wedding invites, and how i did it again

continuing on with the wedding series, just so many things to blog about!


for wedding invites, i didn't want to use invites that looked like that:

 this was 1 of 2 of the better designs offered by SICC.

anyway, I originally wanted to do some brush lettering + painting, then convert to digital. but after then as the date drew closer and i had a whole pile of tasks left to complete and it was the end of july..

i decided to go the easy way ;)

i downloaded some free water colour flower/ brush stroke digital packs from online and searched for some nice fonts, used illustrator (which is my major LOVE, i love vector art) to shift things around and went through so many iterations! Lost count of the many and i won't show them but here's the end product:

front of church invite in english: was going for the slightly raw + simple look. i like caps fonts with slight spacings

back of church invite in english

front of church invite in chinese

back of church invite in chinese: thank God for a lovely papa who is fluent in chinese!

front cover of dinner invite

flip open invite, left side of dinner invite: used illustrator to draw the maps! <3

flip open invite, right side of dinner invite

 and this is the chinese insert (1 card, 1 side) that we slotted into invites of chinese-speaking relatives

i really wanted to print it on pale pink coloured cards like that:

 don't you think it looks modern, yet traditional (like those pink wedding cards back in the olden days?!!?) alas, as it was an insert, it needed to match the english card, and i didn't want everything to be too pinkish.

whilst i got all these cards ready, han yang and i were trying to find cheap printers that could print on good quality cards at the price we wanted. we went to sunshine plaza, which was our best bet, but printing was pretty ex. not only that, they charged separately for cutting, and so cards worked out to be something like high $1++ to $2++ a piece (can't remember exactly). moreover, none of them sold the measurement of envelopes we wanted! they all suggested going to popular or taobao :( we were looking for square envelopes to fit our 140mm x 140mm cards.

anyway, it was end of beginning of august already and i had to go on taobao for 1 last batch of logs, which included this! bought some 148mm x 148mm, 80gsm (or sthng like that) envelopes at S$0.06 a piece, which is much much cheaper than retail cost in Singapore. and considering i couldn't even find this measurement, it was a steal. the colour was a bit more crimson, and less burgundy-ish than i expected, but it worked out pretty well!

anyway, after some time, we were suddenly reminded that fiona's family did printing (they supply all the event cards/ materials for church). she told us that they stopped doing printing for wedding a while back, but for us they would make an exception. yay for friends who are sweet hearts! michelle (the lady who handled the printing) was really helpful when i went down to pick the paper (snuck away during lunch time). their selection wasn't super comprehensive, but it was good enough to pick out something of quality. i was actually looking for some type of matte paper for the dinner invites, like the kind they use for certificate printing?

they didn't have those, so i ended up picking 250gsm pearl paper (slightly shimmery) in cream for the dinner invites, and white pearl paper for the church invites. the quotation was super reasonable, i felt bad and wasn't sure whether they were profiting from this.

the correspondence was quick! we started on 25 jul, confirmed the designs on 29th, and by 2 aug (5 days), the cards were ready! it would have been even earlier, had we not done overlay printing halfway through cos of some minor edits:

here it is! the print quality was extremely sharp and true to colour.

with my favourite card of all the designs. received many compliments too!

<3

one thing, however, we WAY over-estimated! so many cards leftover :(