Progress of invitations

I didn't think this would be so hard.....boy was I wrong. For starters, I really wanted something unique and untraditional. I started pulling images together and finding what i liked. This vintage Ad was one of the pictures. I then realized that I loved the look of old lables and things.

I tried using a vitage decorative border at the top, but that was too frou frou for my tastes. Then i made a french wine lable an invite just for kicks. I made a tree monogram, hated that...moved on. As much as i liked the old lables and vitage tags, it was time to steer around that idea.

Next i found this bird invite. The bird theme however felt a bit overused. Scratched that idea

Then I found these folk's invite, and was like sweet! Its cute, non traditional, and handrawn. Charley and I looked over our "theme" of sorts and liked the idea of it "advertising" what the wedding would be like. So we tried incoporating trees, nighttime, our pet hedgehog, with a retro border.

 Then we tried a handrawn version of the woodsy theme. It was too hard to read and scan in.

Nex idea came from this couple who did a letter styled invite with a typwriter. Charley used to do his homework on the typewriter in the libary  and i loved the old look of antique typwriters so we decided to try that. I took the typwriter below and made a black and white of it and it was going to sit at the bottom of the page while our invite scrolled out of the top of it. This idea was cancled when my mother saw me working on it and protested....thus started the battle between our two tastes. My mother wanted uber traditional with uber traditional wording. I wanted the opposite.

SO we went back to the bordered idea........... but play around with some new ideas first, including a couple of monogram doodles before I realized that wasn't us at all.

One of the ideas was entering into a contest to see if i could win these invitations. I got a nice email back saying they had picked another winner..which is a shame, because these were my favorite invitations that i had seen available for sale on the internet. I wasnt a fan of getting the packs at michaels either.

At this point we were getting very desperate to get something, anything, out so people would actually know when and where the daggone thing was. We contemplated writing on napkins and mailing those.

Next I tried these, but after much argumentation on whose name got to be on the invite, one of our groomsmen pointed out that it looked like a book title. I'm glad he said something, because I didn't see it at first and then I realized he was absolutely right.

The last idea involved printing out the words on copy paper and painting on a tree with our initials on it. This idea came from an invite that I initally wrote off as corney. Okay, so it's corney, but it's us. We are using birch branches and pinecones for the decor at the wedding so it works....except to point out that I think I painted an oak tree and then paired it with a pine cone? Works for desperate people.

First i drew it on with pencil and made a copy. Next i painted on top of the copy.

I had drawn this in my sketchbook as a thumbnail during brainstorming. We are going to have christmas lights all around. Next i painted the teeeeny tiney little pinecone for the RSVP with a little Teeeny tiney brush.

So this idea was a GO from the parental's, meaning it fit  the requirements of being simple, and yet a little different. Its truthfully not my favorite, but I needed to be decisive! and we were in a hurry, and I am entirely too picky about that sort of thing. IT'S A PIECE OF PAPER! Whew, there had be some tears of joy at the opening of these things in the mail. Next I took the origional to Kinkos (or Fedex). They scanned the sucker and gave me the proof shown here: