How to Use Vellum Papers for Wedding Invitations
Say hello to our new coloured vellum papers which perfectly complement our A3 and A4 vellum papers.
With a wealth of experience as wedding stationers ourselves, we’ve used this beautiful paper for many years and understand how it can be used and add a sense of luxury to your wedding invitations. So we’ve included lots of tips and tricks on how to use our vellum papers for your wedding invitations.
Available as 100gsm A4 paper in an array of sumptuous colours including Bright White, White Iridescent, Ivory, Pearl (an oyster shade), Gold, Nude, Blueprint and a stunning shade of red called Red Lacquer. Made with plant fibres sources it contains no plastic and can be recycled. You can purchase a sample swatch pack it’s a great way to choose your favourite shade.
With it’s beautiful, tactile translucent ‘cloud like’ quality it’s perfect for DIY wedding invitations, and despite its delicate nature, it’s surprisingly strong.
Our clear vellum is also available in 110gsm, 150gsm, and also as a 210gsm cardstock giving so much scope when designing and making DIY wedding invitations. Use for place settings for on the day stationery where the thicker paper will be beneficial or use an A5 card blank with paper inserts for a stunning Order of Service or Order of Ceremony. For the ultimate wedding invitation add a vellum jacket.
Vellum Papers for Wedding Invitations and Design
For many years we used lighter weight vellum paper for lining our presentation boxes. These wedding invitations made a real statement and created much excitement for the forthcoming wedding day with the invitation for friends and family becoming like a gift.
These days transparent vellum is used in many more aspects of wedding stationery design. If you’re making your own wedding invitations, consider a simple invitation card made from an A5 card base topped with a vellum layer. The base card can be printed, or the vellum printed itself, for the latter use 100 gsm paper so the text below can be seen.
The two layers or types of paper can be joined with eyelets and ribbon or just wrapped in simple jute string, twine string or finished with a wax seal made with a wax seal stamp. Our wax stamp tutorials are a must for anyone wanting to make wax seals for their stationery. Final nestle your invitation in a quality C5 envelope and create a luxurious wedding invitation for your big day.
All wedding stationery types can be swathed in this gorgeous paper with vellum jackets, or vellum wraps even A7 paper sized Save the Date cards.
Vellum is perfect teamed with barely-there neutrals, ivory and white cardstock but equally beautiful when combined with other shades such as dusty blue or dusky pink card. Don’t be afraid to combine your wedding colours for your stationery and give your guests a glimpse of your big day.
Paper thickness of translucent vellum makes a big difference to your handmade wedding invitations. Use 100gsm paper if you want to ‘see-through’ it as the higher the gsm such as 230gsm, the less you will see what’s underneath.
Our 230gsm is available as A4 card which would give two A5 invitations.
Vellum Envelope Liners
Lining your envelopes with matching vellum paper is the ultimate in luxury and has the added benefit of offering some protection to your homemade wedding invitations too.
Using a thinner weight paper such as 100gsm for lining your wedding envelopes is ideal as it’s easy to cut and fold. Use our wedding envelope liner templates created to help you line your envelopes with little fuss.
If you really love the look and feel of vellum, then why not make vellum envelopes too? Again we have envelope templates to download whether you’re looking to make mini envelopes, small envelopes such as C7 or larger envelopes like 155mm square envelopes.
Vellum Belly Bands
Belly Bands are a paper (or card) strip that holds your wedding invitation suite together. They’re perfect for holding layered, stacked invitations, RSVP cards and details cards together or keeping a pocketfold invitation closed.
Vellum is an ideal paper to make an invitation belly band from, and we have lots of wedding ideas and invitation tutorials to help on our YouTube channel.
We have lots of precut vellum for wedding invitations on our website.
Printing on Clear Vellum Paper
The nature of this high-quality paper’s surface means that the ink takes a little while to dry if you use an inkjet printer and if you try to print quickly, you run the risk of the ink smudging. This is not ideal when using vellum paper for wedding invitations, so we have some handy tips to assist you:
- Look at your printer settings and find a setting that allows a longer drying time. This is usually the specialist/photo papers settings in the print driver or dialogue box. The printer prints more slowly allowing each sheet to dry a little before the next print.
If you’re not sure how to do this print each sheet individually and allow to dry before printing the next A4 sheet. - Sometimes you can print on a ‘draft’ setting, the text may be paler but can be perfectly acceptable.
- Laser toner printers print vellum beautifully as the toner is fused onto the paper
- Whenever you’re printing always make sure you have spare stock to run some test prints
- Foil print looks stunning try gold foil, silver foil and rose gold if you have the capacity to add foil.
- One neat trick to try with vellum is heat embossing directly from your printer. Take advantage of the ink taking time to dry and sprinkle quickly with embossing powder and heat. You can achieve some lovely effects printing vellum in this way. View our tutorial below to see how to do this for yourself. It’s a great, cost-effective way of printing in silver on your DIY wedding invitations
Printing 'Metallic' Inks on Clear Vellum Paper
This is a neat craft hack for metallic printing when you use vellum paper. All you need to use is an inkjet printer, embossing powder and a heat embossing tool.
- Print your design on the vellum paper.
- Be prepared with your embossing powder to hand.
- As soon as the sheet emerges from the printer sprinkle on the embossing powder to allow it to stick to the wet ink.
- Shake off the excess embossing powder.
- Heat the vellum paper evenly with a heat tool and watch the printed area magically transform before your eyes!
- Extra tip – to avoid additional specks of ‘metallics’ wipe your paper with embossing / anti-static bag beforehand. This will help stop any specks of powder sticking where you don’t want them!
Which Glues and Adhesives to Use for Clear Vellum Paper
As a crafter, you might have many adhesives in your card making supplies or craft supplies. With a translucent paper, you need to be sure that you use the correct one to see a little of the adhesive as possible.
This isn’t such an issue if the join of a belly band is on the back of the invitation where it’s less noticeable, but if you need to attach the vellum in full view then again we have some neat little tricks to share with you:
- Use the right adhesive; some are less noticeable when dry than others. In our tests (see the photo below) we found the best glue for sticking vellum to be ATG tape or a glue stick. While Zip Dry was effective we’ve found recent batches to be less so.
- The tapes were the worse performers, especially ‘red tape’ which showed through the paper clearly. Gem-Tac crinkled the paper and glue dots were still visible but are easy to use.
- Make the joins where they’re not noticed, for example, on the reverse or an edge.
- Die-cut or slit the paper and join together, so no glue is needed
We hope that you find our information on vellum paper helpful when you make your wedding invitations. Please do send your photos to us; we love to see your creations.
Remember we have many years of wedding stationery experience and have all the products and advice you need to create the stationery you dream of.
ATG Adhesive
ATG Tape rolls
We have many years of card making & wedding stationery experience and we hope that you find this blog and our DIY wedding invitation tutorials useful. For all your card making and everything, you need to make DIY wedding invitations explore our extensive collection.
From cardstock, luxury wedding envelopes to embellishments, wedding ribbons and much more explore our unrivalled collection. Don’t forget we’re always on hand for advice!