Over-achieving brides

via Green Wedding Shoes

This is why non-crafty brides (over here!) can get intimidated reading wedding blogs. Ah-may-zing... handcrafted multipiece wedding invitations cached inside carefully chosen (The Dream Lover; Blind Date with Mars) hollowed-out vintage books. How would you feel receiving one of these gorgeously detailed packages in the mail?

I hope my guests don't print up t-shirts saying "I was invited to the Barefoot wedding... and all I got was this single piece of letterpress."

See more luscious pictures at the website of photographer Jessica Claire, the bride.

To the post office...

After months of work with the creative wizards at Printable Press and Mercurio Brothers, our invitations finally went in the mail on Tuesday -- just a day shy of two months prior to the wedding.


It turns out that, in addition to his many other talents, Mr. Barefoot is something of a calligraphy prodigy. That is, he picked up my calligraphy pen, screwed around for awhile, and ended up addressing all the envelopes in better style than I could ever muster! I had to address a few stragglers, for whom I was lacking addresses on Sunday, and was not able to match his artistic flair. I love uncovering these hidden talents! (He also makes a mean eggplant Parmesan - never my favorite dish, but much more inviting in his rendition.)

After visiting three different post offices to get enough King and Queen of Heart stamps for our invitations -- which coordinated nicely with the sage green envelopes from Paper Source (with 30% post-consumer waste, yay!) --

source

into the mailbox they went.

And our first RSVP was today! This thing is becoming real. People are going to show up ready to party!

I remember the invitations I got to weddings right after college: an outer envelope, an inner envelope, tissue, vellum, response cards, reception cards, map cards... paper everywhere. We wanted our invitation to be much simpler, while still beautiful and conveying the necessary information.

So, two pieces of paper: the invitation and the map card. That's it. The double-sided map and direction card (to help people find our obscure location), also directs guests to our wedding website, where they can indicate their response for all the wedding weekend activities. The web responses should also be easier to track.




I love the way Kimi, of Printable Press, coordinated both sides of the map card with our invitation, which was based on this.
And yet feels completely our own, in shades of brown and green. (Can you see those lovely deep imprints from the letterpress?)

Both Printable Press and Mercurio Brothers were great to work with. They were patient through several rounds of revisions, were responsive throughout the process and completed everything in a timely manner (or even earlier than promised.)

Letterpress at Mercurio Brothers is half or less the cost of other places - an added bonus was being able to easily drop by on my way to and from campus to check proofs in person. However, all ordering is done via the web, so even if you don't live down the street from Mercurio Brothers, it's worth checking out.

More ways to cut costs

Studio Blue photography is offering 20% off packages booked now, starting at $992 for six hours of coverage.

Ajalon Printing and Design, which I discovered via elefantitas alegras, has an *amazing* letterpress special:

100 invitations, enclosure cards, and envelopes for $398!

What a deal!

Quick: they've got to be ordered by June 30, 2009.

If our invitations were not already well under way, I'd totally be going for something like this:


Or this


More reasons to love it: They're based in Sonoma County, the heart of California wine country, where they print on 100% recycled cotton paper (tree-free) and use soy-based inks.



Green and gorgeous.

Some kind of wonderful

The Before, via Veiled Vows:



And the Ever After, via Broke-Ass Bride:
(Dana and Hunter killed it! What an outrageously talented duo!)

Fresh Hubby of LA from Digital Princess on Vimeo.

Cowgirl (type)Style

You all remember Dr. Cowgirl, whose inimitable style sparked a thousand clicks (well, at least a couple dozen), right?

Well, she's designing her own Western-inflected wedding invitations, with assistance from our favorite print shop, for her August shindig in Idaho. I can hardly wait!

She felt that the invite was not quite right, so I offered to seek out some Western style fonts to spice up her invitation.

Since she might not be the only one designing her own invite, or working on a Western theme, I offer the fruits of my labors here. These are some of the best cowgirl-style fonts I found, all freely-downloadable, except for the last one.

Tanglewood (#24)

Playbill

A bunch of Western fonts here

Mesquite

Old Towne

Nashville



Available here for $50 (along with a bunch of other western style fonts).

Sometimes, you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't

Just popping in to let you know that I seem to have run out of words this week. (I know that, by saying that, I have proven that I still have a few words left, but mostly they seem to be used up.)

