Wow, this was something. I mean, it's just a card, but it wasn't so easy. First, the vision in my head when I think 'wedding invitation' was nowhere to be found. Apparently, letterpress doesn't exist in Argentina for invitations. Also, your only choices, really, are ink jet or laser printing - forget DIY gocco - you're not gonna find an affordable gocco set on MercardoLibre (Argentine eBay). And good luck trying to explain any 'fancy' printing styles in Spanish.
We decided, then, that we needed to get involved in designing something that we liked and could produce. We ended up taking a picture of the gates of our reception venue and having our sister-in-law in Spain turning it into a printable design. I love the effect she used to give it a retro feel.
Fortunately, Guille's brother offered to take over the invitations and gifted them to us, buenisimo!
We ended up with 2 designs - I chose a chandelier as the inside graphic for the ones I sent (as is hanging when you walk through the gate), and Guille's mom came up with a cute Spanish phrase for a music stave that went on all of the ones distributed to Spanish speakers. My favorite detail is the shadow of the gates that is on the reverse of the front flaps - so cool!
We ended up writing separate texts for each language instead of translating it directly - there's a different tone here - I get that, but luckily I got to write what I liked in English. They printed the invites on a kind of sparkly, off-white paper and rounded the top - a sweet detail - and then Guille's mom brought them over from Spain. We went out in search of envelopes, with no idea of what color we wanted but found a nice sand color with a little sparkle to match at Papel Plus.
We printed them ourselves and then hand addressed the outside envelopes for the international invites.
For the ones that we delivered here, we added a wax seal, which turned out to be pretty fun. We don't have wedding colors so we just picked some fun ones for the wax.
For the lighter colors, we found that it was easier to melt a chunk of the wax in a tiny spoon instead of putting it directly on the flame, which could sometimes turn it black.
Lovely! Thanks to L & I for such amazing work :)
4 comments:
These look amazing! I love the gate detail, and that without the crazy expensive letterpress/gocco you still got fabulous invitations. It makes it feel real sending invitations right? Or was that just me...
cool to hear about the collective design process - i wondered where the gate image came from. again i loved these invites - so unique. the wax seals are cute too.
Your invitations may not have turned out the way you had originally dreamed, but I must say that they are lovely! I like the fact that there was a collaborative effort - it seems more special that way. The big day will be here before you know it!
Marie, yes, it is feeling more real each day. The invitations were such a tangible reminder :)
Julia, I wish I could have sent yours with a wax seal too...it just wasn't mailable!
Katie, I feel like I've been altering a lot of dreams lately but it has been a humbling/insightful/delightful process. :) The day will be here so soon now...I'm trying to savor the last few days of our short engagement.
Post a Comment