Here’s one of those head-slappingly simple ideas that I wish had occurred to me. Curious Goods has a tutorial for making fake wax seals out of hot glue, and Carrie Mae has taken it one step further and is using them to decorate her wedding invitations. I know you can purchase fake seals that won’t shatter in the mail, but I never thought about making my own.

If you don’t want to mess around with spray paint, you can use colored hot glue for the “wax.” You can carve your own stamp design out of an eraser if you want (although if you’re turning out a lot of stamps it might not hold up), but wax stamps are fairly inexpensive and come in lots of attractive designs (spiders, spider webs, skulls, and bats among them). For one-time use a cheap ink stamp set like this one might work too.

This is a lovely way to add gothic elegance to wedding invitations, and instead of trying to find commercial faux wax seals in the color and design you want, you can create whatever you desire easily and cheaply. Brilliant!