wedding invitation stamp set

my cousin came to me with the idea for this set.

 she is helping a friend make her wedding invitations and they had found an idea that they wanted to go from. a brown craft paper card with a picture of some aged wooden boards (aged blue paint-looked like blue wood grain, nails) then there was a beautiful scroll in each corner, it was tied up with a lace ribbon, and had a purple paper flower and a peacock feather in the middle. 

she said she wasn't quite sure how they were going to do the wooden board picture and then she thought maybe i could make a stamp of it.

i loved the idea. i knew it would be a challenge, but decided to try. i came up with a rough sketch at the beginning of summer and i believe i shared that here. then another busy summer hit and it was very hard to find steady time to work on it. 

... or at least that is what i told myself...

there came a point were i realized i was making excuses because i was really nervous about this project. that was the point were i stopped everything and got to work. because we can't let fear get in the way of our creativity, right? right.

once i got started i was so happy with the way it came together. i am also so thankful that my cousin brought me this challenge... this idea... something i never would have come up with on my own. this is also the first stamp that i accepted a monetary exchange for and that felt like a nice change (although, i think that is where some of the nerves came in). i also realized that doing a proper monetary exchange for a project of this size seems somewhat unrealistic. i spent $30 myself between materials and shipping. then there were so many hours logged designing, scaling, and carving. to get a honest exchange for my time i feel i would need to charge anywhere from $80-$100 for a project like this... but that just seems crazy... they're stamps. anyway, that aspect makes me very glad that i am still at an experimental point. 

my big project is complete, i am very happy with it, and that feels wonderful.