Homemade Save the Date Postcards and Letterpress Invitations

The perks of marrying a graphic designer is that I have free unlimited designs.  First up on the wishlist was a clever save the date.  In case you are not aware, we love reenacting and dressing up = a fun photo shoot for our engagement pictures.  We let our photos guide our design for the save the date, seen below.

After that was complete, on to invitations we went!  The apple doesn't fall far from the tree in our house, and my husband's father is a professional printer and college professor on the matter.  He just so happens to have a traditional letterpress in his classroom.  This did require a lot of research on my part with no professionals in wedding biz to guide me, I consulted Google and made a few many trips to the paper store and relied heavily on my new Dad's expert knowledge.

At first we attempted to make our own plate, but after many failures we decided to order the design we had custom created on the computer.  Below is the text of the invitation and the boarder was done as a separate plate, since I wanted it printed in blue (only one color allowed at a time).

Future Dad in Law getting things all set up.

Here we go, the master at work!!!!!

Lucy made the trip to the classroom in order to supervise things.

We printed each page one at a time, and seeing as we needed to make lots of copies and lots of extras for just in case, we all took turns at it so no one's arms would get tired!

It was quite fun, here is Ben holding up a completed invitation that needs to be trimmed.

The finished product!

Next was the assembling process!  We got our assembly line all laid out...

Here we are hard at work...

Look at all those letters!  I had no idea we would end up with so many!

After you've got to all that hard work you don't want the letters to be stamped by a machine, so I asked for ours to be hand stamped.  I loved our local post mistress! (she even gave me permission to feature her in my lil blog before it was born - I told her of my plans...)

And then off they went - to be received by all of our wonderful friends and family!

I wouldn't say that making hand letter-pressed invitations was the easiest thing in the world, in fact we had a lot of bumps in the road, but they were all worth it.  I absolutely loved the invitations when we were done and it was such a wonderful bonding experience with my new father in law that I wouldn't trade it for anything!