Weddingbee

I am super thrilled to announce that our much anticipated invitation suite is here!

*fanfare*

Not only that, but they are totally what we wanted and have exceeded our expectations. So here is the rundown. Right now, we are getting a Nikkah (in case you missed it, I gave a quick rundown of Pakistani/Islamic traditions) and so we decided to have the ceremony at a beautiful Masjid (Islamic House of Worship). The reception for the Nikkah will be at an Indian restaurant and we will be having a joint (bride family+groom family) mehndi party celebration the night before.

So, we were looking for an invitation for all three events enveloped into a cultural, yet modern suite. After looking around for a while, we settled on a relatively new kid on the scene, a recent graduate from an arts college here in Los Angeles. This was a tough call considering we wanted to impress and try to avoid any kind of unexpected surprises, which can sometimes happen when you don’t use seasoned experts in the wedding business. Anyhow, we bit the bullet and hired our mystery invitation vendor (who I will reveal soon) to create a hip modern, but cultural, invitation set.

We chose lavender as the color since Ms. Mango’s outfit was going to be lavender, key word is ‘was’… more to come on that later. Anyhow, we kind of had an idea of what we wanted so we worked really close with our vendor to achieve the look we were going for. I guess this could be considered one of the perks of working with a new vendor, sometimes the egos aren’t as inflated. So, after rounds of PSD files being thrown around, we got a digital proof about a month ago, and I was floored by how great it was looking. So off to the printers it went! Since our vendor wasn’t an invitation specialist, we actually went on rounds to various paper outlets to get the right paper media for our invitations. After all was said and done, this little baby was popped out:

The front emblem is actually a verse from the Quran stylized to look like a bird. And of course, we’re bling-ing it up with rhinestones. I think the ribbon behind the card (lush gold) complemented the lavender quite well.

Close up of the bird (bird, bird, bird, bird is the word… ehh nevermind).

I love the inside of the card. This is the actual invitation to the Nikkah ceremony. I was completely loving the Moroccan tile theme that was set on the left side of the card. The right side has the usual details, and again, some more rhinestones… chic, no?

A sort of skewed and zoomed out view of the card itself. In homage to Ms. Mango, there was a small artsy-fartsy flower that was placed on the corner of the pocket holding the mehndi and Nikkah reception cards.

This is our Nikkah reception card. It is simple but has the tile graphic that you saw on the Nikkah ceremony card. The top of the card has a verse from the Quran, translated in English, that says,

“And among His Signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves so that ye may dwell in tranquillity with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts). Verily in that are Signs for those who reflect.” [Qur’an 30:21]“

Back of Nikkah reception card which shows people how to get there and what’s going on at night… I had to take out the finger painting session.

This fun little card is the Mehndi card. The bottom of the card has to-scale drawings of me and Ms. Mango. Incredibly realistic.

The back of the card has the directions and a neat little graphic of a “dholak”, the Indian/Pakistani drum which is played on the Mehndi night.

This last picture shows our envelopes. We opted to have a little color graphic printed on the outside of the envelopes.

Anyhow, what do you guys think? Not bad huh. Hope you all enjoyed my little spread on our invitations. Looks like we might be getting our wedding (shaadi) cards made from the same person later in the year. I loved how we were able to provide a lot of input and at the same time see our comments materialize in the cards that we received.

Anybody else taking a unique route to get their invitations made or found some middle ground between DIY and a vendor completely handling the job themselves?

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