Weddingbee Blog

I love paper. Love it. After Sparks popped the question, one of the first things I got excited about was designing my own paper products for the wedding. I had secretly been thinking about it for a pretty long time, and I had already collected some inspiration pics. (Don’t freak out Sparks—you know I’m not crazy.) So when the time came to start thinking about our save the dates, I was prepared. I had a slew of ideas swimming around in my head and a lot of them looked like this:

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Sparks was especially excited about these because collecting vinyl is right next to me on the list of “things Sparks loves.” Of course, I changed my mind constantly, leaving Sparks confused and semi-disappointed (sorry, babe). But in the end, I knew I wanted something that wouldn’t take four freakin’ months to DIY but that still made a statement. I also really wanted to represent Chicago in the design, and had found new inspiration in a card I had recently given Sparks:

Card by ladypilotletterpress, pic by me

Cute, right? Keeping this in mind, I decided to sketch out something myself and find someone local to letterpress it for me. Easy peasy. Sure. The quotes that I got from local studios were, um…steep. Thank goodness Etsy has been a long friend of mine because after searching for a few hours I finally found Laurie from Lucky Bee Press. I fell in love with the bright blues and classic reds that Lucky Bee used, and their minimalistic designs were perfect for the feel of our wedding. I emailed Laurie the picture of my original inspiration, along with this gorgeous and completely professional sketch:

Bless her heart because Laurie took that chicken scratch and came up with five different design options. Five! I was blown away! Sparks and I looked over all of them and decided to stick with one that was closest to my original design:

(Courtesy of Lucky Bee Press)

I hate to blur out the info…they were so cute! You might also notice in my original sketch that we wanted to go with two separate cards. But, in the interest of saving money on postage, we went with a single card and came up with another way to include some additional info. (You’ll have to wait for that.)

We went back and forth with Laurie for a few days, making a few changes and some tiny tweaks (mostly just the font and size of the card), then waited patiently for her to tell us when they were ready. Boy, it was totally worth the (very short) wait. They turned out AMAZING:

(Courtesy of Lucky Bee Press)

Tada! The Sparkler STDs (heheheee)! They look so sad blurred out like that, but you get the idea. We’ll be mailing them out in the “paper bag” colored envelopes, which are pictured.

Did anyone else design their own paper and have it printed somewhere else? What was your experience like?