The Invitation

A.P. and I are getting ready to jet off to Montreal for the weekend. Seriously. One of our wedding gifts was a free round trip ticket to anywhere in Canada, and A.P. and I decided to take a quick weekend trip to French Canada! Yay! We leave at the ass crack of dawn tomorrow morning and return Monday afternoon. It should be fun, and I'm looking forward to speaking French. I studied the language for sixteen and a half years, and I haven't really had the opportunity to speak it in action in about eight years. I'm terrified of sounding like a total dumbass, misconjugating verbs and whatnot. However, I'm hoping that by the end of the weekend, it will all come flooding back to me. Right in time for the trip home!

Anyway, as promised, I'm trying to get back into the blog of things, and I figure that the easiest place to start was our invitation. The invitation itself was based on a design I made. I would scan that in and show you, but our designer still has it! Yikes! Anyway, the scroll around the wording, the two birds and the initials at the top were all featured in my sketch. I also picked the font and style of the wording, having done a mockup in Word to go with my sketch. Then, the rest is just good collaboration.

Growing up I was a huge babysitter. I worked for so many families, and made a ton of money. I pretty much worked every weekend from 4th-8th grade for one family, C. Blonde. She was like my cool aunt (though she would argue mother number two), and I was not only really close to her, but I learned a lot from her. She also happens to be a graphic designer by trade. So when I was done living in la la land and thinking I was going to silkscreen all those invitations (seriously...what planet was I on?), I went to her with my sketch in hand. She took that and designed this suite for us:

Invitation

Label
RSVP Card - Front

RSVP Card - Back

The invitation was printed on uncoated card stock, and was actually 11x17. The RSVP cards were large postcard size. What we did was center and clip the RSVP cards to the bottom of the invitation with gold paperclips, then rolled up the invitations, clipping both ends with gold paperclips. We then mailed them out in tubes with the labels affixed to the front. My mother, who has the most beautiful penmanship, did any and all writing for the wedding, including addressing 70 invitations. In the end, though, all the hard work was worth it. The end result was simply beautiful. We have a ton of invites, labels, and RSVP cards left over, all of which I plan on incorporating into a shadow box with some of the photos from the wedding. My mother is also going to write out one last label with our current address on it, which will go on a tube and also be put in the shadow box. But, as all you already marrieds out there know, this will probably happen in five years when I get around to it.

Anyway, here are some photos of us laboring to get our invitations sent out to play you out. Have a great 4th of July weekend!

All the stuffed tubes waiting to be labeled

A.P. readying the completed tubes for stamps

Me, stamping the tubes...3 $.64 stamps per tube! Oy!