My wedding invitations!

It's two months to the day since Jeremy and I got married. I didn't post any of MY wedding invites, maps, signs that I loved so much yet! Here's a little run down on what we did to make everything run smoother and made sure we BOTH knew what was happening in our planning process.

Since our wedding was on July 4th weekend in 2009, we sent out save the dates out almost a year in advance. We had a lot of family and friends travel from abroad and from all over the united states so it made sense for us to start planning as early as we did. (plus I couldn't help myself, I was so ready for it all the day after we were engaged) ;)






Our formal invitations (below) went out about 4 months prior to our wedding. With it being on the holiday weekend we really wanted to make it easy for everyone and get their info right away. We also had everything on theknot.com about a year in advance as well.





Our map was so much fun to design. I love this city so much I wanted to show much more on it but I ended up not having enough room. A map online, on weddingmapper.com shows all our guests hotels instead of the one we chose to make it easier on them. Turns out wedding mapper liked our map so much they are using it as the Chicago example on their site now!
http://www.weddingmapper.com/chicago/il/visit/0k3u9d

Since our rehearsal dinner was at Gino's East on Superior in downtown Chicago I wanted to do a city themed rehearsal dinner invitation. I wanted to make it separate from the other themes of the wedding. More informal and fun. We also had a email RSVP on this so it was easy to figure who was coming and not. We went on gmail and made a joint email for our wedding so either of us could keep track of who was coming. We also used this email for venders for the wedding so we both knew what was going on.

St Paul, Minnesota Wedding

I was excited when my Maid of Honor, Alicia, and her longtime boyfriend Josh got engaged on New Years Day 2008. I was hoping that she was going to ask me to design her wedding invitations since so many ideas were already flooding into my head for their fall wedding. When she finally asked me to create her invitations I was so excited.

She gave me total freedom to design her invites. When designing a wedding set I like to look at all aspects of the wedding, including: attire, flowers, centerpieces, and even jewelry. When I have a good grasp of the elements of the wedding, I work on a design that complements the color palate (I'm not really a fan of having everything match). Most of the time I come up with the color palate, but since Alicia has a great eye for color and is a clothing designer she is as good as anyone.

What you don't see here yet, is the plum outer envelope that I even haven't seen yet, which Alicia has put together herself. It'll look so great against the acid green, yellow and cream we've done on the invite, reply card and, of course, the oh so marvelous, map. Everything will pop nicely. I'll post that once I get a photo :)

Can't wait for Josh and Alicia's fall wedding coming two months from yesterday!

Alicia's Wedding Concept Sheet:


Wedding Map:


Wedding Map Back:


Formal Invite:


Wedding Reply postcard:


Reply Postcard Back: