Manolo for the Brides

What better way to let your guests know that you’re planning a destination wedding than by re-imagining your wedding stationery as passports and other travel-themed things? A friend of a friend did just that, working with Serendipity: Beyond Design to create pretty passport wedding invitations. Apparently, Serendipity liked the idea so much, they’re now offering custom passport wedding invitations in their Etsy shop!

Serendipity says: “Passports are a great way to excite your guests about the trip! Multiple pages provide enough information about traveling, accommodations, wedding day events and more. Personalize your Passport with a monogram, photo, history, stamps and map.”

Isn’t that almost disturbingly like the first page of a real passport? Well, putting aside the photo of a happy couple where a glowering “I just stood in a line at the post office and all I got was this awful picture” singleton ought to be. As you know, I’m a big fan of taking a theme all the way, and I think this wedding stationery does just that.

In keeping with the theme, the RSVP card is a boarding pass! Sweet!

Wedding invitation calligraphy — a trio of words you wouldn’t have found anywhere in my wedding budget. We were doing things on the cheap as it was, so the thought of paying someone to address my fancifully hand address my invitations was not one that even occurred to me. Our wedding invitation (seal-and-send, so utterly lacking in envelopes anyway) featured my off-kilter script and The Beard’s jagged letters, yet found their way to our recipients anyway. Still, I don’t fault brides and grooms for paying for wedding invitation calligraphy since for many, the whole point of a wedding is that everything involved ought to be a cut above normal.

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not a huge calligraphy fan. I do like, however, Neither Snow’s unique writing style, which veers away from girly and is… I don’t know… messily elegant? It reminds me of the sort of handwriting one sees on very old pieces of correspondence written by people on very good terms with their intended recipients. It’s familiar, not formal, but still fancy enough to satisfy those who want everything at their weddings to be a bit better than good. And you know what else is familiar, fancy, but not fussy? Letterpress invitations, of course! I thought it would be fun to pair some of Neither Snow’s work with invitations from the gorgeous Parrott Design Studio, with its lovely, simple invitations inspired by vintage ephemera, flora, and fauna. So here goes!

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I absolutely adored the wedding invitations my esteemed colleague showed us the other day by a pair of amazing DIY divas. Beyond fabulous stuff, that.

The sad truth, though, is that not everyone is able to pull off that level of design and execution by themselves. That’s when you need a professional to help you out.

The other day, Mr. Twistie met one such professional and pointed me at his wares.

The good folks at Volta Press do custom design and printing using the Letterpress method. They do some gorgeous wedding invitations, and they even have an Etsy Store where they sell them.
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One trend I’m loving in wedding invitations and other things is bright, saturated colors. As we all know, wedding invitations give guests a hint as to the kind of wedding they’ll be attending and can even give them a sneak peek at your wedding colors. When I receive a vividly-hued invite I expect that I’ll be going to a wedding that will be a bit different from one that is heralded by a white wedding invitation with silver lettering.

This beautiful teal wedding invitation suite with its three-tone flower comes from Modern Girl Invitations, which I love for their policy of allowing customers to change the colors on any of their designs for free. They also carry almost all the wedding stationery you could possibly want, from save-the-date cards to place cards to dinner menus to favor tags, and they work with brides and grooms to make every detail perfect. Need help with ordering, proofreading, colors or fonts, wording, or choosing paper? They’ve got you covered.

This colorful wedding invitation suite, also from Modern Girl Invitations, showcases dark purples, oranges, greens, peacock teal, mulberry, and a little gold… which is a lot of colors for one collection of wedding stationery! I don’t think I’ve ever received an invitation (wedding or otherwise) as bold and daring as this, but isn’t it just tremendously evocative of the wedding to follow?

Of course, you don’t necessarily have to choose wedding invitations and stationery that will match your eventual wedding color scheme or even the formality level of your ceremony and reception. But it is nice to give your guests a clue as to how they ought to dress and what kind of affair to expect, and color is one easy way to do it.

