Someone deserves a sweater...

Our wedding invitations went out last week. Oh boy! Talk about making something official.

The production of these invitations was a major undertaking by my brother. Here he is mixing up paint::

He created the designs, mixed the paint, printed and printed and printed, and cut each invite by hand {x-acto for him, he doesn't trust paper cutters!}. And unfortunately for us, he did this all in the basement, making it very hard to take good pictures and document the process.

The invites were a combination of screen and letterpress printing. On the fronts, the yellow and gold images are screen-printed, and the green is letter pressed. The green on the backs of each piece are screen-printed.






Because we were doing everything by hand, I wasn't too stressed about having an exact day that the invites had to go out. On the other hand, because we're doing so much of the actual wedding planning and prepping, I was a bit conflicted about when we should require the RSVPs ~ most guides suggest an RSVP date of 4 to 3 weeks before the big day. I would love to know today how many guests we'll have.

To give us some flexibility in this situation, we came up with a great solution:: We added a little hanging tag to the RSVP cards that allowed us to write in the return date rather than having to know it the moment the letterpress plates were made. Another plus ~ this allows us to put different return dates on the smaller second round of invites that are going out a week later than the first!

So, here's what we have:: A fun, twine-tied package with the invite, RSVP card, and info card with some of the important details! I love the final results, and think they set the mood for the fun, relaxed, outdoor, homemade wedding that we're planning!

Here's a close-up of the backs with our initials::

Oh, and one more thing to think about ~ stamps. I found the selection of USPS stamps to be slightly lame at the moment. I'm just not a fan of the current, purple love stamps, but at the same time I didn't want to spend a dollar per stamp to make our own. Our invites required 64 cents in stamps, so I settled on the ug-loves {ugly loves}, and then I paired them with these 29 cent herb stamps. And in the end? The ug-loves grew on me! So if you're in a stamp bind, it is worth going in and seeing what fun combination of stamps you can put together to get the postage and look that you want.

So, as soon as the wedding craziness is over, it's time to start working on Jeff's sweater!