Weddingbee

This post is long overdue, but I wanted to make sure all my guest received their invitations before writing about them. Before weddingbee, I never thought in a million years that I would “gocco” my invites. I remember emailing my bridesmaids this gocco post when it came out last February, which got them all excited. Then, my super-talented bridesmaid, Michelle graciously offered to design and help make my invitations! Without her, none of this would have been possible.

My first task: get a gocco! In August, I had bid for and won one off ebay as a pure impulse buy.

The weeks leading up to making the actual invites, Michelle had mastered Adobe Illustrator, did plenty of research online on designs, fonts, papers and envelopes, obtained invitation samples, made many mock-ups of the invitations and emailed me back and forth regarding the designs, colors, positioning, and which paper and envelopes to get. Michelle also found great istockphoto images for me to choose from to get a feel of what I wanted in terms of design. Miss Penguin can also attest to the fact that I sought her sage advice.

One weekend in the summer, Michelle and I met up at Print Icon to brainstorm some ideas about what to do for the invitations. We had decided we wanted to have one theme/graphic that popped up on each insert of the invitation in different ways. We also fell in love with the square half moon card enclosures similar to this one available at Paper Source:

Michelle wanted to make the card enclosures ourselves, and make the half moon bigger so that we could put borders on each insert and each one would peak through the opening.

These are some of the prototypes she made:

However, after looking at some amazing gocco creations, we decided to scrap the printing on white paper idea and we decided we should print on colored paper! We also decided to forgo the card enclosures because it would be too time consuming.

Here are some of the newer prototypes she made:

In the end, we settled on prismatic paper! The best price was found at discountcardstock.com. What is prismatic paper you ask?

“Prismatic Cardstocks - Available in 90 new colors. One side of the sheet represents a fine art watercolor texture while the other side is smooth. These new finishes increase the versatility in all aspects of printing, scrapbooking, rubberstamping, card making and paper crafting.”

The people are discountcardstock are really great about getting back to you and are super nice! One word of advice, make sure you always get samples of colors you are considering because every computer monitor is calibrated differently and colors may actually be different than what you see on the screen. At a dollar per sample, you can’t go wrong! We were originally going to go with an orange, yellow and green theme but upon receiving the samples, we changed our minds.

These are the colors we ended up ordering:

Iced Orange

Frosted Orange

 
Desert Coral Light

I am so glad Michelle opened my eyes to the world of prismatic paper. If it weren’t for her, I probably would have just gocco’d on plain white paper.

So after attending the Billion Dollar Babes Sale back in November, my friend, Mona and I met up with Michelle at Paper Presentation to pick out envelopes before actually gocco’ing.

We ended up getting these:

 
Tiffany Blue A6 (4 ¾ x 6 ½) Envelope 50 per pack
Code:A62185
Price: $10.90

I also bought one of these:

And 1/16″ double faced satin ribbon in dark turquoise similar to this:

The week prior, Mona also dropped off her dad’s paper cutter, which was another key component in this DIY project.

With all the players in place, we were off to Michelle’s apartment to gocco!

Part II: Tackling the Gocco

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