Christina Crawford: Hi! I am Christina Crawford. I am a Stampin' Up demonstrator. I have been stamping for 12 years. I have got a lot of experience here, I am still learning everyday. This video's title is how to create wedding invitations on a budget. After the wedding you have thank you notes, even after a shower you have thank you notes, so and I do think it's very much appreciated when somebody does receive a thank you note from you, because it reminds them of the fun that they had at your occasion, also gives little confirmation that you received their gift and of course it makes them feel really good. So let me show you how to do some thank you notes. Working along, the same color scheme as kind of like my beachy contemporary wedding invitations, it's kind of nice to stay with the theme of those colors and to create a thank you note to match everything. Your Save the Date card, matches your invitation, your thank you notes match your invitation, everything looks great, your favors even match.

Very easy to do that. So to create a quick thank you note because sometimes you just are so busy and you don't have a lot of time, what I am going to do is show you that you can take a thank you stamp and a small piece of paper about the size of the block that you are stamping with or just a little bit bigger and just stamp thank you. If you think it looks kind of stuck and you want to fill little creative flair at it, take a sponge and dab it onto your ink pad and just kind of sway that, it just gives a little bit of color, fills in a little bit of a dimension and just gives it a little bit of a pop.

Next, take all of those pieces and put them together. Now, I do say pieces, but I do want to let you know that when I layer, I usually layer a quarter of an inch difference. So the thank you is 23 and the blue piece underneath it is 2 3 and then the next layer. If you want to give it another layer is 2 3 . So you have a really nice layering going on. If you are going to sponge part of your cards, sponge the outside of the card too and what I am going to do here is take this post card size, it's 5 inches 4 inches and just give it a little bit of a brush. I do see some of my customers try to do it this way and it's very difficult to sponge your color on that way because you really do want to scrape that color, you want to give it a nice little burnish look and then once you have that. Now, let's do some stamping, here is the sea shell, I use the sea shell in the Save the Date card. So then I can use the same sea shell on the thank you note, just to create a little border at the bottom of it . Now, if you do want to change color, it's a good idea to clean your stamps, so here is a little stamping mist, here is the cleaner pad, stamping scrub pad and it's going to gently scrub your, clean if there is some -- your stamp cleaner, there is no more pumpkin pie on that, and you can go right into the other color and this is green, the wild Wasabi green, and I created my little sea shells at the bottom. You can see that it doesn't take much time to make a thank you note when you keep it really simple like this and it looks so cute when you are finished. You could use dimensionals. I am going to just go ahead and use the tape on here. The dimensionals will just give it a little bit of a lift, it's also adhesive and here you go. So you could see that making thank you notes doesn't take a long time at all. You can really keep it cute and simple, keep it within the color scheme of what you have been using for your wedding. Let me show you some other examples. My friend Lisa made this one, it's black, white and pink to keep it very elegant. You can this as a Save the Date, really cute for invitations equally as cute for thank you.

Here is another one that I just made kind of more from two cards that I saw. I kind of put it together and here is the word Merci which is thank you in French. This one goes along the same color schemes before with the greens and blues, just to give you another idea. Adding a flat bow like on that video clip I showed you about those, I told you about those flat bows there. This one is little bit more bright and happy using some decorative punches and of course many thanks to shops straight out.

Definitely, do your thank you notes and don't wait too long. I know it's etiquette to wait about six months, but try to get them done as soon as possible. I know that my aunts were always worried that they didn't get the gifts and it was really appreciated when they finally got their thank you note from me and I think I gave it myself about a month to get them all done. That's just me, rushing, but definitely send a thank you note.

Thanks so much, I hope that you had fun learning different ideas on how you can do all kinds of wedding invitations, wedding announcements, Save the Date cards and wedding favors, thank you notes too on the budget.