Our five-year wedding anniversary is this Friday, and I’ve been thinking about the events that lead us here today.  I met Ben in late October of 2005.  He proposed on February 4, 2006 and I of course said yes.  We started planning a September wedding, but schedules didn’t work, so we pushed the date forward to June 10.  Yep, four months to plan a wedding in the peak of wedding season was not a lot of time.  Now that we have the timeline covered, let’s share the wedding details.  How about we start where everything started?  The invitations.

I’m a control freak, so, with the help of my wonderful cousin Allison teaching me basic Photoshop skills, I designed invitations.  I found the floral stamp online and used it on each and every wedding paper.  I wanted a unique sized invitation, so I settled on a 7 inch square invitation with a 7.5 inch interior envelope and an 8 inch square mailing envelope.

Our wedding colors were basic black and white, to keep everything simple and elegant.

For the invitation, I used a linen textured black cardstock as the backing with a vellum overlay, printed with our wedding text in the Century Gothic font.  I like to mix modern and traditional styles, so it was a perfect balance.  Using white ink, I stamped the floral design on the black backing to soften the design.  The torn vellum edge gives more visual interest.  To hold the two layers together, I secured the sheets with small brass brads that I painted white.  Oddly enough, scrapbook stores didn’t carry white brads back in ’06.

The vellum interior envelope also had a floral stamp, this time in black.

I printed the mailing address on each envelope, so I also scanned in a stamp to add to the envelope.  Mailing address tucked neatly between the leaves of the design.

To cut down on postage (and counteract the higher price of the custom invitation size), we included RSVP postcards with a monogram and info on one side.  The other side simply had my mailing address and a floral stamp in white, for a neat tone on tone look.  I doubt most people noticed it except me, but I liked it.

For coordinating, but not matching thank you cards, I scanned in the stamp and enlarged my favorite section.  The white set went out to shower guests and the black set was for our wedding.  Actually, the black set happened completely accidentally.  I printed our invites at my old work, where they had a laser printer.  Not thinking to switch out my paper, my design printed on black card stock.  I loved the gloss on matte look, so I kept it.

Consider yourself officially invited to our wedding, which we’ll share more about tomorrow.  For now, what  is your favorite element?  Who knew that creating our wedding invitations would lead me to start creating invitations for other couples, and then start making art?  Strange world.