Our wedding - A DIY Project, Tears of Joy Packets

Getting engaged is exciting enough but when you actually set a date, well that's when everything seems to go crazy. From spending a small fortune on wedding magazines and attending every possible wedding fair down to spending every waking hour trawling the web for ideas and inspiration and following every wedding blog going, I've done it all.

As great as all of these sources of inspiration are, my goodness they can add to your workload!

One particular idea I came across was on an American website WeddingBee, the tears of joy packets are just the cutest little things.

The idea behind them is quite simple, a small envelope that encompasses a tissue(or two) with the outside of the pack decorated with a poem maybe.

So in typical whirlwind Emma fashion I set about searching for these small envelopes which I found on eBay. Whilst waiting for them to arrive I decided that I wanted the packets to have the same look as the rest of our stationary so I bought all of the materials I needed.

Materials I used:

Glassine envelopes (purchased from here)

Sage green ribbon

Gold card

Cream card blanks (c6 size from hobbycraft) 

Multipack of individual packs of tissues (purchased from poundland)

Gold coloured diamantés 

Double sided tape

Super glue

Paper trimmer or scissors

I started by cutting my card blanks so that they were 8cm wide (you'll get 2 strips from each card blank)

While I was doing that my maid of honour and fiancé had the wonderful task of putting an individual tissue in each envelope( as the tissues were from mini packs they were already folded perfectly). Once they had finished that they began cutting lengths of ribbon long enough to fit around the envelopes, horizontally. 

Using Microsoft word on my laptop I typed the following poem "If you shed a tear or two, Here's a tissue just for you. So wipe away that happy tear, We're so glad that you are here' I set the paper size setting to the custom size of the strips that I had cut so that the poem would be in the middle. Using the size and font that I did, I was able to fit the poem on the strip three times, printing on the strips vertically.

At this point I should point out that a lot of brides have used business cards instead of faffing about with buying card and cutting it to size, printing poems and playing about with layouts, especially as they are also the perfect size for these envelopes but I was just too impatient to order them and wait!

Once I was happy with the layout of the poem I printed 10 strips at a time. Which once cut into business card size would give me 30 cards.

Using my paper cutter, I trimmed each strip into three equal cards with a poem on each.

On the back of the poem cards I stuck two strips of double sided tape so I could back this card onto the gold card with a piece of ribbon sandwiched between the two pieces of card.

Once I had mounted a few of the poem cards onto the gold card I trimmed them all to equal size so that the gold card bordered the cream card a little.

My fiancé, Sam, stuck a strip of double sided tape horizontally in the middle of each envelope ready for me to attach the poem. Once attached we used a small square of double sided tape to seal the ribbon at the back.

As we wanted these to be in keeping with the rest of our stationary, we simply glued a single diamanté onto the ribbon each side of the card.

Yes, quite a fiddly DIY project but we both love them and can't wait for our guests to see them.

M xx