Graduation weekend was fun, exhilarating and exhausting. I have been quite a solitary being for the last several months, as I've tried to pound out my dissertation in the shortest time humanly possible (only to miss the May filing deadline. argh!).

To suddenly join a weekend-long whirl of parties - followed by a half-day retreat at my new job - was a bit of a (delicious) shock to the system. I think all my words went into the conversations that have been held in abeyance these last several months. The rest are going into the revised chapter due to my advisor by the end of the month.

I've kind of lost the thread on wedding planning, too. Once we secured our DJ (which I need to write about) and started working with the lovely Kimi (who was featured in one of the first wedding blogs I ever read, and immediately caused me to fall in love) at Printable Press on our invitation designs (oh yeah, I owe her an email), the wind kinda went out of my sails.

We have all the big things in place... well, except for the ceremony that we're writing ourselves, and the officiant(s), and the wedding entourage, and the dinner menu, and the rings (which I am petrified of forgetting), and a zillion other things that I surely have forgotten.

But for now, my words are dedicated to my chapters. (hmm, looks like there were a lot more words lurking around than I suspected!)

I'll be back soon, I promise, with photos and the rest of the story of the wedding of Data Monkey and Mountain Man.

'til then...

Another small step in the wedding direction

And I do mean small.

I went to Mercurio Brothers, the local and shockingly reasonably-priced letterpress print shop, with Dr. Cowgirl the other day to get some information about invitations. I collected a bunch of samples, brought them home to Mr. Barefoot, and we reached a decision.

On the design of the invitation? No.

On the wording of the invitation? No.

On the number of invitations needed? No.

All those still remain to be determined.

However, we did decide on the type of paper we want to use.

We chose

Somerset 300 gm Cotton ... our most popular cover stock for wedding invitations and is our #1 recommendation. It is thick and spongy, which are good qualities for letterpress. [...in] Soft (natural) White (more like an ecru).

Unbelievable. I have never before been this consumed by minutia. The wedding is drawing out all my obsessive tendencies (which were quite latent until now!) in a bizarre convergence of my party-hosting anxiety and my dissertation avoidance. Heaven help me if I didn't have the dissertation to draw the major part of my attention - I'd probably be parsing the relative merits of different type styles. (There's no saying that that won't happen over the summer. eek!)

Anyway, Dr. Cowgirl and I couldn't resolve those larger issues about our respective invitations, because we were going to treat ourselves to a facial and a massage, respectively, at Spa Week (or month, at our local spa) - $50 treatments at a spa near you! Check it out before time runs out!

Take Your Wine Bar and Lazy Susan, and Skeedaddle

I came across this purportedly cost-cutting article via Another One Bites the Dust. All I can say is thank goodness I'm getting married on the west coast and don't have to deal with this sort of snobby New Yorkers (yes, there are definitely snobby people everywhere, but blessedly few in my social circle. Maybe because we're all impoverished grad students.)

This article seems to adhere to the brilliant line from one of the commentators at A Practical Wedding that weddings often turn into a game of "Let's Pretend We're Rich." NY Mag seems to feel that everyone is obligated to play, and wins only by convincing their guests that this is the case. Any sign of thriftiness is a sin and should be shunned. The only way to stay within budget is to pull one over on guests in such a crafty way that they won't realize that we're not rich.

Another One Bites the Dust took umbrage with this line:
No matter how tight your budget, do not have a cash bar. A wine-only bar’s thriftiness is just as obvious.

Whatever. If our guests are drinking our carefully chosen wines, I hope they'll enjoy, and not wish that is was something else.

I drew the line here:
Draw the line at family-style service. What’s next, wine bottles on a lazy Susan? Honestly, you’re better off eloping.

Now there's a serving idea! Common at Chinese weddings, I imagine, where the condiments and dishes are placed on a central lazy Susan for everyone to reach.

Thanks for the advice, NY Mag. We'll have to cancel our contract with our site and lose our deposit, since the only food service options they offer are family style and buffet (which I'm sure you, NY Mag, think is even more declasse). hrmph!

We could also debate the value of this line:
If the florist tries to charge you for the arrangements in the bathroom, don’t bite your tongue.

Um, flowers in the bathroom? Really? Maybe we'd save some bank if we didn't put flowers in the bathroom, rather than arguing with the florist about whether we'll be charged for them.

