Lino print D.I.Y. wedding invitations

Why pay someone to do what you could do? Instead of printing out our invites in an expensive and generic fashion, with set fonts and template backgrounds, I decided to make ours. Why not create D.I.Y. wedding invitations, for a fraction of the price, and learn a new creative skill while I’m at it? And it was a learning process. It took time, but I’m genuinely really happy with them now. I personalised the print so that our initials stand proud (P&P, easily enough!), and I feel like each invite is sort of a work of art. Can’t say fairer than that!

I adore William Morris Arts & Crafts -style flower patterns, so based my ideas around this template. As to the medium – at school, I learnt how to do lino printing in my GCSE art course. I really enjoyed learning it, as it’s such a labour-intense but ultimately rewarding thing to do. So, I bought all of the gear from ebay and amazon (for under £20), including brayer, lino cutter, and paints, then bought some very smart-seeming paper from The Works, and voila!

Well, that is a lie. There is NO voila about two failed lino prints (I forgot to mirror the letters in one of them! Duh!) and persevering through many different types of paint before giving in and investing in proper lino paint (which is, by the way, a must! Acrylic and oil both clogged my print and failed to transfer image to paper anyway = lots of wasted paint and time).

I spent several days designing and tweaking, then I was finally ready to begin. I used tracing paper to transfer my design onto the lino, then carefully etched my print out of the lino with my lino cutter, and kept tweaking and tweaking until I felt it was done. The I began printing!

Invites for under £30, including all the gear I need for my next lino cutting escapade!