Weddingbee Blog

On Friday you guys saw our whimsical, English garden, Mrs. Perfume-inspired invitation suite, created by Lindsey Ryan Designs. Now, as promised, I’d like to show you the outsides of the envelopes that showed up in our guests’ mailboxes.

We decided to go with custom address labels instead of calligraphy because we didn’t have room in our invitation budget to hire a calligrapher. Lindsey printed our address labels for us and sent them along with our invites. She also printed return address labels for us.

You can’t really tell, but the backgrounds of the labels were clear so that the envelopes showed through the backs. Lindsey did a great job on these labels, but I was disappointed that we didn’t spring for calligraphy.

I felt that the combination of the vintage stamps and the labels made the envelopes look too cluttered. I ended up hand addressing a few of the extra invitations (I added some guests at the last minute and had no labels for their invites). Although I’m no calligraphy expert, I loved how the simple black handwriting looked with the grouping of stamps in the corner. I wish I had taken a picture to share with you guys! I think with some practice, I could have hand-calligraphed them all. However, there was no way in hell was I going to do that while studying for the bar exam.

These are the vintage stamps that I chose—a set of endangered flora stamps from 1979. The invites required sixty-one cent stamps, so I used four fifteen-cent stamps on each envelope and then added a one-cent stamp to each. The one-cent stamps I bought at the post office totally clashed with the invitations, but at this point I really didn’t care anymore!

Source

The stamp’s pretty ugly–especially when you put it next to the vintage stamps. Oh well! I wish I had a picture of the entire front of the envelope so you could get the full effect. It looked a little haphazard, and the once-cent stamp just made it worse. At least the return address labels went onto the back flap, freeing up some space on the front. It’s a little frustrating because if I had gone with a simple sixty-one cent stamp, the labels probably would have looked really cool. Or if I had gone with calligraphy, the vintage stamps would’ve really stood out.

Overall, working with Lindsey was a good experience. She is very enthusiastic about design and obviously she’s great at it. She also made the process fun by getting my feedback every step of the way. She would send links to different fun fonts for me to peruse, and she compiled a whole gallery of inspiration photos for me to look at and give her feedback on. She worked so hard to try and pinpoint my vision and to tweak the invitations until they were perfect. I could not have been happier with the finished product. While the address labels didn’t work out quite the way I had hoped, I felt like this was a fairly minor issue in the grand scheme of things.

Some more inspiration from the LRD Etsy shop

For anyone interested in ordering custom invitations from Lindsey, I suggest starting the process early. Custom design takes a long time and usually involves a lot of back and forth between the designer and the customer. For me, this was the best part of the process, as Lindsey helped me solidify the vague vision that was floating around in my head.

One of the inspiration pictures for my invites

Finally, Lindsey is great about working within your budget. Just let her know at the beginning how much you’d like to spend and she will do her best to create something for you in that price range.

I hope this post was informative. If you have any other questions about my invitations or would like more details about the process, leave a comment below and I’ll try to elaborate.