Weddingbee Blog

Tonight we finally finished putting together our invitations. We (okay mostly I) really love them! But they were a pain. A real pain. And they weren’t even DIY. Well, they were partly DIY in that I wanted to use boxes instead of outer envelopes. Little did I know I was in for such a maddening experience…

Our finished invitation boxes. (If the Sheraton ever needs gift boxes…)

Midway through our planning, I became obsessed with confectionary colored elements (as is well documented here, here, and here), especially Laduree packaging.

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It’s the details of the laurel wreath…

the finely detailed rococo border…

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…and other sweet bits of fine and delicate eye candy that are so delectable.

All this has become a real inspiration source for the outside of our invitations. I guess I wanted them to look just as pretty at first blush as the do on the inside. Speaking of which, it was such a treat to work with Lindsey Ryan, who really brought my ridiculous Parisian flea market-1930s French Indochine-chinoiserie-English tea party concept to life. More on those later. For now, here’s a sneak peek.

Belly band mimicry

Waggish and whimsical, antiqued elements

Back to the boxes, well, while Lindsey worked on our invitations, I set out to find a simple green gift box to put them in. Something flat, minty in color that would fit an A7 envelope. Simple, right? WRONG. I thought it a no-brainer when I ordered a sample of a light green box from nashvillewraps.com. They have an amazing selection and the perfect green. But the box measured exactly 5 x 7. Our envelopes measure 5.25 x 7.25. It was wishful thinking on my part as I tried to cram the sample invitation Lindsey sent into the box.

So I continued my search (Googling “jewelry gift box”, “two piece cardboard gift box”, and “jewelry set up box”), but the color or the size was always wrong. There are plenty of resources out there: usbox.com, 800giftbox.com, jewelrysupply.com, papermart.com, nu-era.com, bagsandbowsonline, and about a dozen more! And I scoured every box store known to (wo)man/crazy bride. (So if you decide to do something as nuts as stuffing your invitations in boxes, then you can hopefully save yourself some time with one of these.) Ultimately, I found a good enough, but not perfect box at boxandwrap.

A box of boxes!

They were delivered the same day as the invitations!

They’re 5.5 x 7 and a celery green, rather than the light green I had hoped for. Did I really just say that? “Not perfect because it’s celery and not light green.” So lame! Yes, I got stupid over these boxes. Like Miss Cheese said, your inner Perfectionista starts rearing her ugly (well-coiffed?) head in these situations… but they work well enough (even though they’re a tad tight).

Also, I had previously searched all over the internet universe for a very elusive large, oval laurel wreath stamp. I found a place in the UK that had them. The customer service rep there was EXTREMELY helpful and friendly and gave me a little gift of fairy stickers for having to pay international shipping. Not necessary, but very sweet! (If only I had kids or a crafty/scrapbooking bone in my body.)

I used a block letter ’S’ (it was too difficult and repetitive to stamp our three initials) and used gold pigment ink along with the wreath to create the lid decoration. Then I had to find “the perfect pink ribbon”. At this point I’m thinking I’ve officially lost it. Seriously, RIBBON?! One night this week we went to PaperSource and got this thin hot pink thing. But the next day we went to return it and opted for a thicker, paler ribbon (as shown above) that brought together the faded, antiqued feel I was going for. For the first time ever, Mr. P suggested I might be a little bridezilla for being so specific about… freak.in.ribb.on! Mind you, I’m no bridezilla—I don’t even know what day it is.

The not-so-perfect ribbon. Really?

Anyway, so much trouble came of these boxes. After all the boxing and stamping and ribbon tying, we then had to wrap them for mailing. And we also made labels (unfortunately after all we spent on packaging, calligraphy was out) for them.

I tried to get fantzy with the labels and used Vivaldi font to mimic calligraphy and added a little graphic–we’ll see what the post office has to say about it tomorrow.

Another drawback was that mailing parcels to our international addresses would be fairly costly. So we thought we’d get outer envelopes for them. But–there’s always a but–PaperSource doesn’t carry A7.5 envelopes in stock; they must be ordered. Bad planning on my part. We wanted to get them out like, last week, so we couldn’t really wait much longer. Anyhow, Spain, the UK, Germany and the PRC will have some ugly utilitarian envelopes hit their mail stream in the next couple of weeks.

So much wrapping my hands hurt. Notice the ugliness on the left there?

But in the end, after all the annoying packaging—and despite the havoc the process reeked on our home and patience—we’re really happy with they way they came out!

“That’s not happiness to see me”—am I really handling pink bows?

Mr. P gets in on the fun by meticulously cutting the parcel paper.

Boxes everywhere, boxes!