Our Wedding Invitations!

So this was such a labor of love. I knew I didn't want to just print invitations and stuff them into envelopes to send out to our guests. From looking at all the wedding blogs, I decided I wanted our wedding invitation suite to have a lot of layers and textures.

As I was designing the invites, I did think gosh ... I wish I could have someone design this for me as being a designer, I'm my own worst critic and in took me longer than I expected to design this. Finally after deciding a design that both Rob and I both liked, it also took a time to find a letterpress printer that can do a 2 color run with a blind deboss on a limited budget. Thanks to one of the wedding blogs, I found Classic Letterpress and was so happy to find that the printer was only a few miles away.

I found a great inspiration from a Save the Date feature on 100 Layer Cake and decided to make my main invitation with a patterned backing from Amy Butler's scrapbook paper goods that I got from Michael's (my favourite store right now! ... after Anthropologie). The Amy Butler and KC scrapbook papers went perfectly with my Indochina (Colonial Vietnam) meets England theme for the wedding: modern vintage inspired with flowers, tea cups and birds. From the assortment of scrapbook paper design, all the guests were able to receive different patterned invites.



I decided to have the main invite sewn to the side to the paper. Since the patterned paper was double sided, I also figured I could cut a strip of the paper and use the other side as a belly band to wrap the RSVP, Details/Directions and magnets. On top of the belly band, I tied it with yarn and enclosed a tag of our embossed initials. I also punched the corners of the invites to give it a more classic feel. In the beginning, all of these things sounded really easy to make and put together but it was very time consuming hand cutting out the card backings & belly band, punching the corners (800 corners!) and making the embossed tag. The tag is actually tea dyed then embossed punched with our initials logo, but I think the end result doesn't really show that it was tea dyed. Oh well, I guess I won't be doing much tea dyeing in the future. The real killer from the whole project was sewing the invite to the paper. I thought that would be so easy, but apparently sewing on paper is not that easy when you are trying to make sure you sew a straight line.

Close the end, I was contemplating with also doing an envelope liner which I know would be more work for me, but I really wanted to put the invitation suite into something before putting it in the envelope for contrast. Thankfully I found this great idea on Martha Stewart Weddings about doily envelope lining. So perfect! Though Rob did mention that adding the envelope liner was like "pimping" our invites. Silly boy!



It took few days longer than expected when I started to cut, sew and assemble the invites. At one point, I didn't even leave the house for 2 days! But in the end, I'm very happy with the result. And to know that Rob was impressed with it too makes it all worth it.

Voila! Here are some pictures of our invitation wedding suite. Hope you like them!
(All photos by Our Day in April)

PS: Our wonderful engagement pictures on the Save the Date Magnets were taken by the talented Clayton Austin.