Ok - we FINALLY got the first of the new booklet style designs up. We created a really affordable design that is still complex and rich. But, bumpless. Which is really important for keeping the postage down. So - this design uses a normal, 42 cent stamp. Groovy! It’s a landscape booklet, with a pocket, and letterpress printed original art by partner, Scott Rubel. (a damn good artist, btw). The new Seedling Wedding Invitation….

The booklet cover is letterpress printed on handmade cotton (recycled trim) embedded with cosmo seeds. It’s plantable but with a textured finish. (The paper was not run through a calendaring machine to make it smooth) We diecut the binding holes and the enclosure pocket, so it’s really easy to assemble.

There has been so much work to do on the relaunch of Invitesite (the downside of running a 10 year old website!) — that we haven’t been able to post as much as we’d like.

However! We did manage to create a stable set of URLs that put all our eco and green invitations in one, bookmark-able spot. All our 100% postconsumer recycled paper and treefree paper invitations are listed under Eco Wedding Invitations, now.

We’ve been seeing a lot of black used as an accent color for the past year. We use a black satin ribbon for our Garbo wedding invitation.

Something to consider, though, if you are thinking about using a black border framing your wedding invitation: black bordered cards have a rather grim use historically. Called “mourning paper” or mourning stationery, black bordered cards have been used for hundreds of years by widows and widowers.

I became really familiar with mourning stationery when I sold and catalogued rare books and manuscripts. If one was trying to date a letter signed by a famous 19th century writer (Yeats, Twain or Dickens for example) and it was written on a black bordered card, you knew a close family member or spouse, had died in the past year.

We’ve seen a few wedding invitation designs with black borders, and have to figure the designer doesn’t know much about stationery history. Black borders are intimately associated with the recent death of a spouse.

InviteSite Mentioned on Kate and James’ Entry in Dynamite Weddings

InviteSite makes the invitations long before the event, but we are not forgotten. After all these years it’s still a thrill for us to be listed as a part of such a beautiful event. All of our couples’ events are beautiful, but Kate recalls the event as “…not just a formality, but deeply spiritual…”

Sentiments like this keep us going, because it is what we honor and support in everyone.

The InviteSite Staff

Photography by Allegro.

Days of suspense kept everyone at InviteSite on the edges of their swivel chairs and stools and, for those who don’t get to sit down much, they just kept their fingers crossed. Finally, on July 10, after Miss Pinot Noir had blogged about her mulling over of choices of invitations for days, she announced to the world her final decision. InviteSite won, and so did she [sound of cork popping]! and did a top shelf job of assembling our Angelicia invitation. Check out her lively entries and the comments at Wedding Bee. Blogging is probably a dandy way of fending off the insanity of planning for a wedding.

City Council unanimously approves Reyes’ motion to ban plastic bags in Los Angeles
As Los Angeles residents, we have been whining, fighting, and writing letters to City Council and waiting for news on this new proposal, long in the making. Today’s news has everyone hoarding their plastic bags for the day we have to leave the city to get one. San Francisco has already been on track with this and more large cities are sure to follow.

Ed P. Reyes’ motion to ban polystyrene food containers in all City facilities beginning July 1, 2009 was unanimously approved by the City Council today.

What kind of environmentally responsible bloggers would we be if we didn’t include this hot new music video from The Abe Lincoln Story on an occasion like this?

The City Council, by a 13-0 vote, also approved an amendment introduced by Reyes today that bans plastic bags by July 1, 2010, if the State has not imposed a fee of at least 25 cents by then.
“Plastic bags have been the graffiti of the L.A. River for decades,” said Reyes, who chairs the L.A. River Ad Hoc Committee.

The plan requires officials to replace food containers made of polystyrene — commonly known by the brand Styrofoam — at city-owned facilities such as Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), public libraries, the Convention Center and City-sponsored events.

“We’ve gotten to a point where we need to act as a city, where we can have real results. We’re trying to do it in a way where we can educate and inform the public of what we’re doing,” Reyes said. `”It’s going to take time to change.”

After the citywide ban of plastic bags July 2010, consumers will have to use their own canvas bags or pay 25 cents for a paper, compostable or biodegradable bag. Of that fee, 3 percent would go to the retailer, 3 percent will go to the state, and the rest of the money will go back to the city to fund an education campaign.

The plastic bag and polystyrene bans complement the ongoing Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan, spearheaded by Reyes, which proposes transforming 32 miles of the concrete-lined River into a greenbelt linking communities.

