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Guess what, Hive? Our lovely invites are done and mailed out! After months of designing, redesigning, agonizing over wording and dumb spelling errors we are done! Celebratory dance break! We sent these babies out last week and have already gotten a couple of RSVPs back.
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After working with my Lil Boa on a couple of drafts for the invites, I started hunting down the paper I would use for them.
Cue Cards & Pockets—I loved their large selection of colors and immediately ordered a couple of free samples to get to see the colors up close.
*Personal Pic
I ordered six samples in white, light purple, and dark purple in both the shimmer and matte types of paper. My actual selections were: matte (Snow White, Grape, and Purple) and shimmer (Crystal, Amethyst, and Violette). I would like to pick one white shade, one light purple shade, and one deep purple shade.
Matte shades are on the left and shimmer on the right.
I’m lucky enough to have the very talented Lil Boa for a sister, since she happens to be studying advertising and has to take graphic design classes as part of her degree. This wonderful human being graciously offered to do our wedding invitations and all other paper-related stuff. We worked on the invites long distance, me being in Puerto Rico and her all the way in NYC, but by using Skype’s share screen we managed to rock it out. Our first step in invitation creation was finding a starting point—pictures of invites I liked—so she could have an idea of what to do. I sent her these:
Image via Mrs.Duckling on Weddingbee
It seems to me that I have been lacking in posts about wedding crafts. This seems a bit odd. There sure are a ton of crafts on my to-do list. I have a house full of craft supplies. I even have a checklist (sadly unchecked) of crafts to get cracking on. One would think that I would be a wedding craft blogging machine with DIY tutorials coming out of my ears!
However, for the last couple of months these things have been neglected due to one craft—the mother of all wedding crafts—that has totally monopolized my craft-brain-bandwidth, rendering me incapable of thinking about any craft that was not this craft.
Ladies, I am talking about The Invitation! Mr. Aardvark (seriously, he was SUPER helpful) and I started back in August by looking online at paper and finally ordering some from Paper Source. Since then it has been slow and not-so-steady progress, but we are finally, really, actually done. All we have to do is drop them in the mail. (Hopefully before the rates go up on the 22nd.)
We have cut, corner-punched, glued, and folded. We have suffered paper cuts, burns and blisters. We have had mess-ups and re-dos and re-re-dos. But today, I can tell you, it was worth it.
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Featured on Weddingbee
All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
Greetings from the Snapdragon Sweat Shop! Many moons ago, I stated that the only DIY coming out of my house would be invitations. Well, turns out that invitations are more than enough to thoroughly overwhelm my to-do list. I know many of you share my pain.
From the get-go, Bossyboots and I had wanted a folk art, painted style to our invitations. We loved the look of gouache, as beautifully showcased by Anna Bond over at Rifle Paper. We briefly investigated going the Rifle route, but in the end, I decided I want to paint our invitations myself for a few reasons:
After 100,000 hours of painting, many cups of tea (and Shiner, let’s be honest), and more than one moment of utter defeat, I finally sent my invitation files off to a professional printer. After all the hard work I put into creating these invites, there was no way in hell I was going to fight with my at-home Dell printer, to boot. I am a tough cookie, but that would have just been too much!
We’ll be mailing our invitations this week, and I’ll post a full run-down once they’re on their way—until then, here’s a sneak peek!
…handwriting.
As I mentioned, we received our save-the-date envelopes early so that I could get working on the calligraphy for the envelopes. My main artistic skill has always been my penmanship—since I was a kid (sorry—no long lost samples of my journals to insert here). And to answer one of the most asked questions—no, I did not attend a Catholic school.
I thought it would be fun to do the calligraphy for our paper products but, somewhat more importantly, I thought our friends and family would expect it. Seriously—for those who know me well, if I had paid for calligraphy it would have been…I’d argue…disappointing. Even Mr. Turkey took it for granted.
So, to start, I looked online to get style inspiration. Like our paper products, I was going to go more modern with the save-the-date calligraphy and more classic for our invitations. I saw a lot of fabulous work on the web—so many talented people!!
Besides the bright color, I liked the extension of the letters. / Image via The Social Life of Paper
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
This is the final post in my Sweet Suite series. I even debated if this post was necessary but I remembered how useful I found these types of posts when I was starting to brainstorm the process of how to create our invitations.
I had an overall vision of how I wanted our invitations to look when they were put all together, including the map insert, the twine and the mini-moo. Translated to words, it was like this: the invitation would be the largest element, the RSVP postcard would be the middle piece and our map/directions card would be the smallest. I had originally envisioned the map and directions on one side and a bit bigger than the RSVP, but it just didn’t work out that way. I printed a ton of samples until I got the sizing right, which ended up being two invitations per page and four map/directions per page. My steps will begin after the printing step, which is an obvious beginning step.
Step 1:
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Our wedding invitations are done!! They were mailed out last week, and I’m quite certain everyone has received them. Well, everyone except my cousin who live in Mexico. Hers was returned to my parents’ house.
