i love you much photography

After solving the printer mystery, our envelopes came out like stars. I designed them in InDesign, which has proven to be invaluable in wedding-paper-goods-land. Because I like to make things more difficult, and don’t know what the hell mail merge is, I typed each one by hand. Whatever, I am a total fan of how they came out.

Le front:

Le back:

(In case you were wondering– No, the addresses aren’t strangely aligned. I just cloned out our addresses for whatever reason).

I used my beloved Gotham for the font, and the ever-popular but ever-wonderful king and queen stamps on our yummy recycled kraft paper envelopes. Initially we planned to to use my parents’ embosser for the backs, but at the last minute I decided to attempt printing it, which was quite easy. It was a little risky to try, as we had already printed all of the fronts, but thankfully it worked without butchering any of the envelopes.

After their impromptu mini-photo-shoot, they were off to meet their maker, aka the US Postal Service. I hadn’t expected to experience any separation anxiety, since I wasn’t 100% pleased with the whole deal. Strangely enough, I actually was sad to see them go. Perhaps it was nerves, perhaps it was empty-nest… who knows. I am glad to have this project over and done with, and appropriately nervous and excited to finish our wedding invitations! Onwards and upwards!

How did you address your save-the-dates? Did you stick it to Emily Post and go the non-handwritten way? Were you sad to see them go?

*Envies is my pet name for envelopes. Deal with it, dears.

Now that I admitted my STD-printing flub, I can move along to a part that I’m actually fairly pleased with– the envelopes. Not to be outdone, the envelopes had to fail a little first.

While printing these bad boys on our super hawt printer, we kept having the problem of ink smears. It wasn’t coming from the text itself, but just random inkjet blotches. We were good little children, and kept re-using the same two test envelopes, which is why you see highlighted and circled blotches. We had to know what was new and what was old fail.

We figured that it had to be one of two things– thickness, or uneven transfer because of the wonky bits on the back of an envie. After running a piece of chipboard through the printer and seeing it print flawlessly, we realized it was the latter. Oh, fail of fails. Were we going to have to ghetto-rig the printer? It seemed so. JP and I devised a plan that would surely end in tears– rubber-cementing the envelopes down to stock, running them through, then detaching them from said stock. Had disaster written all over it.

In order to hopefully save our sanity, I decided to flip through the printer’s manual. Woops, we forgot to check “envelope” in the print settings. We wasted almost two hours trying to go around our elbows to get to our asses, when a simple manual-read would have saved us. We were then able to then print all of our envelopes in about 20 minutes. Such silly children.

Moral of the story?

I know a billion other people had trouble printing their invitation envelopes. What happened with yours? Printer flub, human flub, paper flub, or just bad luck?