Another project on my table currently is a moving announcement card for me and my boyfriend. Between the two of us we have a lot of people to notify, so I embarked on a project to make the announcements by hand.

The project was inspired by the one over at Paper Source. Except the envelopes are a little more like these, with an antique map liner. I only recently discovered the Paper Source store/site/weblogs, and they have been very inspiring for me. Its stirred up all my old loves of paper and bookbinding!

For the inside card I whipped up a little announcement in Illustrator and printed it on kraft cardstock on my office's color laser printer. It turned out great! Laser ink typically sits right on the surface of paper and looks glassy, but on kraft paper the ink was absorbed a little more and took on a satiny matte finish that almost looked like it rolled off an offset press. Plus the kraft color added some nice depth and dimension to the typically "bright" laser ink.

For the envelope itself, I laid out several envelope templates in Illustrator and printed them out to see what shapes appealed to me. Plus I wanted something large enough to be mailed, but with a template that fit on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. Not an easy task, I discovered! I made one like Paper Source's Petal, and then I started playing around with a combination of rounded and straight edges. Ultimately straight edges won out because I didn't want to go crazy cutting zillions of rounded edges by hand.

Then I turned to the Google image search to find me some antique map images. I ended up with a cool hand-lettered map of Staffordshire in the UK, which I picked because I could crop it to make it look like it was a map of just Shire (My first date with Adam was to see Lord of the Rings, so I have a special affinity for it). Its amazing how many high resolution images you can find with the google image search! I tossed the map into Illustrator and created a clipping mask from the envelope template so I would have cutting guides when I printed it out.