DIY Wedding Details To Make For Your Special Day

Wedding Details

There are so many simple little wedding details that you can add to make a wedding unique and special. These can be done in advance if you are a ‘Do-It-Yourselfer’ but don’t procrastinate! That wedding that seemed so far away a year ago can quickly sneak up on you and there you are with too much to do at the last minute.

Emily and Jon-Michael bought this bird cage when they were out shopping awhile back. Their plan was to use it for cards at their reception. There are bird cages specifically designed for that very purpose, which you can pick up at the craft stores. (But everyone has those! This is just another one of those little unique wedding details.) Since this one was not one of those, there was really not an opening big enough for a large envelope. Hmm…

Well, I suggested cutting one of the horizontal wires at the top and bending it back onto each of the vertical wires on either side. That would make an opening sufficient for the larger cards.

Would anybody see that opening and realize that was the slot for the envelopes? Yeah, you know there would be some who would not. In order to avoid confusion, I came up with an idea to create a card with a vintage hand drawing on it pointing to the proper place to insert the cards.

A search for free vintage hand clipart brought up a ton of options. This one on “The Graphics Fairy” seemed perfect for the project. I right-clicked the image and clicked on ‘save image as’. The image was saved to a file designated specifically for the upcoming wedding.

Then, I needed to remove the white color surrounding the hand. The hand printed on vanilla-colored paper I planned to use would also print the surrounding rectangle in white. Then, using PicMonkey, the white around the hand was easily removed. (PicMonkey is a free editing tool. We are an affiliate and if you choose to upgrade, we may receive a small percentage at no cost to you.)

While this post shows how to make a vintage hand card for the birdcage, the same technique can be used for making an endless amount of other paper wedding details.

How To Remove Areas Of ClipArt

The first thing you will need to do is go to PicMonkey and sign up for a free account. Sign in. Then, you should see this screen or one very similar. At the top of the screen, click on the Design icon.

The screen should look something like this. Click on the Butterfly icon for overlays.

At the top of the page on the left under the word Overlays, Click on “Add your own.” A menu will drop down. Click on “My Computer”. Choose the file for the clipart you want to edit and click “open”.

The picture of the hand or your clipart is now an overlay. Since we are trying to get rid of the white area around the hand, we should change the background color of the canvas. It will make it much easier to see what we are removing.

On the far left is a menu and the top icon is for basic edits. Choose “basic edits” and then, click on “Canvas Color” and choose any color that will be a nice contrast to the white overlay. You might want to choose something that is easy on the eyes like this blue.

Then, click on the overlay and the “Overlay” menu will appear.

Using The Overlay Eraser

You can see there are two choices, ‘Basic’ and ‘Eraser’. Click on the Eraser. To begin with, you want to take out a lot of the white at one time. so, slide the ‘Eraser size’ button to make a large circle as shown in the picture above. By clicking on the white area, this tool will remove the white. You will be able to see the blue background. It will also remove the hand, so be sure you stay away from the black lines.

However, if you do take out some of the black lines, there is a ‘paintbrush’ right next to the ‘eraser’ icon on the menu. Just paint it back!

After you have removed most of the white area around the hand, you will have to slide the eraser size back to smaller sizes to get closer to the lines of the hand. By rolling the scroll tool on top of your mouse, you can make the graphic smaller or larger. Increase the size of the overlay to make it much easier to get into all of the tight areas. You can enlarge it to the point that you can take out one little pixel or square at a time.

Create A Card With Text

When you have removed all of the white areas around the hand, if you are adding type, you will want to do that now. If you want to try different types, all you have to do is choose a font, type your text, highlight it, and then click on each of the fonts you want to try. You can use the back button at the bottom of the page to view all the ones you tried. I love this feature.

  Before you continue, if you ever think you might want to use this overlay again, go back to 'Basic Edits', 'Canvas Color', and click on 'Transparent Color' and apply.  Save this to a file on your computer!  You won't have to go through this tedious process again!  Your work will be saved!  After it is saved you can simply use the back arrow at the bottom of the page to get back to where you were.

Next, you will need to crop your design. Go to the ‘Basic Edits’ menu and choose the top icon, ‘Crop’. You can choose one of the sizes on the drop-down menu or you can pull the edges or corners of the crop tool to crop any size you want.

Click on apply the crop.

Adding Textures

Now, you will want to get rid of the blue background. The main reason I waited to change the blue background is that I planned to use the ‘papyrus’ option in ‘textures’. The papyrus has a darker edge. If it had been applied too soon, cropping would remove all the darker edges!

Next, click on canvas color and choose white again if you want to add a texture. You want the ‘color ffffff‘. You can type 6 f’s in or use the color picker to choose the color in the extreme left corner of the menu. (If you want to just add a color here, click on the color you want and skip the textures.)

Then, click on ‘Textures’. There are many different textures and background colors that you can choose at this point. I chose the ‘Papyrus’ and there are 6 selections. Click on your choice and it will appear in the background with the hand and type in the foreground. Increase or decrease the Saturation and the fade until you have a satisfactory background.

Save and Print

You can save this to a file and print it at this point. You could also add a border or frame by clicking on the frame icon beneath the ‘butterfly overlay’ icon and then print.

Hope this has given you ideas for making some of your own paper wedding details. We also bought flowers and greenery to add to the birdcage. The post showing how to finish the birdcage and add this little card will be shared later this week. Come back! It’s going to be gorgeous!