My good friend Libby Smith is an extremely talented graphic designer and I knew she would be able to help me figure out what to do. Music has played a big part in our relationship and was a very important element in our wedding. I thought it would be cool to incorporate some aspects of old concert posters into our invitations. I told Libby about the concert poster idea, our rustic, overgrown garden theme, and that I also wanted to include some calligraphy designs into the invitations. Libby encapsulated all of these different elements! There were uniquely us.
We didn’t have much time to send out save-the-dates, so instead we had to include a lot of information with our invitations. Libby designed the formal invitation, an information card and the reply card. I thought it would be a good idea to somehow provide a folder or a way for our guests to keep all these parts together, besides an envelope. The creative folks that work at Paper Source helped us out. We found a brown tri-fold to keep everything together. While at Paper Source, I saw a beautiful Japanese-style paper that had a cherry-blossom image on it. I loved this paper and wanted to include it somehow! We decided to have the paper cut and place it around the trifold to add some color. Also, Zack is from Macon, GA home of the Cherry Blossom Festival and I thought it would be fun to add a cherry blossom theme to the wedding inspiration. So we cut the strip, send them through an adhesive machine and placed them on all 250 tri-folds. I also love raffia, so we sealed the tri-folds with a strands of raffia tied in a bow and placed them in chocolate brown envelopes.
I addressed all the invitations by hand with a gold pen. Addressing your own invitations is a great way to save some money, and is also a lot of fun. I played around with my hand-writing for a while and found a style that I liked. It did take some time, but it was worth it.
