Weddingbee Blog

Feel free to just scroll down to the good stuff. I won’t be offended. Or, take the extended, scenic tour…

Knock, knock! A box arrives early Saturday morning, waking me out of a nightmare about being stalked by a mountain lion wearing a mantilla veil.

Oh, look! My new BFF, Tara Bliven of Ephemera, has thoughtfully pre-assembled her lovely creations! As others have testified, Tara is an absolute delight to work with. Using our “Sweetest Type of Love” theme, she worked tirelessly on draft after draft until my neurotic demands were met (”more symmetry! more swirls!”)…

I haven’t blurred out most of our information, because I think it’s an absolute sacrilege to digitally desecrate the beautiful work Tara has done.

The ink colors are just perfect. The paler pink is the exact match of my dress, and the silvery grey type looks amazing up close.

Tara also lined the inner envelopes with that same subtle shade of blush pink dotted paper:

But what really blows me away is how well the delicate, letterpressed details came out. Tara played with a number of different from-scratch images until she’d designed the perfect vintage typewriter and collection of old-fashioned candies:

It was another “Tara, you’re brilliant!” moment when she suggested putting our website on the typewriter page. We had planned on including a small insert with the address, but figured this saved paper (and was cuter, too).

To play up the romantic, vintage angle, we printed our names and some of the script in the retro-riffic Feel Script (first blogged by the font-tastic Mrs. Lemon). And to bring in the typewriter element, we chose (from a cast of hundreds typewriter fonts) Urgent Telegram AOL. It has just the amount of “grunginess” we wanted. We also used both of these on our website, as well. Gotta love that aesthetic integration!

Working with Tara (read: firing four emails at her a day), she got a good sense of the Lovebug brand of humor. And she encouraged us to have some fun with the wording of our reply cards. As if much encouragement were needed - ha!

Since I so wholeheartedly jump at the chance to be a creative smartass, I wanted to give our guests the same opportunity. Plus, the extra space will allow them to tell us anything they might need to.

But one of the coolest features of the whole dealybob has got to be that Brigitte, Tara’s go-to calligraphy goddess, perfectly copied the Feel Script font for us!

Having Brigitte imitate the font was Tara’s brilliant brainchild, and I’m just thrilled with how they came out.

And finally, the coup de invitation grace - the slate grey ink of the calligraphy matches the (finally decided upon) set of vintage stamps we’re using for the outer envelopes:

We had them weighed, and our 98 cents worth of writers, actresses, and presidents gives us a one cent leeway. Yippee!

So, is Tara the Supreme Guru of Gorgeous Invitations or what, people?