Wedding Blog

I guess it’s more just architectural hand lettering done with pen and ink.  As sort of a preface to my invitation post, I’ll show you the invites’ clothing and all that went into it.

First, my workstation:

(click image to enlarge)

A few closeups of the tools:

(click image to enlarge)

The first batch of ink I mixed was too dark. I did about a quarter of our envelopes with that ink, so I decided to just send them off rather than redoing all of them in the nicer color I mixed up later.

Then, harebrained Miss Lime started writing names before realizing she did not yet have addresses from certain guests. So the name stayed, and the address was added later, long after the first batch of too-dark ink was already used.

Finally, I got the right proportion of white and blue mixed in a batch large enough to cover more than all of my envelopes.

Various fun stamps. Yes, I know I overpaid on one of these two. Do not shop on usps.com late at night while delirious from lack of sleep. You, too, may order 4-cent stamps instead of 2-cent stamps. Luckily, I’m a chair whore, so they fit. I really love the Gee’s Bend quilt stamps, and the superhero stamps are nice graphically, too, for the most part. We were able to keep the whole weight of the invitation to 1 oz. to save money (a whole whopping $26 or so) on postage.

The return address gocco’ed onto the square back flap of the #10 envelope. Now you know where this came from.

Fonts - Our logo/monogram is Century Gothic, but I edited the proportions of the letters a bit. The address itself is Din Schrift (always reminds me of Dwight Schrute).

An overall view of a finished envelope:

A sneak peek of what’s to come. No inner envelope (to save trees and postage), and no liners since the inside of my envelopes have color and aren’t any different from the quality of the outside; they just don’t have dots. I acutally liked the contrast of the solid red to the patterned outside.

Costs:
Now outdated hand drafting classes at a private university = I don’t even want to divide it out.
(2) bottles of ink at $6 each = $12 (I had plenty of ink left over)
Pen & ink nibs = $0, as I already had them. You can get them pretty inexpensively at art supply stores. The pens run a couple to a few bucks each, and the nibs are also about that price, too.
Total = Hard to say.
Unhelpful, lazy bride strikes again. Well, if you have nice writing, some time to experiment with pen & ink or past experience with pen & ink, and some time, materials can easily be had for under $20.

The envelopes are No. 10 square flap “dotted washi” envelopes in red from envelopemall.com. More in-depth review of that experience to come in invite post.

Oh, and apologies to the etiquette police as I did not spell out “avenue,” “drive,” their close cousins, nor state names. We also didn’t use titles, but apparently newer etiquette guidelines say full names sans titles are fine. You can’t get me on that one, haha!

Unfortunately, I had to blur out so much for this entry. I will do a few samples “Jane Doe” types next time I sit down to finish addressing the last few stragglers and post those.