Invitation: The final product

There were a few ups and downs with designing our invitations, but I am so happy with how our invitation suite came out. It was a massive project. To anyone who wants to do this, it has to be a labor of love or you will hate every minute of it. I really love knowing that I cut out each piece and hand tied all that twine. I am well aware that most people spent two seconds tops untying that twine, but I think it gave it the personal touch I was looking for. We picked out the wording forever ago, but reading over it now, I get happy all over again. I hope people truly know that we want you at our wedding because, in some way or another, you are important to us and our parents. And, this isn't just some "I dos" and a cake - it is a CELEBRATION! A celebration of life. A celebration of family, friendship and the stuff that makes life worth it. Okay, I will stop being sappy. I took some "glamour shots" of my invites, so I could show them off to the world. :)

Invitation: A few bumps in the road.

So, remember when our wedding theme was supposed to be ghost orchids? Well, one of the reasons why that theme was booted was because the only way to incorporate them was in the paper materials. They are an endangered species… I guess Wes might be mad if we went into the Fakahatchee and plucked them off the trees… Anyway, I couldn’t make the ghost orchid work with my lacking graphic art skills. I wanted the orchids on the invitation, so I drew a picture of one to scan into my computer. I tried everything to make it look good and finally resorted to making it a solid color.

Here’s the best version of the invitation I made:

I think it looks amateur. Not at all what I imagined in my head.

I tried a few other things:

I liked these okay. I would have used shimmer gray paper with the top one. But, I was missing the color purple. The second one has purple, but like I said, it was just okay. Obviously, I was digging the mixed font, especially with the font “Albemarle Swash”. I didn’t like how the loops overlapped each other, but I fixed that by downloading the fonts “Albemarle” and “Albemarle Swash End”. Using those fonts, I could pick and choose which letters I wanted to have the swashes. Then, I found this inspirational photo:

And, that’s how I came up with the idea for the final product! I hope all my family and friends are enjoying their mail!

Also, I want to say that Wes was VERY involved in designing the invitations. Not only that, but he was right there printing them out with me and putting on stamps! I wouldn't have been able to do it all without him. Thanks hunny!