Check it out! I made it on Oh So Beautiful Paper!
Stretching my limitations and challenging my capacity is one way to describe this wedding suite. I usually calligraph and PRINT wedding invitations. This one was all hand calligraphed.
About the bride: Lynsey is an UBER classy girl from our neighborhood. Her and her sister run Alder & Tweed an interior design firm based out of Park City, Utah. And when I say classy, I mean basically every outfit is sartorial street-style straight out of Manhattan.
She’s my dream client. However, I only had 14 days to complete the invitations before the wedding. This means I had about 2-4 days tops to complete invitations and envelopes so guests could get their invitations! Most of the invitations were delivered by hand, so mailing wasn’t too much of an issue. There were a couple of invitations that were mailed outside of Utah, which made me nervous, but because it was such an intimate event every guest had the date saved.
The invitations themselves were classic. I worked on flourishing the names and did a slightly flourished running script for the main text. I hesitate to call this real Spencerian, because it’s fairly casual and doesn’t have the classic Spencerian shades. I opted out of that for the text because of the paper. The felt-finish paper caused some issues with keeping fine, smooth hairlines. Overall, I feel like it worked because of the rustic venue for the event.
For the finest hairlines, I used a Nikko G nib (it works best on those rough papers) and Old World iron gall ink. The Iron Gall ate about 3 of my nibs through the course of the 30 invitations and envelopes, but it was worth it.
The lightbox was my BFF for this project. I created the design on layout paper, drew in the text with a dark micron pen and taped it onto the light box. I used light adhesive washi tape to tape each paper in place while I lettered. It took about 8 1/2 minutes for me to write out each invitation.
The bride and family were over-the-moon to see their names ornately flourished. I really had fun with the addresses. I got in a groove and just flourished these names to bits!
The wedding was stunning. See snippets here and here. And here.
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