Recently I shared on my Instagram Stories the hot foil stamping process for Anne and Eric’s custom wedding invitations, as it was a process I’d never actually tried before. I’m lucky that my clients trust my vision and experience, and I had the support of my foil plate supplier ensuring me this was something that could be done, but it was still a little scary!
These invitations had 2 foils included in the design; one in gold, and one was an iridescent foil. Wherever you want to separate the design such as having two colors, it requires two different foiling plates to be made (which increases the cost of the invitations too as these are sent to my supplier and they’re etched out of metal).
Originally the design had the bold type sat in front of the script, and then at the last moment I thought it’d be even better if the script looked like it was weaving in and out of the gold foil text! And it did, but I was making the job harder and harder for the production phase! The script details at the bottom were also going to be in gold foil and I switched that to sit on the other (iridescent) foiling plate at the last minute. Basically I made it into a nightmare job, because it would be extremely visible wherever the plates weren’t aligned perfectly.
My foil machine does have screw holes so that instead of using die bonding tape (which really would be a nightmare on this job), the two plates would and could align, I just needed to make sure the paper didn’t move AT ALL! This involved a lot of masking tape as shown below!
I’ve also shown below how slim the lines on the main gold foil plate appeared when I started foiling. I was a little concerned by this and how the second plate would even fit, let alone be legible! Also shown below is how it could have turned out if the plates were off by even a couple of millimetres.
If you’re foiling and using screws, this is definitely achievable! I was so shocked and happy at how perfect they came out in the end! I tried the plates with couple of other color variations, the gold and iridescent were my favorite but I’m also a little obsessed with the magenta foil on the pink paper!
If you’d like to discuss your own wedding stationery do feel free to get in touch! This is the link to my custom wedding stationery quote request, and this is the link to my semi-custom stationery!
Anna x