Wedding Week – Invitations

Just like the Save the Dates, we wanted to Letterpress our Invitation Suite. We decided to go all out for the invites, and do double envelopes, double thick cardstock, a double sided invitation with a blind deboss on the back, two enclosures as well as our friend the wax seal.

This time we smartened up, and had all our paper custom cut from letterpresspaper.com . We had it shipped to family in the US (to avoid the crazy UPS brokerage fees) and my Dad drove over and picked it up for us. We designed our invites in Illustrator and had the plates made at Boxcar Press.

I wanted to use blind impression somehow for the invitation suite, and decided to do a pattern debossed on the back of the double thick invites. My L Letterpress is incredibly good at doing blind impressions, so we pre-blind printed the backs of the invites, before heading to Snap & Tumble‘s studio to print with ink.

Where printing the Save the Date‘s took a few hours, printing the invite suite took two FULL days. We then cut out envelope liners using our Silhouette SD. This was a godsend. We could NOT have cut that many liners (and maintained our sanity) without it. We used some wrapping paper with stamps of the Queen on it (a nod to El Granto’s British heritage). We didn’t have enough to do all the invites with that paper, so we mixed it up with some pretty black wrapping paper for the rest of the liners.

We also designed a belly band to keep the invite suite together. We had a local print shop cut 1″ strips of our letterpress paper, and we blind debossed the same pattern onto them as on the back of the invites. We scored them, wrapped them around the invite suite and secured with a glue dot. The whole thing was then stuffed into the lined and addressed inner envelopes, and then into the outer envelopes. They were wax sealed, stamped and mailed. (Envelopes were addressed by printing each one individually on our Epson Inkjet printer using Illustrator for the typesetting.)

We were very pleased with our DIY effort, although it was a LOT of work. By far the most time consuming part of the wedding planning!

The Invitation Pieces
The Envelopes

Source Info:

Paper: Crane Lettra 220lbs for invites (A7), 110lbs for rsvp & info cards (4 bar)
Envelopes: Crane Lettra (A7 inner & outer, pointed for invites, and 4 bar pointed for rsvp) – letterpresspaper.com
Letterpress Plates: KF95 Photopolymer Plates – Boxcar Press
Wax: Glue Gun wax in black & “S” seal stamp – www.letterseals.com
Fonts: Ecuyer Dax & Burgues Script
Letterpress Printing: PIY (Print it Yourself) time at Snap & Tumble