We finally sent out our wedding invitations a few weeks ago… and phew… what a weight off our shoulders! Even though we sent some Save-the-Date cards that I covered in a previous post, the wedding somehow feels more real with the formal invitations sent out.

I am really proud of the work that we put into these invitations. Can you believe that more than 100 hours of our own time and hard work went into these? Although they were printed elsewhere, I am really happy to say we did these 100% by ourselves: designing it, handwriting it all, illustrating it all, mailing it, and putting it all together.

I designed our wedding logo and ordered an embosser and plates to do our gold seals for the envelopes. We’ll also be using the embosser for other parts of the wedding such as programs and napkins. Good job to Allan for getting these perfectly centered while doing the pressing

As before, we continued to use our custom return address stamp from Paperfinger on Etsy…

And I spent hours upon hours doing all the hand calligraphy with a dip calligraphy pen, and also did all the heat embossing myself for the gold tree on the envelope as we did with our save-the-dates before.

We really wanted to do a unique invitation, so we continued with the theme of the wooden wedding invites and thanks to my awesome bridesmaid Charmainne who gave us the idea of doing a #10 size card. It was hard to find envelopes that size that matched our save-the-date envelopes… but I managed to find some at Paper Source.

It turned out really cool and I love the length of it. I designed the text and the logo and we sent it all off to Night Owl Paper Goods to be printed on wooden birch cards… Kudos again to Night Owl… they turned out beautiful!

I also designed our insert cards in Illustrator — 2 double-sided cards with lots of information about the wedding and the area.

One of my favourite hidden parts is the pattern at the top and bottom of the cards… they are actually surfing waves if you look really closely. Thanks to VanPrint for doing an awesome job on the printing.

(click for larger)

Probably my favourite part of the wedding work we’ve done so far is actually the custom wedding map that Allan and I made together. Both of us laboured over Adobe Illustrator for probably 60 hours alone just on this map. Allan did all of the illustrations himself… what you see here on the image is actually all done by vector work from scratch. I also did the text work, the actual road map, and the colouring. I had a pretty clear vision of how I wanted this map to look, so it definitely took some time and some heated discussions and tons of compromise between us to get it to look just right and represent both of us. It sounds funny, but it was a good test of our relationship.

Check out some of the little personal details… that’s an actual representation of Allan’s little green VW golf with surfboards on top.

And of course our interpretation of the Black Rock and the Ucluelet Community Centre … and us on the little patio getting married Hee hee!

I can’t believe the wedding is only 2.5 months away… scary and exciting! Yay!

It’s hard to believe we’re less than 5 months away to our wedding! It’s been a year since we  got engaged and time has just flown by! I posted a couple weeks ago about our Save the Dates from Night Owl Papers Goods that we fell in love with! We’ve received a lot of great feedback from our guests on them too.

I’ve received quite a few e-mails from people asking me about Night Owl and the save-the-dates so I thought I would post more information here on how we got these done. I was not paid for this post… I am literally writing about them because we LOVED our wood stationary soooo much!

For our save-the-dates, we basically custom designed our the artwork and text in Adobe Illustrator. We matched the “artboard” size to the same size as the wood cards from Night Owl and set the bleed to 1/4 inch. I recommend printing it out on paper to make sure the text is readable in the actual size. You then e-mail their custom project coordinator (I’ve been dealing with Megan) at custom@nightowlpapergoods.com. She will then make sure your artwork is good, and send you a proof. Once your proof is approved (by you), they start printing. I found it was a very smooth experience and there were no hidden costs.

We’re also planning on doing our formal wedding invitations through Night Owl Paper Goods too! I just got an e-mail from them that they just launched new designs and new colours for their wood wedding collection! Check them out. All their products are handmade, from sustainably-harvested wood, and their envelopes are made from 30-100% recycled material. They like to call their products “modern, yet folksy”. I agree!

I really can’t say enough good stuff about Night Owl. They have been a joy to work with on our custom wood wedding save-the-dates and invitations and I would highly recommend them if you are thinking of getting yours done soon. They also have beautiful greeting cards, gifts, notepads, and tons of other wood products.

If you have any more questions, please let me know in the comments!

Disclosure: I was NOT paid for this post, and I did not receive any product in exchange.