the invitations

so another thing i had fallen in love with early on were the wood invites that i saw on a blog and etsy.  at $6.75 per invite though, it seemed a bit out of budget so i set off to look for cheaper vendors. we did flip flop a lot on even what kind of wood invite we wanted.  we thought we wanted ink and then we thought we wanted laser engraved.  in the end we went with ink and foil printing and the result was awesome!  the only thing is that the green foil isnt as dark as we had hoped but its not something we are stressing about.  in the end we went with cards of wood because their sample pack was the most impressive.  they were the ones who showed us the foil option whereas the other vendors had either ink or laser.  laser is actually done on thicker wood pieces and there were a couple issues with that: 1.  people probably couldnt put the invite on their frige with just a magnet and 2.  postage would cost more.  at some other places, the ink printing looked like it added a clear layer on top of the wood which i didnt care for much.  when we got the invites in the mail, i used a punch to round all the corners.  didnt take too much time and i liked the effect much more.

for assembly we decided that we wanted to hang two leaves on some twine and tie it over a strip of vellum.  the leaves we cut on the cricut but i think a leaf punch wouldve been better for the job.  i think when the cricut does repetitive cuts over and over some of the cuts can be not that good so some of the leaves had small rips in them.  after the leaves were cut, i also punched a small hole on one end so the twine could go through.  the darker leaf was stamped with "c&s" and the lighter leaf with "072812"  both sides.  the toughest part about the leaves was actually stringing the twine through.  we used pink and purple divine twine.

as for the vellum we got two rolls of 18" by 5 yards from a drafting store in sf and did a lot of cutting.  how do you cut about 150 pieces of vellum?  very imprecisely.  some of them came out slanted when assembled.  but i didnt worry about it too much.  we also ended up having to tape down the twine to the vellum with a small piece of washi tape because when the invite was pulled out of the envelope, it basically got unassembled.

i actually ordered some pearlized envelopes online but cards of wood provided me with envelopes as well! i think we can use them for thank you cards maybe?  unless the thank you cards come with envelopes too.  then we will be in envelope overload mode.  i printed the leafy pattern on 8.5" by 11" paper and cut it down as an envelope liner.  to adhere the liners to the envelope just a glue stick was good.  liguid glue, while strong, wrinkled the envelope a lot.  i also rounded the corners on the liner.  the calligraphy stamp on the back was also a custom piece.

the save the date

the save the date was such a labor of love.  i had seen some save the date videos before and thought that ours could include one since it was through email.  the stop action or stop motion ones really caught my eye and stephen willingly (?) or not so willingly took on that task. 

his first iteration was just of totoro running around.  he didnt end up liking it because he felt like it didnt have much to do with the song or the message.  the first song that we chose was actually Home by edward sharp and the magnetic zeros.  we ended up changing that too since his last and final idea was a more fun, party-ish vibe.  he did end up using some of the totoro footage

his second idea involved me and him and it was us getting ready for a picnic through kody's eyes.  fate wouldnt allow us to finish that one though - no bottle opener, out of battery, and inclimate weather.  so we ended up ditching that footage altogether

his last idea was to have the dunnys spell out save the date.  we were actually short a few dunnys so i made a try to urban outfitters for 10 dunnys.  most of them were repeats so they contribute to my collection but they definitely helped the save the date video. 

we finally sent it out with a link to our website.

Claudia Yu & Stephen Li - Save the Date!