Hmmm... I wonder what NY Mag would have to say about the unisex bathroom (singular) at our site?

Egad, the more I read, the more incensed I am.
Don’t get a fresh-from-ICP artist to shoot your wedding. You’ll regret it, always .... You could opt out of the engagement shoot and save about $500, but that’s when you’ll realize if you love your photographer or if you’ll have to prepare for more of this kind of creepiness later

Huh. "Opting out" of the engagement session suggests that its mandatory. Isn't purchasing a service from a vendor more like "opting in"? We never considered having an engagement session, especially since we don't know anyone who has done this. I asked my married BFF about it, and she looked at me like I was from Mars: "what, you're not movie stars!" (Which is not to say that you shouldn't do an engagement session if you have the time and cash. I'd love to have some nice photos of us - but we have neither time nor cash right now.)

NY Mag crossed the line when they crossed Miss Manners:
avoid engraving, letterpress, and shapes that don’t fit into regular envelopes. And, print all of it at once. Skimp tastefully. Example: A save-the-date magnet isn’t the best idea.

As we have learned from Miss Manners, handwritten or engraved invitaions are the most proper. We do want the guests to feel warmly invited and welcome, even if they're only going to get to drink wine, and may be called upon to pass serving dishes to the person on their left.

The magnets? I love 'em! Our fridge is covered with save the date magnets from our friends.

So save yourself the time and angst. This is one article on wedding budgeting that you can avoid.

The bottom line is in the article's final line:
A great place to start: Event-design companies Fête and A Wedding Library offer free one-hour consultations. Go, and don’t waste a minute.

Nice advertorial, NY Mag. I wonder what these event planning companies paid for this sort of free publicity???

Well, I guess that settles it

that's our site!

Mercurio Brothers, the wizards of affordable letterpress, are right here in Berkeley!

I could probably even pick up my order (on my bike!) to save on shipping. When you think about it, that's really more sustainable than ordering invitations from NY that have to be shipped all the way across the country, even if that press is powered by wind from Native Energy.

Mom and Stepdad agree that letterpress is the way to go (having apparently read Miss Manners - as Bride in Exile did - and learned that the only proper way to issue a formal invitation is via a handwritten note or an engraved invitation*), and kicked down some funds to support it (yay!). Next step is figuring out the proper wording to reflect the participation of all the sponsors of this party.

* according to pg. 390-1 of Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior:

"In a perfect world, people would handwrite all of their formal invitations. But as we live in a world in which people wish to marry before of hundreds of their closest friends, and they claim to have more urgent tasks than copying out hundreds of invitations in their own dear handwriting, we substitute engraving.... The world is full of nasty people who examine backs of wedding invitations and run fingernails over the front in order to tell whether the thing was properly engraved. Miss Manners is one of them. Handwriting and engraving are equally correct; fake engraving and computer generated fonts are imposters."

Postcards from a wedding

I think I've stumbled on a theme without even intending to.

The other night, after Mr. Barefoot had gone up to Tahoe to ski, leaving me the quiet of the house to peacefully work on my dissertation, I got sucked into the vortex that is ebay. I needed to order a few more vintage California postcards to use for additional Save the Date cards (thanks to the ever-expanding guest list!). But with bidding on ebay, you never really know if you're going to win what you want for the price you want, so I always bid on a few extras of this thing I'm looking for.



Before I knew it, I had placed bids on an additional 108 postcards - when we only needed like 10 more! And you know, ebay bids are not retractable once they're placed. (Yeah, I know, I should've just 'watched' the auctions, but at $2 here and $5 there, it didn't seem like much of a commitment to go ahead and bid... Until I saw that the total of outstanding bid I had was $42. Still, it won't break the bank.)



So then I set to wondering what I was going to do with 100 extra vintage postcards. I'm thinking maybe this is the theme for our wedding. We both love to send postcards from our travels (my middle brother is the only other person I know who still does this.) We had already been thinking about using postcards from different places we'd traveled together as table markers.




Now I'm thinking we can use the additional postcards as either
1) place cards on the tables, or
2) escort cards hung on a clothesline, with the guests' names and table numbers written on the back, or
3) places for the guests to write wishes to us. We could have a sign that says something like "Send us a postcard into the future for our adventures together" and guests could fill out postcards and place them in - oh! a little mailbox! which could also hold gift cards! - rather than writing in a guest book.


