Darci’s Out of Town Bags

Posted by Khris in DIY Projects & Tutorials, Favors + Gifts

We have a significant amount of guests traveling to our wedding from out of town, so I wanted to have something waiting for them when they arrived at the hotel.  I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money and also wanted to be as “green” as possible, so I decided that a canvas tote was the best way to go.  I found some online at Cheaptotes.com for .99 cents a piece and decided they would do the job!  However, I did still want to personalize them somehow.  I also didn’t want to slap our names on there in huge bold letters and deter people from using them in the future, so I decided that using the flourish from our invitation suite would make sense – provide a little consistency and still keep it rather plain.

I priced a few options for having them professionally printed and most of those defeated the whole purpose of paying .99 cents for each of the bags. I kept thinking about how I could get the flourish into a stencil somehow, and after one attempt with foam board failed miserably I turned to google and found Custom Cut Stencil Co. They were so easy to work with – I emailed them my design, they added the necessary breaks, and one week and $30 later this was at my door:

It’s a mylar stencil which means that it’s pretty durable, but in retrospect I should have made the lines a little thicker (you’ll see why in a second). I bought a fabric paint pen for $3 and away I went! Important tip – put some cardboard in the middle of the bag before you start painting. Bleeding is a bad thing…

I should have made the lines on the flourish thicker because the paint pen doesn’t quite fit into the stencil. So, basically I have to trace it once with a pen that will fit into the lines and then go over it with the paint pen. Not the biggest deal in the world, but a little added work. Here is how it looks after tracing the stencil with a pen:

And here is part of the process of going over the pen marks with the paint pen:

To get a line on either side of the flourish I just got out a ruler and tried to line things up as best as possible:

And there you have it! I used a warm iron on each of them to set the paint and make sure they weren’t overly wrinkly.

All in all I would say that it takes about 10 minutes per bag for the design and just a few more minutes for ironing. There are 40 bags in total, so when you break down the cost of all the bags, the paint pens (it took two), and the stencil it cost around $2 per bag. Here’s hoping our guests get some use out of them in the future as well!

Contributed by Darci L.
Blog: http://www.with–this–ring.blogspot.com/
Used with kind permission from the author.
Copyright 2008 • All rights reserved.

posted by m.s. for k.c.