Our Wedding: The Stationary

Let me start by saying I'm no graphic designer. I probably could be if I really committed to learning all the stuff in my InDesign and Illustrator books, but I'm not a very good student when there isn't a grade involved. I did spend several years as a newspaper designer, however, and when we got engaged, I knew I wanted to design all of our paper products. I figured it would save money and be the most personal way to capture "us" in paper. (Plus I'm a HUGE typography/stationary/graphic design nerd.)

Our invitation suite went through about 15 iterations. Some had typewriters, some had the state of Virginia, some had hearts, some had big fonts, some had small fonts....I had a hard time spitting out my vision. I've always loved silhouettes, ever since that first one I sat for at Disneyworld as a child, and I decided that would be classic and personalized. Unfortunately, I don't have the mad skillz it takes to execute such a feat. So I called in the big guns: my good friend Chanelle.

Chanelle carefully copied our silhouettes into digital form and graciously spent a wild and crazy night printing and cutting the invitations until about 4 in the morning. It was a great flashback to our days on the college newspaper staff.

I spent a day handwriting our wedding website's address on manila tags, and hand-tying baker's twine bows to keep the suite together. It was hard at the time, and fun in hindsight.

I also designed rehearsal invites (the little card you can see here) and our programs, which were pastel blue paper rolled up and secured with fabric tape from Michaels.

The nitty gritty:

• We bought Paper Source's cover paper cardstock in luxe fino cream in bulk. I have tons left, and it was cheap to buy in bulk. Chanelle and I used a paper slicer to cut the cards to size.
• We used Paper Source's A7 envelopes in Pool for the outer envelopes, and their A2 envelopes in luxe fino cream.
• We also used Paper Source's red notched corners labels for addresses.
• I bought the baker's twine from Michael's for Christmas gifts a couple years ago, but you can buy similar twine here.
• The blue paper came from Office Max. At some point I'll post our Save-the-Dates, which entirely were made with paper from Office Max.

All told, we probably spent about $300 on the invitations which is in-freaking-credible if you know anything about how much invitations cost. Sure, letterpress would have been amazing, but I thought they came out pretty cute.

Stay tuned for more wedding updates throughout the week! Later today, I'm going to update about our rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, which you might remember was a big problem area for us during the planning.