Romantic? Check. Elegant? Check. A little bit out of the ordinary? Check. A pink and gold wedding palette is perfect for the feminine bride who wants to plan a wedding that could be described as magical and lovely. Though this palette skyrocketed in popularity after the modern movie version of Marie Antoinette, a pink and gold wedding palette doesn’t have to be inspired by the French Court by default. As pretty as it is, the pink and gold wedding can also be modern.

So what do we have here? Traveling in a vaguely clockwise pattern, there are natural branches studded with tufts of fluffy garden stock blossoms from a party hosted by Tracy Metz, a striking pearl and bird necklace designed by kgarnerdesigns, a lovely soft pink wedding dress by Alisa Benay for 100 Brides for $100K, a pink wedding cake with delicate gold embellishments from The Wedding Cake Shoppe, a gorgeous handpainted wedding invitation from Momental Designs, freaking amazing shoes from Haberdashery Boutique, a delicate rose gold filigree bracelet, and a snapshot from a real wedding that included antique gold bridesmaid dresses from Vera Wang.

The pink and gold wedding palette is truly as sweet as can be!

A certain Luis Diaz Santis and a certain Magaly Guerrero Ramirez (both computer scientists) were married earlier this year. I found their awesome (awesome awesome awesomex10) wedding invitation via Temple of Groom, and I just had to share it.

Illustrator Carla Berrocal designed the wedding invitation for the Chilean couple. The graphics and text were created using both freehand drawings and Photoshop effects, which makes me think a layperson could put together something similar with a bit of effort.

What do think? As a child of the 80s, I can’t but help love this homage to early side-scrollers. It makes me smile in a big way.

Edible wedding invitations are something that has before now never crossed my desk, but I’ll admit to having entertained the idea. Now I’ve seen everything, as Wonderful Graffiti sells huge 6″ lollipops printed with a monogram on one side and your wedding invitation on the other. Well, sort of. The monogram is printed with edible ink while the invitation itself is printed on glossy cardstock and affixed to the wrapper. The hang tag is the RSVP card, while the envelope for the RSVP card is hidden beneath the lollipop in the box.

Quite nice looking, but none too cheap. Postage alone will cost you $6 per lolly, which I suppose doesn’t seem like much when you’re paying $1,750 for 50 edible wedding invitations.

On hand, I’m a huge fan of anything edible… edible wedding favors, edible cake toppers, you name it. We all know that 99% of wedding guests are just going to throw out those keepsakes after enough time goes by. Sending out edible wedding invitations in the form of sweets pretty much guarantees that your wedding invitation isn’t going to end up in the trash bin, particularly if you are sending enough of them to families with children.

On the other hand, what to do if members of your family surreptitiously eat the invitation and toss the wrapper with all the deets? And some brides and grooms send out their invitations well in advance of the wedding. Those who are short on notepads and like to keep the original wedding invitation just in case may not feel much like eating a three month old lolly if the cardstock won’t come loose.

I love the idea, but I’m a little put off by the price… it seems like brides and grooms with access to good printers and specialty paper might be able to DIY this invitation with monogrammed lollipops or cookies or some other sweet. What say you?

My new favorite source for custom wedding stationery? This Paper Ship of Greensboro, North Carolina, where Joel and Ashley Selby design and print totally sweet custom wedding invitations, custom wedding maps, and things like RSVP cards and save-the-dates. Er, they also do all kinds of other stuff like cute cut-outs of people’s cats and fliers for businesses and even custom headers for blogs, but I’m mainly interested in the wedding stuff, duh.

Wood you marry me, heh. I love the envelope color they chose to go with it, too.

The pattern on these invitations (or was it RSVP cards or save-the-dates?) was repeated in other areas of the stationery suite as a monogram.

Did I mention they hand draw their maps? Because they do.

Of course, if you’d rather, they’d be happy to design your wedding stationery using photographs of you and your intended as the starting point.

This Paper Ship will be set up to sell packages through their web site soon, but for now they’re pushing their weddings invitations, etc., in an Etsy shop. You can also find them on Facebook, where they frequently post those cute custom cat cut-outs I mentioned earlier.