Wedding Celebrations

My brothers and I are in the midst of getting things done for mum and dad's 50th wedding anniversary celebration in December. Mum and dad of course, are busy getting things organised as well; but we kids are doing a few things here and there. Mostly we are laughing at all the old photos of ourselves and thoroughly enjoying the nostalgic trips down memory lane.

One of my tasks has been to do the invitations.  Its always tricky working out what folk might like and so I started off with quite a few test runs and options for them to think about - some with intricate folding and envelopes; some long and thin, some more regular, some embossed, some with a photograph and so on.  Any designer knows the process!

Little by little we got some clarity about what they were imagining the end product might look like and we grabbed some firm ideas early; others sort of appeared over time.

Barry and I sat down together one night right at the beginning and hand-embossed the 50 onto the front page of the card. I cut two templates form the sides of plastic milk containers and we sat side by side in companionable embossing mode.

I then had to do quite a few roughs to try and work out how much info we could get on a card; what size to write it; what bits to embellish, what style of writing to do and so on. Any calligrapher knows the process!

And then I had to try and work out how to get the final words onto about 35 cards - and I struggled again with scanning and with Photoshop so I ended up printing/copying each one from the original.

I worked out how to get the gold 50th onto each card - again after I tried all sorts of options and all sorts of pens and styles. And then decided it needed a little bit of something, so did gold diamonds by hand on each of them; and then right at the end, decided that I needed to separate or highlight "Graham and Adrianne" a bit from the rest, so tiny little gold diamonds were added alongside their names to each one.

I found the gold paper and envelopes in town - excellent! But there was only one sheet of paper and I needed about 15. So luckily we found more in Melbourne on one of our recent work trips. I cut each printed page down to size, each gold sheet down to size. And attached the gold to the card.  I didn't dare attach the printed page until I had hand-written everybody's names in case I mucked them up. I didn't want to have to throw the whole card away.

Then I attached the printed part to the card and we were almost there. The envelope selection came next and we tossed up white, white with gold or gold and Mum chose gold, so we bought all the envelopes there were in town.  Then the issue of how to address them - labels, handwritten, all calligraphy (eek) or a bit.  We settled on a capital letter and the rest just hand-written by me, so it showed a bit of care and creativity without being over the top, for which I was grateful.

They were popped in the post and have been received across the country. Phew! Now down to the party...