Balboa Style

 I always say how lucky we are to have so many super creative friends around us. Andrea and her fiancé Michael, who you have met before, have been our letterpress-hobby guinea pigs going way back to their Save the Dates. So when they decided they also wanted us to letterpress their invitations, we were all over it.
And by "over" I mean in over our heads... way over. Andrea is seriously like, the nicest person you will ever meet, so of course she had roughly a million friends and family to invite to their big day. Okay... not a million, but a whole lot, and after giving it the old college try, we had to concede that our little table top sweetheart Kelsey was just not up to the challenge.
Enter our heroes Jodi and Shelly at French Press. They totally saved the day by finishing up these deliciously pressed invitations you see below.

Andrea's wedding was at the Prado, in Balboa Park, in San Diego. Surrounded by gorgeous Spanish and Moorish design, Andrea and I went back and forth over many different designs to come up with an one that was inspired by both old wrought iron scrollwork and the patterns on Spanish tile. 

This was a Wedding Weekend Extravaganza, if there has ever been one! Andrea thought of everything, including arranging childcare for guests traveling with children. We did press the Childcare, Brunch, and Accommodations cards in-house! (Yay us!) 

We chose Crane's 220# super duper thick cotton paper, that was 100% tree-free!

 We also pressed the envelopes and envelope liners. The bride and groom's name was printed on the liner in charcoal ink for you to see when you opened the envelope. The outer and RSVP envelopes both had 2 color printing, with the design from the invitation in green around their names and address in charcoal, on the flap of the envelope for the return address, and the front of the RSVP envelope.

 Thank you Andrea and Michael for being our letterpress guinea pigs, it was an adventure, and we wish you all the best in the world as you start out on your new life together. I only wish we'd been able to be there to see it!! Congratulations, I know you will spend the rest of your lives making each other so happy. :)

We Solemnly Swear We Are Up To No Good...

THIS blog post has been a LONG time coming... I have kept putting it off because I wanted to do the invitation – and the couple – justice, and not just rush through it to get it up on the blog quickly. Unfortunately that has left us here, more than 3 months OVERDUE! So here it is, the Harry Potter, Marauder's Map-Inspired wedding invitation for Dina and Travis.

Let me start out by saying how absolutely SMITTEN I was with Dina and Travis from the moment I met them. I already had a soft spot for them before we even met since they had found us through Nickel City Studios, and I can't help but feel a kindred spirit with couples having the same wedding photographers as we did. As I spoke to them about their wedding plans, Dina laid out one eccentric, crazy, awesome idea after another, with the most amazing "I don't care if anyone gets it, we love it" attitude I've ever seen in a bride. It wasn't a Harry Potter-themed wedding, it was just one of the many things they loved that they wanted to be a part of their big day to make it perfectly "them." {i.e. the "table numbers" were Bruce Campbell characters and movie posters, and the pastor started off the ceremony with the wedding intro from the Princess Bride... yeah... #epic}

Every Harry Potter fan who swung through our booth at Brides World this past January noticed this unique invitation right away. We designed the front to look like the outside of the Marauder's Map from the Harry Potter movies, but included Dina and Travis' names in the banner, and a drawing of the small church in Salamanca they were married in in place of Hogwarts.

Any time I get an opportunity to do an old-school pen and ink drawing for an invitation, I am a happy camper... so doing two made me VERY happy...

Footprints (we, unfortunately, had no way of making them move} surrounded the reception information, which had little nods to the story without being all magic wands and owls. Another fun twist, the church was too small to invite everyone on their guest list, so the main invitation was for the reception, and a separate card had the information for the ceremony that only went to closest friends and family.

Sealing the whole thing up was a pearlized white wax seal, with a simple image of a house. I originally designed the seal as red, with a monogram, but Dina and Travis said they wanted white wax, with a house... because Travis' last name is Whitehouse. White. House. We all thought it was hilarious, so of course we ran with it!!

So if you want more, more, more of Dina and Travis' awesome leap day wedding (oh yeah, did I mention  they got married on a Wednesday? Because February 29th just sounded fun) you can check out their feature on Off Beat Bride or the rest of their amazing photos on the Nickel City Blog.

Thank you Dina and Travis for letting me be a part of your incredible day, and for being the epitome of why I love love love what I do, and where I do it.