Project Invite

When asked, I say I don't know what got into me. But I kind of do know, it was the bridal blogosphere's fault.

What I mean is, when it came time to decide on invitations I came up with a fairly elaborate idea which required many different pieces AND, and here's the big AND, AND I decided to make them myself (mostly. As you'll see, I had a lot of help. But I mean "make them myself", as opposed to paying someone to make them and deliver them ready-made to my home). Which, was completely insane. I'm pretty sure the last thing I made was circa third grade and involved glued macaroni.

And why? Because as I do with each new hobby or interest (so far: poker, cooking, home design, restaurants, and now wedding) I've become completely immersed in it and read all the blogs associated with said hobby/interest. The wedding blogs, well, they're all freaking adorable. Seriously, click through my blogroll, you will find multiple virtual cheeks to pinch. Cute as pie girls with ultra creative ideas on typeface, on paper, on color, on details, put it all out there for the world to see. I loved every second of it. So when the invitation momentum striked (stroke? What? I'm an immigrant.) I went with it. This is what I came up with:

We found this awesome calligrapher named Jane Dukes. I liked her handwriting a lot and she was super flexible as we arranged everything on the fly (we need 50 invites, um, now that we've actually counted, more like 100). I highly recommend Jane. Visit her website. This is the invite with personal details blanked out:



Jane wrote our invites on something like parchment paper, which we purchased at Kate's Paperie in NYC.

We rolled up the invites and tied them with twine. I bought the twine on ebay because I live in NYC and having never ever had a use for twine before had no idea where else to get it. Seriously, twine.

Then, we put the rolled up invitation in a bottle partially filled with sand and shells, all of which we purchased at this website. The prices were good, the delivery was fast and the only problem was that we had also ordered the boxes for the bottles from the site. The boxes were the perfect size, but for the bottles and the bottles only. We realized too late, um, we need a reply card.





So you'd think, because I've made a complicated invitation I'd keep the reply card simple. Clearly you have not been paying attention when I tell you I lost my damn mind. I found a template for a boarding pass online and my fabulous friend Cora from Cora Designs fixed it up for me.

THEN, I dragged IC to Paper Presentations twice to buy the card stock for the boarding passes, the board pass envelopes, the perforator (spell check still doesn't know but this is something that makes like a dotted line so you can easily rip off part of the paper. I perforated! Me! Actually, I now own not one but two perforators. Don't ask.).





The idea was that people would rip off the right side of the boarding pass and mail it back in a tiny little envelope. Until we found out that the US postal service has rules for how small an envelope can be. We found one that would work and finally, finally we were good to go.

We got the boxes here, like a million percent cheaper than Mailbox Etc. or even the post office. They were lifesavers. I was close to giving up on the whole project when we had such a hard time finding boxes that would work.

We don't have wedding colors, really, but when I have to make a color decision (twine, box filler, yarmulkes, etc.), I've been choosing variations on blue.



My most inspired little detail, and the one I think will probably be mostly overlooked because of all the other cool components of the invite are the Turks&Caicos stamps I bought on ebay and used to decorate the boxes.







Oh, and you can see an address label peeking out in the last pic (I do believe it's Ms.Etypical's, actually). That was another "oh yeah, we need labels for the boxes and oh yeah, we need labels for the return envelopes, they're starting to refer to us by name at the paper store." We used a font that I'm obsessed with called Write Like Jesse which I found on DaFont (a really cool website I discovered by reading the aforementioned adorable bridal blogs). The typewriter font on the boarding passes is also from DaFont, called Rough Typewriter.

Now that it's over I can say it was totally worth it. We got a great reaction from our guests and I loved making our invites unique and different. I don't know how many opportunities I'll get to have such a direct effect on various wedding elements ("So, is it crazy that I'm thinking of buying the flowers and making my own bouquet."-Me "Yes, and let's never speak of this again."-IC) and it was nice to have done this.