Apologies for the last post today, Derek and I were up all night trying to hash out our first official wedding invitation proof. There was a lot of photoshopping, a lot of test prints, and a lot of tiny xacto knife cutting. So needless to say, a blog post did not get written until this morning. But we are very excited with how our invitations are turning out. They’ve been sent in to the spelling/grammar police [my dad] and after some tweaks here and there they just might be ready to order. Eeep!

So in the mean time let’s talk envelopes! If you’re designing your own wedding invitations it’s absolutely crucial to choose your envelopes firs. Why? So that you know exactly what size to make them! We decided to go with an A7 envelope with a European flap, which basically just means that it’s a 5″ x 7″ envelope with a pointed flap. Finding envelopes with European flaps is difficult because they are less popular. However, we plan to line our own envelopes and we both prefer how the patterned lining looks with a European flap rather than a square flap. See?

I originally wanted to have black envelopes for our invitations using white ink to address them, but I couldn’t figure out how to do our “calligraphy” trick on such a dark color so I started looking for other options. I really want our vintage stamps to pop [which was why I was so drawn to black] but Paper Source had a lot of our wedding colors which both helped and also made the decision even harder. These are our favorites out of the bunch:

I love the richness of the navy, even though navy isn’t one of our wedding colors, but I think it would be pretty with some vintage wrapping paper to line it. The grey is nice too since that’s what I modeled my vintage stamp idea on, so we know that will look good. What do you guys think? Slate, pink, or navy?

If you follow me on Instagram [@catharines] you may have seen me post about my amazing vintage wrapping paper find while visiting my parents. We are a massive thrifting family so that weekend we hit up downtown McKinney to scour all of the local antique and vintage shops. Well on our way to McKinney we stopped at this junk shop that has been haunting me ever since I got my driver’s license. Literally. I would drive by it all. the. time. but for some reason I never stopped until 11 years later. What? Well most of it was absolute crap. We’re talking rats probably lived in the piles of boxes this man stored in his back warehouse. But! Tucked away in the corner I found some beautiful hand painted vintage wrapping paper. I can’t find a date on it, but it looked very old. I had a feeling the guy had no idea how cool these were so I asked for the price. 50 cents! What?! I grabbed up about 10 rolls and went on my merry way.

I’m not sure if any of them will look right for our invitation lining, but I’m leaning toward the green/gold in the middle or the pink with green leaves below it. If none of these work I’ve also searched high and low for some other options.

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I die for that hedgehog paper. SO cute! And I love that Jonathan Adler made a wrapping paper that matches our ring bearer pillow, I just wish it was the same colors as the pillow then it would be a no brainer! So which are your favorites?