Plus, I love this theme idea because it's all reused - vintage, baby - so no new resources are required to make these decorations, and it totally reflects us.
What do you think? Which one(s) of these options would work the best?

Chart the wedding

Ooo, cool new ways to visualize the physical and social space of the wedding!*


This wedding mapper tool is a great way to give a visual overview of where everything is happening. One more link on the wedding website, and one less piece of paper to send to everyone.

And this wedding genealogy is such a cool way to show how everyone is interconnected - think Facebook social history, calligrafied.



So wishing I had the mad design skills of some of the bride2B's out there! I wonder if we could do this in PowerPoint or Word. It would be fun to visualize how everyone is connected.

*hmmm... my inability to actually escape from my dissertation, even when I am ostensibly thinking about something else, rears its ugly head. Task for the weekend: finish a chapter on perceptions of physical and social space.

Letterpress to Save the Planet!

How did I miss this before? Bella Figura creates beautiful letterpress invitations using soy-based and low VOC inks using 100% cotton paper made from reclaimed fibers in a wind powered plant, where employees are given bus passes and memberships in a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm!

Through participation in 1% for the Planet, an initiative started by reknowned climber and environmentalist Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia sportswear fame, they donate at least 1% of their annual revenues to environmental organizations worldwide. They have really raised the bar for environmentally-responsible invitations. How incredibly cool that they are marrying their passion for paper and design with their commitment to protect the environment - something Mr. Barefoot and I want to emulate. I love it when people pursue what they love, while keeping the larger social and environmental perspectives in mind.

And their designs are absolutely beautiful!



A small additional bonus is that they're based in Syracuse, NY, where my late, and much-beloved, grandmother lived for every single one of her 98 years. When I got engaged, she was the first one I wanted to tell, but alas, I had to waft a message upward and hope that it reached her, rather than picking up the phone. I wish so much that she could be at my wedding. Getting something from her hometown might make me feel like she was included.

Affordable invites

Having run out of things to stress out about regarding the location, date, dress and photographer, I'd moved on to stressing about invites.

The two foci of my stress were cost and environmental-friendliness. Since we're both in the environmental field, we want our wedding to reflect our values. So far, so good: it will be outdoors, in a national park, and the reception will be at a non-profit arts center, with seasonal, local, organic food.

But what to do about all the miscellaneous paper that accompanies throwing a big party? Mr. Barefoot was all for evites (bet he didn't even know that they have a deal with The Knot!)*, and online RSVPs, but that seemed just a little too casual, hey-c'mon-over-we'll-pop-a-few-beers.

In the last couple days, I've seen two awesome options that have given me great hope for classy, yet affordable and environmentally-friendly invites.**

Option 1: Reasonably priced letterpress which can be done on recycled-content paper, via Snippet & Ink

Option 2: Fresh, sophisticated designs from the brand-spanking-new Printable Press which could be printed locally, or even by us, again on recycled-content paper.



Or, OMG, Option 3: We get an amazing design from Kimi at Printable Press, and send it to Mercurio Brothers for some sweet letterpress. Now that would be stylin'!



I can't imagine that there's anyone in the anti-WIC blogosphere that hasn't seen the amazing designs at Printable Press yet, but if not, dash over and take a look. Her designs are just gorgeous! (All images from there.)



*In a nod to Meg's post at A Practical Wedding today, in which a bride to be gives the downlow on what it's like to plan a lesbian wedding in a small Texas town, I'd like to point out that evite does have wedding evite with two brides, and two grooms. Cool and progressive! Just for that reason, I'd almost consider doing evites...

**Oh, and by the way, I never understood all those extra envelopes and pieces of tissue paper. So we're not gonna have 'em. Less to buy, less for people to throw away!

Great idea: Even if you're not a calligrapher...

You can have calligraphed envelopes, according to this brilliant shortcut from Jenn over at With This Ring...Comes a Lot of Hard Work!

You should check out Jenn's blog to see just how she did it, but basically she used her printer to print addresses in a fancy font, just slightly darker than the color of her envelopes, on the envelopes. Then she traced over the printed type with a calligraphy pen to give it that hand written feeling.

Super cool idea! My handwriting sucks, and Mr. Barefoot's is no better - after all, we're academics, and we're not supposed to write clearly :) But printed labels are ugly, and there's no room in the budget to pay someone to do all the envelopes by hand.
Genius!