Virginia and Dan's Wedding Invitations

Finally, I get to share more about V's wedding! We're starting at the beginning, so today's post is about her invitations. Over the next week or two, I'll share more of our projects. Enjoy!

What is the general style of the wedding?
We threw a "vintage garden party" wedding in my mother's (spectacular) garden in Guilford, CT. It was pretty much a given that we would have the wedding there -- Dan and I both grew up in Guilford and have lots of family and friends in the area, so I wanted the wedding to work with the setting, with flowers, flowers, and more flowers taking center stage. Then the vintage piece came about because Guilford is one of those picture-perfect historic New England towns, settled in the 1600s (my parents house was built in 1901 by one of the town's founding families) and because I liked it as a way of avoiding buying new where possible and incorporating things with a story or sense of history themselves.

How does that related to your personal style?
I love pretty much all things vintage (although vintage clothes only in theory -- I rarely fit into them!), and grew up going to antique stores and flea markets with my mom. I also write about the environment, so I'm aware of how buying local or secondhand is usually the more sustainable choice.

How did you decide on the color scheme/graphic elements for the invites?
I trolled a LOT of wedding blogs (Snippet & Ink, A Practical Wedding, Peonies & Polaroids, Once Wed, Style Me Pretty...) and read a lot of Martha Stewart and saved tons of images of anything and everything that inspired me. I had Kathryn on Snippet & Ink make me a fantastic inspiration board, which really helped the vintage garden party style come together. You and I looked at a lot of stuff; we made Dan look at a lot of stuff, and realized that it was this sort of interplay between big and graphic and delicate/flowery that I liked. And then I showed everything to the brilliant Anita Soos, of Anita Soos Designs, who immediately got it and came up with this.

What was the best part about working with a designer on this project?
What was really amazing about Anita is that she's an art director, so she was able to help coordinate the entire look of the wedding -- she didn't just design the invitations, she also made all the flower arrangements and did our photography, and also did everything from helping me source table numbers to brainstorming the table cards. It was great to have someone with that kind of eye helping me to pull the whole look together.

Anita was also endlessly patient about my need to compulsively email her more and more ideas; she was also very willing to hear whether we liked or disliked something. An earlier version included a more script-like font, which made Dan think of church weddings and break out in hives, so that had to go -- and she was immediately like, "got it, no church stuff" and even later pointed out when I had a floral arrangement in my file that was a little "church-like."

How was your fiance involved?
Dan is a stand-up comedian with a day job in communications, so the invitations are an aspect of the wedding that he really got into. He wrote all the funny copy (I did some, ahem, light editing), proofed endlessly, and was all over it when it came time to stuff envelopes.

Are those vintage stamps?
Why yes, they are! Anita is also a stamp collector, and let me raid her collection to supplement our postage.

What talented person tied such a lovely bow?!?
That would be one Amy Palanjian! AKA "Quality Control"**. I thought my bow-tying was up to snuff, but I was quickly corrected! And you were right; they look adorable. (By the way, we used waxed cord from Maine Thread. Super cheap and comes in tons of great colors. Amazing!)

**Just a note in my defense about the bow tying ocd. Virginia has impeccable taste and I knew that all of her guests were eagerly looking forward to seeing what her invitations looked like. All I wanted to do was to make sure that the final package was perfect—which yes, meant that since no one else seemed to be able to tie a straight bow, I tied them all. And may have retied some of Virginia's. But it was with the best of intentions, I promise!!