Invitations (spoiler alert)

So… I had fun making the wedding invitations – perhaps a little bit more than I expected. We decided to do them ourselves both to save a little money and also so we could do whatever we wanted instead of going with some printing template. Looking back at the components, I realize there were various bits and pieces that made them special in addition to just being handmade.

The invite itself I designed in Illustrator. Our friend Chank is an awesome fontographer and type foundry guy, and I’ve been using the Millesime font from Chank Co in a lot of the wedding miscellany. Speaking of fonts, I should note:

There will be NO PAPYRUS at the JOHNSON-SCHUMACHER wedding.

We kept it pretty simple – black and white ink printed on pretty paper our friends Mike and Irene gave us. I felt like they were lacking a little something, so I daubed little balls of iridescent paint into the strand of lights. We watched Harry Potter while I tap tap tapped the brush on the invitations. It took a long time but only because I kept getting distracted by the movie. (FYI – Somebody dies.)  Then we mounted them to colored paper backings.

We didn’t exactly pick official wedding colors, but rust orange keeps coming up because… well… pumpkins are AWESOME! Black and white are classic colors, so there you go.

I did the map in illustrator too. I’m really not sure anybody will use our map when GoogleMaps is so much easier but… at least they look pretty right? Ha. I found a stamp at Archivers that we both really liked, so I used that for the back of the RSVP cards to make them look nicer than just like cut up pieces of paper. (Which I suppose they still are… but now they are *stamped* cut up pieces of paper. SPECIAL!)

I read somewhere (and by somewhere I mean – every single blog post and etiquette article I could find on this topic) that wedding invitations should really be hand addressed, and neatly.

Seriously?

That’s like… a lot of writing and a lot of neatly.

So I got a simple calligraphy pen, some pretty ink and practiced for a few days. Once I felt confident enough I did a few envelopes every day for a week until they were all done. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be to hand address everything neatly – apparently writing bible verses over and over when I was younger to practice my handwriting really paid off.

I was going to post a picture of my practice calligraphy sheet since it was kinda neat looking but the dogs ate that paper – along with our brand new couch cushions. Seriously! I don’t know why they keep eating our pillows, but it’s really frustrating. We decided anyone that eats invitation related items should not receive invitations to the wedding. We also added these replacement pillows to our wedding registry:

Only kidding. (But I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what our pillows look like to the dogs.)