Maria and Ashley are Getting Married!

I recently had the pleasure of working on a wedding invitation suite for a couple in Cali, Colombia! The couple is currently living in Florida, but they are having their wedding and reception this month in the bride's home town of Cali.

Way back at the beginning of this year (wow, almost a year ago already - yikes!), the bride, Maria, and I began working on a design for her save-the-date cards. Maria wanted her invitation suite to be formal and traditional, and warm and inviting all at the same time. We chose a very traditional layout and fonts for the design, and to warm things up, used a chocolate brown (rather than black or grey) ink for the printing. The save-the-date was an A6 size, which measured 4.5"x6.25". It came with a matching A6 size, white envelope with Maria's brother's return address in Cali, printed on the flap.

I absolutely love how decorative and beautiful a nice script face can be all by itself. Don't get me wrong, I love designing pretty images and patterns for wedding invitations as well, but there's just something about beautiful letterpress printed typography on white 100% cotton paper that brings joy to my heart. It's just so lovely!

Not too long after we did her Save-the-Date cards, we started working on the design for the main invitations. Maria wanted to continue with the gorgeous all-text design we had used for the save-the-dates for her invitations as well as keeping with the same fonts and ink color. Her main invitation suite included an A7 size invitation, an A2 size reception card, a 5" square map card and a beautiful set of inner/outer invitation envelopes. You can see a photo of the full suite at the top of this post and below is an image of just the invitation and invitation envelopes together.

For her invitation envelopes, Maria chose a matching set of white, A7 size envelopes with European pointed flaps from Waste Not Paper Company. We used the same address printing plate from her save-the-date card envelopes to print the return address on the flap of the outer invitation envelopes. The inner envelope was lined with a gorgeous, handmade paper from Nepal in a chestnut brown color. Maria hired one of my favorite calligraphers, Fran Heider of Little Flower Calligraphy, to calligraph her addresses on both sets of envelopes. I'm sure the calligraphy was absolutely lovely!

Above you can see the invitation all by itself. Maria explained to me that it's tradition in Colombia, and many other spanish-speaking countries, to include the parents names on the top of the invitation. I thought this was a really interesting tradition. Once again, I love the way the classic-looking script really accents and draws attention to Maria and Ashley's names in the center of the invite. I wish you could feel it too through your computer screen, because the texture of the letterpress impression feels amazing!

Maria and Ashley's reception card is an A2 size and featured the reception information, prominently in the center of the card and the phone number to RSVP to in the bottom left corner.

Isn't that a classy card?!? I love it!

Creating a map for Maria and Ashley's wedding was somewhat of a challenge. It was surprisingly difficult to find an english map of the city of Cali (even google maps' map was in Spanish), and although I speak spanish fairly well, navigating a map of an unknown city, in a foreign language, while trying to locate certain streets and landmarks, was really challenging. Maria was awesome though and drew me a map of a little portion of the city that she wanted to use and I used that to create the map card design.

This map measures 5"x5" and was letterpress printed in chocolate brown ink. The thick dark line running through the center of the map is a river, the Rio Cali, and we created cute little icons (inspired by a map created by Crystal Kluge earlier this year for this wedding) to represent major city landmarks, the Catholic church where Maria and Ashley's wedding will be, their home, hotels they recommend, and for the reception location. Here is a close-up so you can get a better look:

I love the way this suite turned out and I know that Maria and Ashley's wedding in Colombia in a couple of weeks will be really neat! Congratulations Maria & Ashley!