We finally finished our wedding invitations and got almost all of them in the mail yesterday. They are a perfect metaphor for who we are as a couple. I designed them with a sophisticated look but with cool distressed fonts and fun elements. The main parts are printed on tree-free banana husk paper. The envelopes are natural vellum and the outside wrapper is fine art paper with mango leaves or banana husks embedded in them.

But what is more like Laurel and me is that we were too focused on the little things about the design and missed a few major things. Like the fact that the red card stock was about a quarter inch too short and wouldn’t properly gate fold around our card. Or that the only reason we had to use the card stock in the first place was that we couldn’t find a natural card stock that was thick enough, so we rigged something up with paper from the craft store. Or that we procrastinated until the last minute and then realized that our design was a little complicated, forcing us to glue, fold, insert, label, and stamp 76 of them in two days. In hindsight I wish that I’d made them a little bigger and spent longer looking for some kind of all natural card stock for the gate fold.

Way too many pictures and a cost breakdown after the break.