Our Wedding Day Vision

One of the first things we had to determine, before we dove headfirst into our plans, was to determine what we wanted our wedding to look like. We both were huge foodies, who loved to cook, eat, drink, entertain and had a penchant for bygone eras. (We both came into our relationship with record turntables AND record collections in early 2003. If you don't know what either are, I'd recommend you Google it!) 

I started to envision a 5 pm wedding ceremony, with an elegant retro-vintage vibe. My soon-to-be husband had introduced me to the Thin Man movies and we fancied ourselves a modern-day Nick and Nora Charles.

While those movies were done in the 1930's, we loved the cocktail element they portrayed and how people actually dressed up and looked sharp when the occassion (and there were many) called for it. We were both smitten with the gorgeously tightly fitted, double-breasted suits of that era for men. Wouldn't it be great to have a tuxedo that looked like that?!

Early when we had just started dating, we watched the original "SpyKids" movie together. If you have not seen that movie, the beginning of the movie starts with how the parents met and their dramatic wedding day. I instantly fell in love with this fictional couples wedding cake: a tall-tiered number, bright yellow with bold flowers piped in frosting across the sides and a Day of the Dead wedding couple figurine for the cake topper.

It indulged my love of bright colors, being untraditional in the usual-boring-typical wedding cake look, and the Day of the Dead figures incorporated my Mexican-American fiances heritage while providing a fun and funky element. When we first watched the movie and saw the wedding cake, we agreed that should we get married someday, we wanted our cake to look JUST.LIKE.THAT.  (Right after we were engaged, I bought my first official wedding planning magazine and a DVD copy of the "SpyKids" movie!)

Plans and ideas began to take shape and form off of our initial concepts.

A vintage, Spanish-inspired wedding venue perhaps? (Old Laurelhurst Church below...)

And while we didn't want to go completely Mexican (no Mariachi bands, thank you!) in our wedding plans and themes, we did want to incorporate some elements into the ceremony and the overall scheme including a Day of the Dead bridal couple cake topper...

I imagined 1950's inspired cocktail dresses for each of our wedding attendants to wear and for those dresses to have elbow-length gloves as a key accessory.

We knew we wanted food to be an important focus at our reception dinner.  Meanwhile, I was dying to have Chivari ballroom chairs for the ceremony and reception, my favorite since childhood.

I also wanted silver beaded glass Belmont plate chargers for the dinner portion of the reception.

Together, we envisioned a three or four-piece jazz band playing during dinner and a post-ceremony cocktail hour with a bar that served signature cocktails. We preferred a formal sit down dinner instead of a dinner buffet and wanted to make our wedding a throwback to a bygone era of long ago: a time when manners and etiquette and formality meant something and was appreciated.

We knew we wanted a smaller wedding (no more than about 75 guests invited) and that we wanted it to be a representation of the two of us.

Finally, we had an outline for the rest of our plans to begin falling into and expanding into place!

Copying is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

I love color. I'd originally spied these bright, vivid and modern Claudia Calhoun invitations in a Martha Stewart Wedding's magazine I believe. I found a shop that carried them and they were kind enough to send samples out for me to see.

Unfortunately, the colors in the magazine were much brighter (due to typical photography and printing inconsistencies) and the actual items in person, more dull in color. I was dejected at first. Until I saw the other sample the salesperson had included in my sample package. They were gorgeous!

Simple, classy, elegant and very expensive looking.

Actually, they were quite expensive in reality...

 

The were letterpressed and boy, did I want them so badly! But alas, we couldn't afford them. They were gorgeous, though. I'd never considered chocolate/espresso brown wedding invites before (I know, I was thinking hot pink and red so why was this a stretch!) because frankly, I wasn't big on the color brown in my clothing choices or in my home decor choices. Yet, these exuded the very feel and image we were going for with our wedding: vintage/retro cocktails from the 1930's - 1950's.

Hence, these beautiful Claudia Calhouns became my crafty "gateway drug", so to speak, and began what would become my mantra throughout our wedding planning days: If we can't afford it or find it, we'll do it ourselves.

(Apologies in advance for the quality of the pictures to come, they were taken way after our wedding celebration and many of the items you'll see are from the scrapbook I made to keep a sample and memory of everything created for our big day.)

Below you'll see the final version of the invite I created off of the Calhoun version above. I found a DIY paper supplier called Envelopments that has nearly everything under the sun paper-wise to make your paper goods. I found a dark brown matte cardstock that was very close to the Calhoun model and a beautiful Citrine metallic paper to mimic the ink printed on the Calhoun as well. For my lettering, I learned how to emboss, and that is an addiction within itself!

I originally wanted to have a local paper printer do raised-ink printing (very tactile) on our invites and envelopes. I would provide the paper, they provide the service. However, I soon found out that this was a frustrating request. No one would touch the project! I heard every excuse in the book except the real reason, which I suspect was that the job was too small for them to bother with (we only needed 70-75 invitation sets printed).

So that is how I learned to emboss. And as you'll see in other posts, I got pretty darn good at it, too.

Fortunately with the Citrine metallic paper, it didn't absorb the ink jet ink on our trusty Epson Stylus Photo R300 printer very quickly. Which meant I could shake on my own custom blend of embossing powder (part gold, party pewter), then tap the excess off, and have the powder remain on the printed out portion of the paper. Hit it with the embossing heat gun while keeping the gun moving so as not to burn and warp the paper too much, and presto, a beautiful raised invitation that looked an awfully lot like the Calhoun version.

I did that over 75 times alone just for the inside of the invite. I'd also end up embossing all the response cards...

As well as all the envelopes associated with the invite suite.

For the return address for the back of the vellum outer mailing envelopes, I had a rubber stamp made in the same font as on the invites and response cards and again used the embossing powder and the heat gun. For the star motif invite seal(actually the star on the center of our china pattern) we took a picture of that, made an image of it on the computer and I had a rubber stamp made of that, too, and embossed a bazillion of those. They sealed up the pocketfold envelopes the invitation was attached to in the center and also were affixed to the center of matching brown folded cards which were used as thank you cards for wedding gifts and the like. (For the thank you cards, I used a silver metallic Gelly pen which showed up beautifully on the dark paper.)

I swapped services with a co-workers partner whom had gorgeous handwriting. She wrote each guests name on the back of the pocketfold invitation in metallic silver Gelly pen and I did some sewing repairs on a blouse my co-worker had needing repair.

On the vellum mailing envelope I handwrote out each guest name and address using Gelly pens in burgundy metallic ink. It was a dark maroon-brown color that looked perfect with the invites and stood out on the vellum for the post office.

I still get comments to this day about how beautiful our wedding invitations were and I'm still quite pleased with how well everything turned out! You didn't see a lot of colored wedding invitations back in 2003-2004 for more formal weddings like you do today. I do like that they still hold up over time and don't look dated or passe as some styles can unfortunately do.