{Wedding} Our Wedding Invites

I've been desperately wanting to share these with you for some time now - but time itself has been rather fleeting and any spare moments I do have, go towards checking and re-checking guestlists and supplier info and RSVPs (and sending emails to the people who haven't RSVP'ed yet. Ahem PEOPLE).

But finally! Here is a little peek at our WEDDING INVITATIONS!

I'm not going to start off this post by saying "I wanted something a little different..." Because duh. Every bride wants something "a little different". When most of the time it ends up all being very similar to everything else. What I will say though, is that I wanted something tactile. Something with different textures, a mixture of papers and things and bits and pieces stuck/tied/stitched/pieced together. I wanted something that had a very definite hand-crafted feel and something that guests would immediately know has been individually crafted just for them. When our guests received our invitations I wanted them to feel like they were opening up a secret little package and almost taking a peek into a drawer of our daily lives. Our invites were not fussy about measured lines, straight cut papers and neat edges. They were torn, tacked and bundled into beautiful individual parcels.

Here's how it began:


As with all of our wedding projects I started with making a few different prototypes in different papers, fonts, colours and sizes to get an idea of what would work best.


Initially I began experimenting with using brightly coloured paper clips to bind some elements of the invites together - also to create the "bottom drawer" vibe I mentioned earlier. I later switched these out for brightly coloured mini wooden pegs.


We chose the basic colour scheme of the invites to be different shades of coppers, bronzes, earthy browns and golds and I wanted to add a pop of colour with some bright ribbons and the mini pegs.


We ended up choosing quite a "standard" format for the actual wording of the invite. "Standard" in that I have seen this type of design on loads of different wedding and design blogs.

The Invitation Elements
There were several bits and pieces that we used to construct our invites. The first, and most important being the actual invitation wording. This was printed on an earthy brown cardstock with quite a grainy texture (above). Once these were printed I sourced some very thick and slightly embossed sheets of paper in different copper and bronze tones. I tore up two different sized pieces of this paper and used bright pink cotton to machine-stitch these to the invitation wording. (As you can see from the pic below, some invitations had the bronze sheet as the under layer and some had it has the top layer)

The stitching really helped to give another dimension of texture and even though I am not really a seamstress, it was quite fun to stitch them all up and I only broke the sewing machine once twice.

 
 The relationship between Warr and I has grown through letters and writing and emails and good song lyrics and I knew I wanted to include a few meaningful quotes to bring in this wordy-business. So I printed three of our favourite quotes in a soft brown onto a metallic gold paper. The three quotes were:

Happy is the man who finds a true friend and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife. - Franz Schubert

There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness. - Friedrich Nietzche. 

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, whilst loving someone deeply gives you courage. - Lao Tzu 

The next element were the origami hearts which I sat and folded. (Yes I did). I used this particular style of origami heart because it created a bit of a bookmark effect which would be easy to combine it and "clip-onto" other elements of the invitation. It took a bit of guesswork to work out exactly where I should print the names onto the paper I bought and at what size it should be. But eventually I got it to work just perfectly so that our names and our wedding date met at exactly the centre of the heart after it had been folded. You can't really tell from these pictures but the paper I used for the origami hearts was almost a translucent/opaque sheet

Also pictured above is a photo of Warren and I taken from our recent trip to Turkey, I printed these on glossy photo paper and styled them to look like mini polaroids. (Obsession with old school cameras ?! yep.)


For many of our guests who are not from the area we included a thin strip of directions. These were actually printed on scented paper. (Yes, I know). I'm not even sure if any of our guests would have noticed this - and it's not exactly as if you can put a "scratch-n-sniff" sticker on your wedding invite. (Can you?). We closed up the directions with the top peeping out and fastened it with our mini polaroid snap and a brightly coloured peg.


We then attached an origami heart to one of the quotes and tucked it behind the direction slip. We tied the whole thing together with a coppery-brown ribbon.

I got some of my family to come over and help assemble all the bits and pieces once they were all completed. Family is good at helping. Also, that bottle of wine in the background there?

Wine is good at helping too.

As a final touch I stamped a "Made with Love" onto the back of each individually crafted invitation package and sent them off in gorgeous shimmery-gold envelopes.

What do you think?!

xo