THE INVITATIONS

It is with delight and pure excitement I debut our Ireland invitations!!!!!

I am so proud of these babies!  I designed the entire invitation myself and this is by far the biggest design project I’ve ever done. I’m so excited about how they turned out it…I wish we were going tomorrow! 540 days to go according to my wedding countdown clock.  😉

David and I are getting married in Ireland in September 2012 and then having a reception in our area exactly 2 years from today!  We are so blessed with amazing family and friends and cannot wait to start this next chapter in our life.  We share a love of music, art, beer, fine dining, travel and life.  We wanted to celebrate all of that with our wedding.  When we got engaged we knew right away that we wanted to do something different to celebrate.  Someone came up with the idea of Ireland and we never thought twice about it. Once we started researching we knew Ireland was the perfect place to get married.  Ireland is  a beautiful country rich with culture and so much to see and do.  Ireland combines my love of picturesque settings and Dave’s love of fine whiskey and food.

Dear Family & Friends – We tried to send as many of these out as possible but may not have hit everyone.  If you should have gotten one, please forgive us, we love you.  The more the merrier and if we missed you, let us know and we’ll send you all the details. 😉

So let me break this down….below are all the ingredients.  It all started with the passport and after they were printed I needed something more grand than a white envelope to send them in.   Once my imagination is sparked it’s hard to contain it. 

 I thought of designing a passport laying in bed one morning and over coffee laid out the cover.  The inside was not as easy, I had a hard time visualizing what it should look like.  A few weeks went by and one morning an idea popped into my head for the first page, once that page was done the rest was easy and 8 hours later the whole thing was complete.

While designing the cover I had a really hard time finding the eagle for the front I was Googling “passport eagle” so much I was afraid the goverment was going to come after me.  I found this passport template at Aylee Bits which had the perfect eagle!  I was also able to use some of the background graphics for the pages. 

The passport is 3 – 4×6 press printed cards stapled together and I used the “thingy” below to make the corners round.  Rounding the corners was actually Dave’s job and he did very well!  It felt more passportish with the rounded corners.
 

I started the passport out as an invitation to our wedding….

This spread is the day by day breakdown of our trip….

Travel details…

Our website information and a teaser about our St. Patrick’s Day reception…

and the inside back…

They say the invitation sets the whole tone, I wanted ours to be a party in a box and bring a taste of Ireland.  We purchased the Jamison first but the store didn’t have enough so at the next store we found Bailey’s which was awesome because they were much lighter and $0.23 less to ship. After that I went into A.C. Moore for kraft paper and came out with a ton of green mini mugs and an RSVP idea.  😉

I used two sheets of orange, 2 sheets of white and 2 sheets of green to represent the flag of Ireland.  It added the perfect touch!

I found these great boxes on ULINE, the price was right and they were perfect for shipping.  Building all those boxes was also another Dave job.  

I thought they needed to be dressed up a bit so I had labels printed for the front and 4×6 images printed for the inside. 

I’m so glad I had to ship all of this out because honestly I have been looking for a good excuse to buy a stamper.  I LOVE IT!  I don’t mail a lot of stuff but you better believe every letter from this point forward will be adorned with one of these stamps.  Check them out at www.finestationary.com

We finished up the packages with brown kraft paper and this awesome tape.  I picked this tape up almost 2 years ago in a dollar bin at A.C. Moore and did a serious happy dance when I came across it.  So perfect!

 I can’t wait to show you the next wedding project I’m working on!

I didn’t get all my girls together because I wanted them all to be surprised but I needed some help so SHOUT OUT  to my girl Heather for helping me out!  xoxo