land eventually. I drew the coffee mug with that puffy stuff that goes on t-shirt designs to give it an interesting texture. The martini glass, I drew with a regular felt-tipped pen. For texture, I mixed olive green paint into good ol’ Elmer’s glue and dabbed it onto the handmade paper to give the olives a 3-dimensional look.
I think I should be able to come up with wedding invites that are elegant, reflect our commitment to environmentalism and don’t cost an arm and a leg.Stay tuned to see what I come up with!
For more Cheap Chic ideas, go to www.thecheapchiccouple.com
The Cheap Chic Couple 
AWESOME IDEA! How do you make paper? I did it once as a kid but maybe i’ll go google it..hmmm
The best resource I had on how to make paper when I was just starting it out as a hobby was arnoldgrummer.com.
Like him, I prefer the ‘hand pour’ method, which is easier (at least for me) than the ‘dip’ method that most people lean towards.
Hope this helps!