Project Description

As a designer, staring down the project of completing your own wedding invitations can be terrifying. I wanted to do something different, something handmade, letterpressed, personal, and classic, and I let ideas simmer in the back of my head for months. I came up with the concept of my fiancee and I writing each other letters about how we fell in love, since we hadn't dated for that long before getting engaged and not all of our guests knew how we met. After some initial apprehension, my fiancee agreed to publicly pour his heart out on paper along with me. He endured good-natured ridicule from his male friends and tears from our mothers and compliments all around from everyone else. The invitations ended up being four pages: a cover, our letters, and the last page with the details, which I bound together as a booklet. I knew that I wanted to incorporate blind letterpress and an aspect of my own illustrations into the invitations. I also wanted calligraphy, but couldn't afford to hire a pro, so I got out my pen nibs and a bottle of ink and practiced my writing. I made a protective cover for the booklet, which is the gray outer layer—I made all of these by hand—trimming, folding, and gluing in the pocket to hold the booklet. For the belly band, I took leftover gray paper scraps from the covers and rolled black acrylic paint on them with a brayer, backed them with yellow scrapbook paper and then stamped them with the J + S monogram. Finally, I took some of the illustrations and created envelope liners.