everyone has their wedding-related calling. to many, it is making favors, to others, perhaps tackling a cake....my wedding-related talent, however, is a bit of a moot point: photography. because no one wants to see a bride hauling around a huge digital SLR on her big day.

so with my main talent out the window, i'm still left with my strong diy-ethic and artistic ability. i can draw but i am no means a graphic designer, and i'm the farthest thing from being able to vectorize my own photographs. enter new miss milkshake blogging topic: invitations. and it ain't like those other bees who either a) have them all done and show off their pretty finished products or even b) who still have them all done, but managed to take detailed pictures of the process to share with the community -- four months before my wedding and i'm at the very beginning stages. so any feedback you can give will certainly help me along on my journey!

after finding no appropriate images on the net for blackberry related images (it pleased me that blackberries = august fruit...and i could perhaps incorporate real ones atop my simple cake), line art and photographs alike, i sat down with a pen and paper. but even after re-drawing my images much larger in a thicker pen to shrink down later via photocopier to make a more "letterpress-ready" image, i just wasn't getting the look i wanted. damn my scoffing at cross-hatching in art class.

this one below came close, but then again, i think it's a magnolia or something entirely unrelated to blackberries.

when i drove an hour out of town for the gown that i finally slammed down the visa card for, i had to kill an hour in the town till i came back to witness the size 2 bride buying the only sample of the dress that i never got to try on....not only was it my size, but she snagged it for 50% off! the positive spin on my impulse buy was that i spent my hour at a bookstore where i scoured their shelves for botany books for those letterpress-y images (i had been entirely unable to even find books with these images to buy on amazon and ebay). i came home with two, and i've now thrown out the blackberry idea in favor of great letterpress-ready (i hope) images.

an invite to fit into one of those square envelopes? no way! greeting card sized invite? no way! i'm really liking the long look, with rounded edges, to be put in an envelope like the one on the left (i'm strangely giddy that i was able to "draw" that on the computer because I couldn't find any images of the envelope i'm envisioning...i grew up with corel photopaint and i find that performing simple functions in photoshop incredibly difficult...ie making line art, or any image for that matter, with rounded edges. why is there no rounded edge-making tool!)


i haven't decided on any colors for my wedding, thinking it would be easier to leave it open (although my indecision is at times, perhaps, a larger force to reckon with than the logistics in color coordinating everything in tiffany blue, for example). i'm testing out the of white text on dark paper, above, but i'm not sure how well this works with letterpress...

and then i'm playing with other images because i'm a very indecisive person. i like that there's something strong behind even the most simplistic layouts.




i do think i like this combo the best, and while the rsvp card does seem a bit busy, who cares! if i get cute notes from all my guests, i'd rather have 100 of those to save than 100 boring cards where they simply ticked the box and wrote their names in.




so ... feedback?