
Handmade wedding invitations
2012 • Skills: Design
I’ve designed and printed two complete wedding invitation suites: for my own wedding in 2010, and for my sister-in-law’s in 2012. Both marriages remain in effect.

For my wedding, the designs were inspired by the look of vintage postcards because our event was being held at two historic sites in the Hudson Valley. The main graphic is a Photoshop composite of a vintage postcard of the Vassar College chapel and an autumnal treeline with a noise filter applied to match the vintage postcard texture.

I made the full suite of paper products for the wedding – from maps and belly bands to menus and stickers for our throw packets (filled with gray lavender buds and orange orchid petals).

For my sister-in-law, because the couple met at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, they wanted books to be the visual motif for the occasion. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I proposed that their wedding invitation be an actual book — one that I would design and bind myself.

I designed the cover in Illustrator, sent it to Boxcar Press for a photopolymer plate and hand-printed more than 100 copies on a Vandercook letterpress at The Arm print shop in Brooklyn. I also made a bookbinding jig out of scrap wood and bound the books with glue and linen bookcloth.