Ta da! Our invitations. Lovingly letterpressed and linocut by Hal himself.
One of the few things Hal felt passionate about during wedding planning was making our invites. With the money saved by doing them ourselves, we splurged on an inexpensive
at-home letterpress machine. I designed the invitation wording and uploaded it to
Lifestyle Crafts for our
custom printing plates.
The tree was done as a
linocut. Hal has linocut before, but it was his first attempt at letterpress. It took some trial and error, but he quickly got the hang of it. For weeks, he disappeared into his man cave cranking out 100 of them, one by one.
We included a vintage postcard of
Gig Harbor, where the wedding would take place. Around 75% of our guests were flying in from California and other parts of the U.S., so I wanted to give them a nostalgic view of the small town they'd be visiting. The original postcard was blank and in order to replicate it en masse, I scanned both sides, added a faux postage stamp in Photoshop, and
printed it for cheap on cardstock.
A second set of postcards, with a handwriting font on the back, were sent to guests invited to our rehearsal dinner cruise around Gig Harbor.
Playing off the "green carpet premiere" invitation text, I designed a little wood ticket to announce the wedding website using our
H ♥ S logo. The Etsy shop,
Bullfrog Graphics, laser engraved them for me and did an excellent job.
During a weekend-long marathon of Say Yes To The Dress, all of the pieces were neatly tied together with baker's twine and placed inside an A9-sized kraft envelope with an origami paper boat (which would later play a role in our wedding).
We were happy with how they turned out. A painstaking process? Yes. Would I purchase invites if I had to do it all over again? Um, quite possibly maybe probably yes. But in my eyes, nothing beats a handmade invitation. And I hope our guests felt the love.
SEE THE REST OF MY WEEKLY WEDDING SERIES HERE.
{Images by Christopher Bachmann}
