Our Wedding: The Newspaper Program
I saw a sweet wedding invitation printed in a newspaper format once. This would be too expensive to mail out, as they're bigger... but I still wanted to do something with this idea... so we decided to make our programs into newspapers instead. This was Aaron and mine's favorite part of wedding planning: designing our wedding program. We wanted something different and it was really fun to collaborate with him and to see his creative side in this as well.
We used the Newspaper Club to print these and loved how they turned out. Inside is a quick summary of our story, thank-yous to our vendors, bios of our wedding party, activities for the kiddos at our wedding, and some photos ;) You can view the PDF online here... and if anyone out there loves these as much as I do and want something similar for their wedding, holler at me because I'd love to design one of these again!
Our Wedding : Invitations & Handlettering
Welcome to part one of our blog series titled, Our Wedding. Over the next couple of weeks (or month or two- let's be honest), we'll be writing about each of our vendors and the team that it took to make our day so beautiful and us. In this first post, we're talking invitations and handlettering! Follow along on this process :)
We knew we wanted some type of floral element in our invitation suite and I thought that an envelope liner would be perfect. In enters my friend from college, Eleni. She is an amazing illustrator and I wanted to be able to hire her for something. She's just too good. We emailed her some of our inspiration images and she sent us some drafts. It was a pretty quick turn-around as we loved what she sketched out for us.
Here are some images from this process:
SKETCHES
Eleni sent us two concepts and we chose the one pictured here. She then finalized it with color.
FINAL
Here's what they looked like prior to assembly!
When it came to who would be designing and printing our invitations, there was no question. I interned for Sara back in 2013 and have since stayed connected with the business taking photos and working at their storefront. We always joked that she'd one day do my wedding invitations. I knew I wanted our invitations to be letterpress and on beautiful, thick paper. Sara did an awesome job encapsulating what we wanted for our invites because we wanted it to be able to timeless but modern. We didn't want anything that was 'trendy' per say, which is why we kept all illustrative elements outside of the invitation itself.
While I was finding inspiration for our invitations, I found the font F37 Bella. It's a beautiful font that is sophisticated with geometric elements.
The main palette for our wedding colors were black and white, with touches of dark green, plum and burgundy. I loved the idea of keeping our invites simple in the colors and I wanted to incorporate blind letterpress so you could really feel the invites because of our thick paper.
Our info card was a play on the idea as we had a password for our wedding website. The blind letterpressing made it almost like a password card.
Aaron designed our logo! A triangular shape to represent our relationship with God. The left side is meant to look like an A and the right side is a D. He did a good job, right?!
Once we finalized our design, Aaron and I went into the shop and watched as Sara pressed all of our invites. I took photos of the whole process, but lost them since they had been stored on my stolen laptop. Huge bummer :(
I've been working part-time at Paper Source for over a year now and when the holidays come around, Paper Source comes out with holiday colors for their Paper Bar. I fell in love with Spruce as soon as I saw it. I wish it was a year-long color! Once the holidays are over, these envelopes are on super clearance. The standard size for invitations is A7 (5x7), but I went for A6 (4x6) instead because that's the only size we had left and it didn't make too much of a difference. I managed to buy 90 envelopes for about $9! To fill in the remaining envelopes we needed, I purchased black A6 too.
We also got a custom embosser through Paper Source since we were doing colored envelopes and I didn't want more work for Sara to letterpress our return address. I thought it was a fun idea since we were doing blind letterpress on our invites.
Aaron has a friend who is self-taught in calligraphy and once I saw her work, I was so excited. Ellen is super talented and in her particular field, I know that she'll go far. We hired her to address our envelopes and also our place cards! Aaron found some marble tiles from Lowes and Ellen used a permanent paint pen to write on 'em. They doubled as a party favor andddd they weren't too expensive!
The last element of our invitations were our stamps! Maybe I'm too detailed but I wanted the stamp to really pull everything together. I used some of the illustrations from Eleni and added an ampersand using the same font as our invite and ordered them from Zazzle. They turned out awesome and added just the right amount of color to the outside of our envelopes.
Final thoughts? Invitations set the tone of your wedding since they're most likely the first thing your guests see regarding your wedding. I always thought I'd want to design my own invitations and do this all myself, but I am so glad I had someone else help! Obviously I am a little bias because I have a graphic design background, but the details matter to me. Details like paper type, envelopes, stamps, etc. We wanted a beautiful look to our day, but also not too serious. I mean, if you know me and Aaron, we like to have sophisticated fun. Is that a thing? I mean if having tacoland as the password to our wedding website didn't clue someone in... :) Hope you enjoyed reading!
Our Bonhoeffer Print
If you know me at all, I am a giver! I love gift-giving! Receiving is fun too, but nothing brings me as much joy as the look I get from my loved ones when I nail it when it comes to gift-giving... so you can imagine the agony (okay, I'm definitely exaggerating here but the word is close enough to my feelings) I go through every year when Christmas comes around. If I had it my way, I would get a meaningful gift for everyone I love... but such is life, this is not realistic. Aaron and I have much saving to do when it comes to our goals so we came up with an alternative idea: we would make gifts!
I read Life Together early on in my time at SPU and it really struck a chord with me. It's one of the few books I actually enjoyed reading in college so I kept it. Awhile ago, I took it out again to re-read it with Aaron because at that time, we were trying to figure out what community meant, especially in regards to living out our faith. This little book has so much wisdom-- anyway, we pulled out one of our favorite quotes from the book and decided to make an art print to give to our closest friends.
“Only where hands are not too good for deeds of love and mercy in everyday helpfulness can the mouth joyfully and convincingly proclaim the message of God’s love and mercy.”
Of course, when it came to actually implementing the idea as far as time and energy went, it took us awhile to get started. There were actually moments when I wanted to give up on the idea, because we had no time and because I'm a perfectionist, I didn't think we could pull it off. However, I could tell Aaron was very keen on the idea; I knew it made him giddy. One evening he pulled out a few branches and leaves he had noticed in his front "yard" and that was the jumpstart we needed to get the project rolling.
Aaron laid out his findings on his desk and sent me this picture:
From there, he did a sketch with pencil and outlined in pen:
I placed these pictures in Adobe Illustrator and made them vector images and started shifting some things around. Below is some work in progress:
After some drafts, here was our finished print!
We wrote a little note to give to our friends, printed these bad boys out, packaged them in nice cellophane bags (because that always makes things legit), and packaged them up with some good ol' kraft wrapping paper. To make things a little bit more fun, I made prints of Aaron's film photos he had taken over the last few years to add a little more personalization to the whole thing and calligraphed name tags.
We had a lot of fun doing this together and our friends were so surprised and thankful. I'm already curious as to what we'll be making next year for our friends!
If you'd like to get a copy of this print, head on over to our shop and purchase a downloadable print for $10.00. The proceeds from this project will go directly to Arise and Shine Uganda, a babies' home where I volunteered for a few months in 2013 and 2015. Contact us if you have any questions about this effort!