Our first Bat Mitzvah

Today I thought I would share with you the first Bat Mitzvah invitation suite I ever designed and printed.  This isn't a newly completed job, but it's less than a year in the past and I thought it was a lovely one!  I'm also showing this one off because it lead us to another client who ordered invitations for her son's Bar Mitzvah which will be held next week - those invitations turned out awesome as well, and I will share them with you soon! 

For those who don't know, a Bar or Bat Mitzvah (Bar for boys and Bat for girls) is a Jewish ceremony celebrating a boy or girl coming of age in the Jewish community.  The Bar or Bat Mitzvah ceremony is typically an ordinary Sabbath service in which the boy or girl participates for the first time as an adult.  Typically a boy becomes a Bar Mitzvah at the age of 13 and girls become Bat Mitzvahs at the age of 12.  Following the service there is often a celebratory meal or other type of party with family, friends and members of the Jewish community.  If you'd like to read more about Bar and Bat Mitzvahs you can here.   

I really enjoy designing paper goods for various types of celebrations.  Currently the majority of custom invitation work that Twin Ravens Press does is for weddings, but I also really enjoy doing invitations for different cultural rituals and ceremonies other than weddings, as well as for occasions like baby showers and birth announcements.  It's a lot of fun and is one of the things that keeps the work that I do interesting.  

So, as you can see from the photo above, the first Bat Mitzvah invitation I ever did was for a girl named Dahlia who had her Bat Mitzvah last September.  Dahlia and her mom came by my studio and we worked on creating an invitation and postcard-style reply card for her then-upcoming celebration.  Dahlia's favorite color is blue and she really wanted a blue dahlia flower on her invites.  We did something really unique for Dahlia's invitations that I think is a great idea for any type of ceremony that will involve a response card.  We printed the invite and the reply card on a single sheet of paper and then perforated it so that the cards could be easily separated from each other when the recipient was ready to mail back their response.  This is a great idea especially if you know you will be mailing out your invitations far in advance of the ceremony and you're worried that your invitees might misplace the reply card.  Having them as one perforated sheet helps keep both parts together until the recipient is ready to send their response back!  You can see Dahlia's invite/reply card together in the photo at the top of this post.  Below is a close-up of just the invitation portion:  

I really love how simple, yet beautiful this design turned out!  The large blue dahlia in the background is fun and whimsical and the font Dahlia & her mom chose for the name and date went with it perfectly!  They chose a coordinating blue envelope to go with the invites and we printed their return address on the back flap, just like we do for most wedding invitation suites.  Here is a photo of the two parts (invitation and reply card) separated along with the envelope: 

Below is a close-up of the response card portion.  The response card was a postcard format so there is a front and back to it.  Here is the front side: 

And here is the back side:  

For the back side of the reply card, we used the same large blue dahlia that we had been using throughout and then simply printed the family's return address in the center with a little box in the upper-right hand corner for the stamp.  

Aren't they pretty?  This coming week I will share with you my first Bar Mitzvah invitation suite which was just completed last month.  

If you would like more information and pricing on our custom bar & bat mitzvah invitations, please e-mail me at twinravenspress@gmail.com!