Weddingbee Blog

Yesterday, I made two important trips to the post office. First, I went to buy a stack of stamps. If you are interested, I walked away with a stack of the Herbs for our RSVP postcards and an assortment of the Lunar New Year: Year of the Rabbit and the popular Garden of Love stamps for our envelopes. Second, I returned to the post office to drop off all of our invitations!

One box of invitations, ready to go!

They are currently making their way around the United States and Canada. I cannot wait to share our invitations for both Vegas and Milwaukee with the hive later this week! They turned out better than I could have ever imagined. But, for now, I am going to share our inspiration for our invitations.

We had a few criteria in mind when we started our invitations search:

1. An informal feel: Mr. Mole and I aren’t really fancy people, and we aren’t having a fancy wedding. We wanted our invitations to set the tone and formality of the event.
2. An uncluttered and focused design: We wanted something that was simple but had a prominent design element — an cool pattern, an interesting font, etc.
3. A reasonable price: We didn’t have a strict budget in mind, but we didn’t want to spend too much on paper.

I turned to websites like Etsy and Minted to see if I could find any invitations that met our criteria. I waded through a lot of invitations with birds and tandem bikes before I found some great options for us.

Image via Minted / Design by Teresa Lang Design

Image via Minted / Design by pottsdesign

Image via Minted / Design by j.bartyn design

Image via Minted / Design by chocomocacino

Image via etsy / Design by shineinvitations

Image via esty / Design by CreativeStartDesign

It took me a while to realize it, but I had a very particular vision of our wedding invitations. Can you see what it is? As I look back at my inspiration photos, it’s so clear that it smacks me in the face. All of the invitations that I bookmarked or saved have strong typographical elements to them: ampersands, brackets, fonts.

Mr. Mole suggested that he could design an invitation set based on these inspiration photos. He ended up coming up with a really great logo. The font he used is Gill Sans — or, as I like to refer to it, that font from that super creepy guy.

Image by Mr. Mole / Horrible privacy blurring by Miss Mole

We ended up deciding that Mr. Mole probably had a bit too much on his plate already, so we decided to outsource the invitations. The logo that Mr. Mole created will appear on our wedding programs instead. I think that he would have done a fantastic job on the invitations if time allowed. Oh well.

Back I went to etsy. As I was browsing through the invitations (yet again) on my laptop, my eyes wandered across the room to a framed print on my dresser. I had purchased a tree print from SilhouetteBlue on etsy for Mr. Mole on our first anniversary.

Framed print, candle, picture

This print gave me an idea. I vaguely remembered that the seller also sold stationery — including wedding invitations. I looked up the seller’s name and browsed through her store. There, I found the perfect invitations. I have no idea how I missed them in my original searches!

Image via etsy / Design by SilhouetteBlue

We bought two sets of invitations from Megan. Next time, I’ll show you how everything looked together! Here are some teaser shots.

Some of the supplies…

Out of the box…

What are/were your invitation inspirations? Where did you find them?