There were some hiccups on the way to getting these invitations all done and ready to be sent out, but this is a celebration, so we’re going to focus on the positive. A group effort between me, Momma Kettle, Daddy Kettle, and a couple family friends got the job done.
The invitations were designed by an amazing photographer/graphic designer who’s dating one of Mr. Kettle’s friends. She did amazing work and I’m super excited about how they turned out. They perfectly fit our vision of the wedding of being a quirky twist on a classic. So enough talking; on to the pictures and captions!
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| Personal Image: I took this without the flash, so you could see the more ivory cream color of the outer envelope |
It was never a question for me whether or not I would design our invitations. My job is very logical and so any creative outlet I can utilize, I do. Client presentations have become very colorful, just to appease my creative urges. Our budget also had something to do with it; as much as I would kill for a custom illustrated suite, it wasn’t in the cards for us.
I started brainstorming in the first week we were engaged and over the course of the year I slowly created our invitation suite. Having time on my side was a huge advantage; I was able to take my time and when I would reach a point of frustration I could walk away and (hopefully) come back more inspired.
So, just how much did our DIY suite come out costing?
A Sweet Price Tag:
Hive, have you seen the new Randomizer series? I have, and it’s awesome! It seriously put me into “wanting to do recaps” mode just so I could participate. I feel like before I can start recapping, I should share one of my favorite things with you: our invitations!
Our invitation suite was a DIY affair…and it ended up taking longer than I thought (which is how it always happens, right?!). I’ll break the whole process down for you, but it’ll probably be easy to do in pictures. 
The first step was to create the invitation suite. As much as I loved all those modern invitations I kept talking about so many months ago, I really wanted something that looked fresh, but ultimately traditional. I spend all day, every day designing hip, modern things…for our wedding, I decided to follow my little designer-heart and create something that I loved, even if it wasn’t exactly “cool” and seemed traditional. That was my inspiration…
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Hi hive! Whew, am I glad this last week is over. It was a busy one; from jury duty to decorating our Christmas tree…clearly life doesn’t stop when you are planning a wedding and anxiously trying to write a post to reveal your invites to an important online community! We have had RSVPs rolling in since last week and I think it’s safe to say that our invitations have reached our guests and I can finally share them with you!
Having designed, created, and assembled every part of these, they were certainly a labor of love but I’m also relieved to have them completed. You remember my mailbox reaction? That has dissipated and has been replaced with giddiness each time I check our mailbox and see it filled with RSVPs. Without further ado, the Honey invitations!
Starting with the envelope, that I’m oddly in love with:
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| Guest Address Label |
Before I get to my invites (we’ll get there eventually—haven’t even shared our save the dates yet), I thought I’d share my “experience.” Warning—it’s minimal.
One of my bridesmaid duties in a wedding this past year was shower invitations and, needless to say, I set myself some lofty goals to create a high-quality product for the bride-to-be. I didn’t totally DIY the invitations, but many of the elements are DIY.
For context, the bridesmaids chose coffee as the primary theme for the shower. The bride was a huge fan of coffee, and we thought the color of the caffeinated beverage (brown) went quite well with the scheme chosen for her wedding (purple and gold). So, when starting the invitation journey, I searched online for any options with a coffee motif.
I found, quickly, that this was an uncommon theme, which meant some creativity and flexibility was in order. Ultimately, we decided upon these invites from Papeterie* featuring a pot and using purple, brown, and gold.
Hate to blur it…
But an invitation was only so much in the greater scheme of the suite I had in mind. First, we needed to type up directions to the location and explain the contents of the envelope. I have shared my invitation suite online here (albeit in altered form to be generic). The suite also included recipe cards.** I created a template to be 4 x 6 and put in space for well wishes beyond the recipe itself. Each recipe card has a different image, either wedding or coffee related. It’s easy enough to change the images—just make sure they all have the same dimensions. For both the directions and the recipe cards, I used card stock for printing and cut them with different decorative scissors.
Our invitations have now made it to most of their destinations. Faster than expected, even: we got a text from Mr. Mole’s sister the day after I dropped them in the mail. So now it’s time that they make it to the hive’s computer screens! My warning is that there are lots and lots of photos ahead. The coral envelopes are our Vegas invitations; the sage envelopes are our Milwaukee invitations.
Two kinds of stamps: USPS, Personalized Address
Imagine you get one of these in your mailbox.
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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!
I was going through some files one day and found a stack of wedding invitations that I’d saved. Sometimes I see people write on the Weddingbee Boards that guests throw invitations away, but I never have. Does anyone else save their invitations?
Anyway, looking at the stack, they were almost uniform. Two were printed on the exact same paper with the same border, and those weddings weren’t near each other in time or location. They were all lovely invitations. They were just very similar.
Photo by Miss Mink
There was a time when I judged an invitation by running my finger across the text. I cringe at how petty that is, but I thought the best invitations didn’t look different—they felt different. I’m glad my horizons have broadened. When we started looking at invitation designs, the overall look, not the feel, was important to me.
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