Wedding Blog

Thanks to all of you out there who offered so many great suggestions and helpful hints about how to do my calligraphy. I went out and bought all kinds of pens and markers and other tools of scribal warfare. I hunted them down, got them home, and set to work practicing to get a sense of what kind of writing I could do with them. The answer: too big. I was looking for an instrument that could do detailed, frilly work. I had a vision in mind, you see, something grand and girly and graceful. Something like this…

{from A Lucky Orchid Wedding}

Eventually I gave in and bought a calligraphy set complete with 6 nibs so that I could play around and see which size I liked best. I finally settled on the fine nib and I was super excited to get to work on addressing my invitations. I wanted to get some practice in first, though, just to be sure that I’d settled on a style I could actually accomplish before tearing into my limited supply of envelopes.

After about 10 pages worth of “practicing” this fancy writing, two things became very clear. One, I needed A LOT more practice and two, it was going to take FOREVER. A swirl would look pretty good, but then a loop would be all wrong. The grand and graceful part just wasn’t happening. Girly, though, that seemed a possibility, and even cute looked like it was making an appearance, so I just went with it.

The next task was figuring out how to write in a straight line. The idea of drawing lines in pencil and then going back and erasing them was just too much for me. I liked the idea of the card stock printed with heavy lines and it turned out that I could just see the template through my envelopes. The issue to solve was the whole centering question, so I did a little searching and found a wonderful How To on this very subject from The Bride of Rochester. The answer was why center, when you can stagger! Problem solved!

My Template

{The top is for the outer envelope, the bottom
is for the inner envelope.}

Since we mailed them from Singapore, I had to forgo the pretty present box idea. I don’t even want to think what the postage on that would’ve been. After perusing the stamp selection at our local SingPost, we decided to go with wildlife. At first I wasn’t so crazy about the idea of birds and fishes being on the invites, but then it struck me “Hey, they’re in pairs!” So then I made up this very Winnie the Pooh like song in my head, and every time I stamped an envelope I sang to myself “Deux birds of a feather, two fishes swim together.” And much like Pooh, that’s about as far as I got. Here’s a little close up of my little happy pairs…

Because it was airmail, I had to stick that nasty little sticker on the front, too. I’m glad the lady at the post office was nice enough to let me do it myself, otherwise who knows where it might’ve ended up on my envelopes.

And here they are, the finished product…

Done! YEAH!