About the invitations

Ralph decided that he wanted to have a little fun designing and creating the invitations rather than just going with something standard. None of that boring tissue paper and engraving for us.

One thing Ralph wanted to include was a drawing of the bride and groom on the front of the invitations. He had long been looking for an excuse to commission such a drawing from one of his favorite artists, an illustrator in Australia named Claire Robertson, who has also maintained an interesting and lovely weblog for a number of years, liberally sprinkled with more of her drawings. Claire had just had a baby and was taking a break from work, but in January she announced that she was taking on commissions again. Ralph jumped at the opportunity, and a few weeks later, a TIFF file of the illustration of the two of us on the boardwalk at Ocean Grove was wending its way through the wires.

Extensive web searches pointed to this neat set of invitations on the Boxcar Press web site. At the time, Ralph was thinking "wouldn't it be neat if we could get some pre-printed cards made on a letterpress and use those as a basis for the invitations?" Both of us love letterpress printing.

When we saw how much custom letterpress would cost, we decided to go a different way, but the invitations above still stuck in Ralph's mind. A link on the Boxcar Press site mentioned that the sewing on those invitations had been done by Unique Artistry in Chicago. We took a trip into New York to go to Kate's Paperie and found some samples of their work, and fell in love with it. The problem was that it would be a real pain to try to print the illustration on the cards as they were available at retail. So Ralph contacted Andrea Ummel of Unique Artistry to discuss whether it would be possible to get some custom work done that would incorporate the drawing. Andrea was happy to help.

The paper colors of the invitation were chosen to reflect the fact that this wedding is taking place at the beach. The cream-colored paper that forms the basis of the invitations is Fabriano Tiziano, made in Italy. It represents the sand. The strips sewn on at the top that keep the card closed represent the water (dark blue), the sky (light blue), and the two of us (brown, because of the color of our hair). The envelope colors were chosen for similar reasons, and although you can't see it, the dark brown paper on the back of the envelope is light brown/cream colored on the other side, meaning we have sand inside the envelope. :-)

We considered having the invitation text on the inside offset printed, which Andrea would have handled, but decided instead to use rubber stamps and embossing powder, which give the text a shiny, raised texture. It's similar to the thermography technique used on some invitations and business cards. We used to have an art rubber stamp store a few miles from our house, but they closed at the end of January, just as we were preparing to go there to get some custom stamps made. Some more web searching turned up Kiva Stamps in Mt. Holly, about 40 miles away. They had some text on their web site about how you could bring them your artwork and they would make it into a polymer sheet suitable for use as a rubber stamp for $20. Sounded like just what we needed.

Ralph's color-blindness got in the way here. Our printer has an unfortunate tendency to print black as green when printing at its highest resolution. Ralph didn't notice that the artwork was green, and Laura didn't think it was important to point it out to him. Our first attempt at bringing the artwork in was a failure as a result. E-mail problems between us and Kiva also delayed matters, but eventually, Ralph brought proper artwork to Kiva, who turned the work around quickly. We probably lost two weeks because of Ralph's defective rods and cones.

The stamping process was time consuming. It took the better part of a week to get everything done. It didn't turn out quite as nicely as we had hoped; the stamp of the bulk of the text was a pain in the neck to work with. But ultimately, we were able to produce the finished invitations. A few of them are a little dodgy, but a bit of practice produced enough that we could discard the worst ones. So if you have an invitation that's a little blurry, or is missing part of a word or something, please take that as evidence of the time we spent lovingly hand-crafting these fine works of art.