Eco-Wedding Invitations

Countdown to Eco-Wedding: 6 weeks. It is crunch time and my checklist has caused some stressful moments. In the middle of these 6 weeks Andrew and I will be going on a 'pre-wedding honeymoon' to New York City!! I'll definitely try to check out 'Yoga To The People'- after all the chatting over at 'its all yoga, baby' I'm definitely curious to see what it's about!

Our invitations were created, cut and sent a few weeks ago and I can now share them with you!

Although there's pressure to have fancy, letter pressed invitations, I just couldn't wrap my head around spending that much money on a piece of paper that was just going to get recycled (hopefully!). So, for two years we searched for our perfect wedding graphic. We had a tree with our letters carved in, followed by a tree with a heart in the middle... 

And then I found a tandem bicycle graphic- free download. Andrew fell in love with this invitation. A few hours of playing around with the wording, fonts and colours and voila! A Tandem Bicycle invitation to represent our brand new Life Journey together.

It was essential that I find a sustainable paper solution. Fortunately there are a lot of post consumer recycled cardstock options out there now and I easily found beautiful ivory sheets for not too much money. I would have preferred forest stewardship certified paper.... but I didn't really give myself enough planning time. We sort of needed invitations to be made and mailed in two days time (haha, yep we were *that* organized).

The actual sizing and cutting of the invitations involved much more swearing, beer and frustration. We used box cutters, glass picture frames and a ruler. Several hours of intense staring, measuring and frantic cutting later and we were good to start addressing. Note to self; borders are extremely helpful when printing two invitations per page.

Full invitation and rsvp card

I was so proud of those invitations and of course we received minimal feedback (or even email rsvps.... but then our wedding is small enough we knew mostly who was coming anyways). We even made ten special rsvp cards for those people we knew weren't computer savvy. Why anyone would spend a fortune and ridiculous amount of hours for such a minimally noticed aspect of the wedding is beyond me.

Close up of the invite! :)

 

Next up; the weekend program of events. After spending a chaotic weekend at a friends wedding (which was lovely), I realized the importance of letting your guests know just what the 'plan' is for the affair. Since we'll have many guests staying two nights, a short Weekend Program will help guide expectations and decrease the need for constant timeline with bride-groom verification. 


It's fine when the bride and groom are super laid back about details and events, but guests really do need to know what the deal is in order to figure out timing and weekend expectations. 


As a result, our wedding website has tourist resources for our out of town guests, accommodation options, thoughts on what to wear (i.e. October can be chilly, the ceremony will take place outside so shoes should be able to handle grass etc). As most of the family have so nicely reported that 'why no, we didn't look at the website yet!' my paper-saving plan has gone down the composting toilet.

Wedding programs test-print

 

Alright, a printed 'program' it will be. I found another funky bicycle graphic and spent an hour typing up the basic weekend events. I sourced a paper supply that was back ordered and not being used (so reclaimed paper? lol) and will print two programs per page to maximize paper use. 


Done and done.