Ack- I meant to post this yesterday and fell asleep early instead! Conor has a birthday coming up and if you are a regular reader of my blog, you know I try to challenge myself to come up with cute/neat invitations. After last year's Darth Vadar marathon of cutting, I want something a little easier on me. So I decided to play with fire instead!
I must stop here to extol the virtues of digital stamps. This project would not have been possible without the ability to resize the image to whatever size my heart desired. The theme of the invites was a pirate treasure map. I debated on a couple but I went with a cute one from.....I can't remember so if you know please let me know.....
Here's the finished map:
But it didn't start that way so let's go through the process.
I first resized the pirate map in Microsoft Word and printed it out on vellum (laser printer).
Since there was extra vellum around the edges, I cut close to the map outlines.
Now I broke out the flames. I used a lit candle since that was the easiest. (I tried to take pictures at this point but it was just me and trying to juggle the camera and the burning vellum at the same time was not working and I really didn't want to burn down the house).
I took a tiny area at a time and touched it to the flame. As soon as the vellum caught fire, I would blow it out. The vellum would bubble and scorch as well as burn so it gave it a cool look. I worked all the way around the map with this process (and after doing 8 of these I was ready to pass out from all the flame blowing out activity). I then would lightly swipe the back side of the map over the flame to just get the back of the vellum sooty (like you were soot stamping) but don't hold it there to long because you will extinguish the flame.
Here's a close of of a corner:
Meg has written a cool poem/invite so if I can find it, I will print that out and roll it up with the map. Here's the finished map rolled up.
Okay, easy part done. Now I have three weeks to figure out what to do with thee boys at the pirate party!
Have a great day!