Weddingbee Blog

After months and months and months of obsessing over our invitations, I finally have a piece of them in my hot little hands! Guess what arrived in the mail this week? What could have possibly gotten Josie so excited?

The suspense was just killing her.

What’s that you say? It says “envelopes” on the box, so my “GUESS WHAT” game isn’t working? Oh. Well, then. You got me—IT’S OUR ENVELOPES!

Our calligrapher, Michele Clark, wrote out our return address, scanned it into a high-res file and then Kristin Walker at Twin Ravens Press ordered letterpress plates.

Photo courtesy of Kristin

How cool is that? Kristin letterpressed our envelopes first so that we could get them to Michele by the end of January. This is very early, I know, but I was thinking the more time I left myself to work on envelope liners, the better.

Kristin is super-awesome and sent us some photos of the envelopes while she was working on them. SO cool!

Photo courtesy of Kristin

We used the same “sparkling sapphire” cardsandpockets.com envelopes that we used for our save the dates, except these are regular A7s instead of square. The addresses are printed in gold.

Photo courtesy of Kristin

Kristin also letterpressed our address on the RSVP envelopes, but she’s holding onto those to send to us with our invitations(!!!).

We had planned to request gold ink for the guest addresses on the outer envelopes, too, but when I saw lavender ink in a photo on Michele’s blog, I just couldn’t resist. And I’m so glad we took the risk, even though it won’t match the back—it looks SO cool!

Want to see? Josie did, too!

Here’s a look at Michele’s calligraphy head-on:

It is so tricky to properly capture the color of these envelopes. The metallic color doesn’t come through well on a computer screen, plus you can’t tell how multifaceted the shimmer is! I think this photo got the closest:

Oh, yes, by the way—we’re not using inner envelopes, so we put “and guest” on the outer envelope. I know it’s bad etiquette, but … eh. I tried to care about it, I really did. I just couldn’t. I really don’t think anyone else will, either.

And here’s a shot where you can see the lavender ink on the front and the gold ink on the back:

We’re fine with it! In fact, we love it. I know a lot of people consider envelopes really unimportant, since most guests will just rip them open and throw them away. I don’t disagree with this. I realize that all the money and effort poured into these babies will go unnoticed by many. But I think they’re important. I want our guests to pull this envelope out of their mailbox and know it contains something really special. I want them to see their names in handwritten calligraphy and feel special themselves. Mr. Panther agrees. It helped a lot that Kristin and Michele both have very reasonable pricing, and they’re both crazy awesome! I mean, really. Go hire them for your stuff. Immediately.

Now, as far as having your envelopes addressed five months before the wedding—I would recommend avoiding it if you can. After feeling stressed and rushed with our save the dates, I felt it necessary to leave a HUGE time cushion for our invitations. But I can almost guarantee there will be guests whose addresses change in the next few months, and I’m going to have to keep bugging people to make sure our precious babies will arrive at the right place. Luckily, Michele kept a bunch of our envelopes and will be available for updates. Phew!

Our invitations themselves (NOT the enclosures or belly band or envelope liners) should be done in a few weeks, but I just can’t reveal them until we mail them out at the end of April. But I’ll try to share as many sneak peeks as I can!

Did you give your invitation envelopes some love? What method did you use to address them?

All personal photos unless otherwise noted