Continually mending the world

I've said before that invitations are not really my thing. I can fondle a beautiful card stock with offset printing with the best of them. However, creating a assembly line to put the complicated things together was not high on my list of things to craft for this wedding. (An assembly line for the yarmulkes with my bridal brigade is a totally different matter.) :-)

However, I have a few illustrators that I really love. I approached one of them about custom work and although that was too expensive, she said we could use a digital image of something she had already created for free.

Sweet!

This illustrator is the lovely and talented Johanna Wright and you can view her work here. You may remember her from an earlier post.

So, my lovely sister-in-law is studying medical illustration, which is a really specialized form of graphic design. She graciously agreed to design the invitation and I was just going to use my favorite photo printing shop to print them up as 5x7 photos. Good enough for anyone's fridge, right?


However, I had a moment of inspiration when I realized that I could just as easily and inexpensively have them printed on fabric by Spoonflower. If there is a theme to our wedding, it is mending the world and we're using patchwork quilts to symbolize that. So, we'll send out 5x7 patches. Pretty cool, huh?

The fabric arrived the other day and I am chomping at the bit to start cutting it.

We'll have simple postcards for RSVPs (we have too many non-tech guests for online RSVP to work for us). I'll show you the design for those when I have it. A little cliffhanger: it also features the art of Johanna Wright.

This process just keeps getting more and more exciting. Recently, I read a profile of a wedding that just sounds torturous in its attempts to be "offbeat" and just comes off sounding disorganized and poorly thought-out. With this project I realize that when I look back on this wedding it will have a lot of unique elements but none of of them will have been included just to be different. Each will be an organic development of what Jacob and I are already doing in our lives. I have been using Spoonflower to make fabrics for quilts for other couples. And eureka, we can also use it for our own! Cool!

That's how I like things. Comfortable.