Guest Blogger: Invitations (Gocco'd)

as i had mentioned earlier, we weren't sure how to treat invitations given the fact that we weren't telling guests where the wedding would be held. should we just let the invitation itself be the announcement for the location, and keep it a secret until "six-to-eight weeks" before the event, instead of until the day before? letting the arrival of the invitation spill the beans? nah ... we decided to print "secret location" on the invitation itself ...

our invitation in a frame

after reviewing tons and tons of invitations, invitation websites, and invitation reviews, we decided to [gasp] make our own. with sixty guests, it seemed doable.

the invitations were each individually printed with a japanese print gocco. i first found out about gocco on etsy, and contacted a designer to gocco our invitations. her name was heather jeany, if anyone has been scouring etsy, her work is fabulous.

work by heather jeany
{image from http://images.etsy.com}

however, she planned to be giving birth soon and was going on hiatus. thus began the search to purchase my own gocco. i could not win a single ebay auction; goccos were going like crazy. then i found a distributor in florida. alas, the funny little print maker arrived.

the way i designed it, each invitation required a two-process print. once for the skyline/flourish, and again for the names in white (this was because the design was spread out wider than the gocco window, otherwise the black and white could have been printed in the same process). after all the invitations had dried, each was hand-fed through our regular printer for additional text. we found out along the way, it made more sense to reverse the process - hand feed through the printer first, and then print the screens.

in addition to the invitations, the flourishes on the hotel card, and the note from bride and groom card were also gocco'd. also the return address on the back of our outer-envelopes.

these are the invitations after being screened.

by the end, we created our finished package:

here, an envelope stamped and ready to be delivered.

once the outer envelope was opened, the inner package could be pulled out. the inner envelope was clear plastic, creating a little packet of enclosures. first, the invitation itself was showing through the front of the clear envelope ...... and when turned over, the other goodies could be seen. this is the side of the clear envelope that was sealed with a small sticker with the guests' names and a small flourish [not shown].
once removed from the packaging, a total of four enclosures were included. the invitation, the note from bride and groom, the hotel card, and rsvp card.

the note from bride and groom was two-sided; the note on the front [white gocco flourish showed up very poorly in the scan]
and a list of things to do on the back [this is the same sheet of pearly paper, have no idea why one side scanned dark and the other side so light, maybe something to do with the contrast of the white paint on the first side? also, why did i scan these instead of just take pictures of them?]:

the rsvps were post-card style, and mimicked the stamping efforts of the original envelope. because there was a place to write, we got some great responses with our rsvps! should have had parentheses around the (s) on accepts, but was having serious issues with the printing margins on these small cards, and the parens for this font were really wide.

shout out to my hubs for doing the stamps on all the invites and rsvp cards!!

Comments

[Melissa's Greetings]

These are amazing!!

[Anonymous]

Are you open for business?

[Riley (aka Rachel)]

Oh, these are so cool!!
You guys are so creative coming up with the "secret location"! That's really fun.

These look great!