Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Eleanor & Jeremy are Getting Married!



Last month I completed a really sweet and summery little wedding invitation suite for an American couple that is living in Tunisia (they work for the State Department), who are getting married in Massachusetts later this month!  How does a couple living in a country that far away find out about Twin Ravens Press, you ask?  She was recommended to us by a previous client, Isabel, who just moved to Tunisia for work as well.  If you'd like to read about Isabel's stationery (which also turned out really cool!), you can here, here, and here.  

We went through several different ideas in order to get to the lovely set you see at the top of this post.  When Eleanor and I originally started talking about designs she thought that she probably wanted a design with a barn (they are getting married at a family farm), or a barn door.  We came up with quite a few lovely mock-ups of what this design could potentially be, and while I think any of those would have turned out beautifully as well, I think it's pretty neat that ultimately she ended up choosing to go with this simple,  yet beautiful, summery hydrangea design.  Eleanor and Jeremy's suite included the invitation, a reply card, an invitation envelope and a reply card envelope.  

As I mentioned before, you can see a photo of all four pieces in Eleanor & Jeremy's suite together at the top of this post.  Below is a photo of just the invitation, by itself. 


Eleanor and Jeremy's invitation is an A7 size and was printed on 100% cotton Crane Lettra Paper in their Ecru color.  I really like the Ecru paper from Crane - it's very warm and inviting, and in my opinion, very different from a regular white paper without really being a strong "other color".  As you can see in the photo, I drew two blue hydrangeas for the design on the left side of the invite and then the text was arranged around them.  For the fonts we chose a very nice, handwriting-like script font for their names and then a very nice classic serif font for the rest of the text.  I really love the texture that both the fonts and all of the small line work in the hydrangeas created for this design.  Here is a close-up photo of part of the invite so you can get a better look at the fonts, ink colors, fine hydrangea details, and the impression:


Very pretty, don't you think?  Here is the A7 size envelope that accompanied the invitation: 


This envelope is a light blue from Waste Not Paper Company and it features a European pointed flap.  I printed Eleanor's parent's address on the flap in the same green ink that I used for the invitation.  I matched the blue ink for their names and the hydrangeas on the invitation, to the blue of this envelope!  It turned out really really nice.  

For their reply card, Eleanor and Jeremy chose a standard 4bar size and we used basically the same design elements for it as we did for the main invitation.  We also decided to go with the same light blue color for the reply card envelope that we used for the main invitation envelope and printed the bride's parent's address on the front in green ink.  Here is a photo of the reply card and envelope together: 


Here is a closer photo of just the reply card, by itself: 


If you are working on designing a response card for your upcoming wedding or other event and you have multiple events that your guests could attend, I highly recommend having some sort of way for your guest's to tell you which event(s) they plan to attend, rather than just giving them the option to accept or decline.  Eleanor and Jeremy are planning to have a barbeque the night before the wedding and reception, so they made an option on their card so that guest's could indicate whether or not they would attend the barbeque as well as the wedding and reception, or just the wedding.  I think this is a great idea and helps to keep everyone more organized prior to the event.  

Eleanor and Jeremy were really great to work with and I wish them all the best for their upcoming celebration and in the years ahead!  Congratulations Eleanor & Jeremy!