boxed wedding invitation

I like to joke that our wedding was planned before I even met AJ... and I guess to some extent it wouldn't be a joke... I knew that I wanted blue bridesmaids dresses, a wedding dress not every girl had (ie: not strapless... it would fall off me anyways during the entire day), all white flowers and a boxed wedding invitation. Years before I'd become addicted to Paper Source (have you ever been in their fabulous store?) and saw that they had boxed invitations. I wanted our boxed invites to represent the theme of the wedding... The North Shore. I had the wording and basic ideas for the design (including the fonts I wanted to use!) ready to go when I met with graphic designer Jessica Brand. Jessica worked on Gordon's Campus Events Council with me when we were both students so I knew that her work was fab. I told her I wanted a vintage map of the North Shore and she manged to track one down and then work some designing wonders ... here are some photos of our collaboration:

We covered the boxes in a label to secure them for mailing. I was able to print directly onto the label from a printer that Jessica loaned me... because the boxes were so light they only cost about $1.20 for mailing... not so bad considering normal wedding envelopes cost around 65 cents to mail. Here's how we made the inside weigh about 2 ounces but still raise the invites up to the height we wanted (I forget what it's called exactly but we got it at Christmas Tree Shop and filled all the boxes using maybe three bags of this filler, you hardly need anything!):

We used the vintage map as a border around the invite and then used the fonts Edwardian Script and Garamond (small caps) for the invite.

Our RSVP cards were a larger version of the map with a washed out sepia colored photo of us on the reverse side:

The last two pieces that we had in the box were a card of area information, where AJ and I outlined some of our favorite places on the North Shore, and then a card with accomadation information. I loved loved loved working on this piece of the wedding and by far anything to do with the printed pieces were my favorite part of the wedding. As I mentioned recently, I'm on a wedding kick lately because I'm helping out with a wedding next weekend... and it just is making me remember all the fun pieces that went into planning and making the day be such a reflection of us!

Have a great day!