Wood & Grain : INVITATIONS

INVITATIONS One of the major themes for our wedding that surfaced early on is the drive to do as much as we can ourselves, or with the help of our friends and families. We’ve both found that the sometimes arduous work involved with creating something yourself is vastly out-weighed by the pleasure of looking upon something you have created yourself. It is also the only real way to let your personalities show through the work. We knew we could design our wedding invitations and hand them off to one of the many local letterpress printing shops and end up with something beautiful. However, this didn’t feel right to us. Beyond just designing them ourselves, we wanted to fabricate them ourselves as well. Not only did we think the process would be fun and educational, but it also made the most sense for something as important as our wedding invitations. Another reason is the application of embracing constraints. By choosing to make them ourselves we limited our options drastically, making decisions much easier to make along the way. Modern print methods, and to a lesser extent letterpress, make almost anything possible. This can be a daunting realization when staring at a blank canvas. In our case, deciding to produce our invites in-house not only led to an ease in decision making, but conversely opened us up to a new level of customization and rarely seen effects that traditional methods wouldn’t allow. Luckily for us, there is a friendly neighborhood TechShop around the corner from our house. Just a two-minute walk down the street was an incredible warehouse filled with custom-fabrication machinery for us to use. Of particular interest was their laser-cutters, the application of which will become clear as you scroll down…