Worldly Thank You Cards and A Beautiful Spanish Wedding

Last week I received a really fun e-mail from a client that I've been working with for quite sometime. If you've been following this blog for a while, you may remember Isabel and her now-husband, Luis. Isa and Luis live in Tunisia and were recently married in Madrid, Spain. Isa designed all of the stationery for her wedding herself and hired Twin Ravens Press to print it. It was pretty fabulous! If you don't recall what Isabel and Luis' wedding stationery looked like, or if you haven't seen it yet, you can see photos and read about it in a couple of my previous posts: here and here. You may also remember that I printed and die-cut a very cool set of round wedding menus for their wedding, which you can see and read about here. Anyway, shortly after their wedding, Isabel designed and had me print a set of thank you cards for them to send out to their wedding guests. I hadn't shown these off on the blog yet, but when I received Isabel's e-mail last week with a bunch of truly beautiful and awesome photos from their wedding, I figured now would be the perfect time to show off both!

First things first: I have to show off Isabel's beautiful thank you cards! You can see a photo of one of the cards and their envelopes together at the top of this post. Here is a closer photo of just the card, by itself:

As Isabel and Luis have both english and spanish-speaking friends and family members who attended their wedding, Isabel created a bilingual design for her thank you cards. I love the challenge of designing printed pieces in multiple languages, but don't get the opportunity to do it very often. All of Isabel and Luis' stationery has been bilingual English and Spanish and I think she's done an excellent job throughout, incorporating all of her wording in both languages without making her designs feel cluttered. Her thank you cards feature a large compass rose in the center of the A2 size card with the names of a variety of cities all over the world from where Isabel and Luis' guests journeyed from to celebrate their wedding. The text at the top and bottom reads "Thank you for coming from near and far to celebrate with us". Both the compass rose and all of the text were printed in chocolate brown ink on Crane Lettra 100% cotton ecru paper. We also blind-embossed an antique map of the world behind the compass. It's a little bit difficult to see in the large photo, but here is a close-up photo so you can see it better:

Isn't that cool?!? For her envelopes, Isabel chose a chocolate brown A2 size envelope from Waste Not Paper and had us letterpress print on both the flap and front in copper metallic ink.

I typically don't print on envelopes with this much ink coverage, but the results were amazing! Here are a couple of detail photos so you can see the front and back flap of the envelope a little better:

Aren't those amazing?!? I love how Isabel stuck with very romantic, classic images throughout all of the pieces in her wedding stationery suite! As I briefly mentioned above, printing these envelopes were no small feat, due to the large amount of ink coverage. Because I hadn't had a set-up in a while for envelopes that was this complex, I took a few photos so that my fellow printers (and anyone else who's curious) could check out the make-ready (fancy printer's term for set-up) for printing these envelopes. It was pretty crazy!

In all three of these photos you can see where the printing plate is sitting below the ink disk. To make the image have an even and clear impression on the envelope I had to cut out the parts of the envelope on an extra one that were causing the printing to be uneven and the tape this cut-up envelope on top of my tympan, but under some acetate to create an even, but smooth surface from which to feed the envelopes to. I used rubber bands to create a frisket to help pull each envelope away from the heavily-inked plate after the print was made so that the envelopes didn't stick and get caught and smashed by the press. You can see the rubber bands in the photo above. It was pretty crazy, but I always love a challenge!

Isabel's thank you cards came out beautifully and I've been very excited to show them off to you along with the rest of her stationery! Which brings me to something else that's really exciting! Every now and again a bride will e-mail me photos of their actual wedding. After working with so many couples, having so many different types of weddings, all over the world, I've found that it's really fun and exciting when I receive an e-mail from a couple with photos of their celebration. Isabel and Luis' wedding was no exception to this, and honestly, I was super-excited to see photos of a wedding in Spain!

I'm not entirely sure about many of the details of their wedding, but I love how absolutely gorgeous and happy both Isabel and Luis look in all of them. I also love that many of the photos Isabel sent are in black and white. I think it adds just one more touch of classic romance, to an already very traditional, classic and romantic-looking celebration.

Aren't the couple and the church where they got married, absolutely beautiful? The above photo almost looks like an antique image to me. It's almost difficult to believe it was taken on May twenty-third of this year. So beautiful!

I love how happy they look in the two photos above and I love it that you can see the rice being thrown in the second one!

Aren't they just so romantic and wonderful? I feel so so sappy, but it totally made my heart flutter just a little bit when I looked at them the first time. Thanks so much Isabel and Luis for hiring me to be a little part of your special day, and thank you for sharing your gorgeous photos with me, and for letting me share them with the world!

Congratulations!