Read and listen to more coverage on this issue at Uprising Radio.

Wedding Invitations were really really boring until about 10 years ago. One company (Taylor Corp) owns most of the large commercial wedding invitation companies. They pretty much controlled the entire market.

About 13 years ago, right when the web started to gear up, a few brave couples wanted to individualize their weddings. They didn’t want the sweet embossed invites with angels and castles. The internet offered a chance to find unique vendors, and communicate with each other. At the same time, Martha Stewart launched Martha Stewart Weddings (the magazine).

Weddings, and the wedding invitation, would never be the same.

Letterpress also began to make inroads. Martha discovered Julie Holcomb printers, and featured her letterpress printed invitations, and even shot an episode with Martha at the press. That gave letterpress a jumpstart. (a few letterpress printers were experimenting at the same time.) Scott, my partner, had been printing letterpress as an artisan hobby since the mid 1980’s. I learned late 1995, with a local book group. Everyone was experimenting in their studios. But, most of these designers, such as Julie and Scott, came out of the fine printing and fine press movement. Julie studied with William Everson at UC Santa Cruz.

In 2001, there were only about 4 of us letterpress printers exhibiting at the National Stationery Show in NYC. Crane was trying to figure out how to get into letterpress. William Arthur was bought by Hallmark, and soon jumped on the letterpress bandwagon.

This year, it was just about all letterpress at the Stationery Show. Scads of great designers out of art school. Amazing.

Amazing!!

So what does desire for a fabulously modern wedding invitation have to do with Oscar Wilde?

We think it’s delicious that the trend for highly creative wedding invitations has its roots in the Aesthetic Movement of the early 20th century.

Beautiful papers (inspired by the opening of Japanese design to European artists), fine letterpress printing (the Fine Presses of the Arts & Crafts movement), theatrical graphic design: all reached a zenith in the late 1920’s. Beautiful books were laboriously produced in limited editions of a few hundred or so. The Great Depression put an end to these amazingly beautiful book productions.
Commercial printing and graphic design went through another series of upheavals through the mid century. The ascendance of the offset press over letterpress, for example. (During the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s letterpress equipment was phased out and junked.)

But none of these changes were as profound as when Computer Graphics and computerized prepress took over in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Art schools and Graphic Design schools underwent an utter revolution. Design technology was completely decoupled from the previous technologies and printing equipment. Proof presses and type cabinets were left stranded. What happened, in effect, is that the outmoded printing equipment could be used exclusively for artistic expression.

Fine printers, typographers and graphic design professors all have a great sense of history, but many of their students didn’t have a clue about anything that came before computer generated fonts and graphics. More and more graphic design teachers began to offer classes in handset type and the old printing techniques. (Previously, this was only taught to as a trade class in high school!) Art Center, The Center for the Book, and a few other schools became an important influence on the re-introduction of letterpress as a craft. Book Arts became an important movement again, with beautiful limited editions and unique books as objects becoming quite popular to produce. These books are irresistably beautiful, but it is near impossible to make a living producing them. The techniques that people developed began to move into invitation design in the 1990’s and really took off in the past few years.
Contrary to what the wedding magazines tell you, most invitations from the late 19th century through the 20th century were letterpress printed, not engraved. The invitation stock may have embossed borders and decorative elements, but the invitation itself was usually printed letterpress with handset or linotype. (we have a large collections of early invitations from about 1840 - 1940) The printing quality wasn’t always great.
What has changed is, the invitation itself has become an artistic expression of high craft and aesthetics.
Oscar Wilde would be charmed.
“Artists’ books are books or book-like objects, over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control; where the book is intended as a work of art in itself. They are not books of reproductions of an artist’s work, about an artist, or with just a text or illustrations by an artist”
From: Artists’ books : the book as a work of art, 1963-1995 by Stephen Bury
In other words, the book as a stand alone object. The Wedding Invitation has also become an artifact.

Almost all invitations will cost more than 42 cents to mail. If it’s square, if it’s thicker, if it’s more than 6-1/8 inches on two sides, it will cost at least 20 cents more. The Post Office increased rates about 6 months back, and finally sorted out the increases.

If any of your wedding stationery (mailable) has the slightest bump, add 20 cents.

So, if you are trying to spruce up a really simple invitation by adding a bow, a tie, a pressed flower, anything that adds a bump, add 20 cents per.

Don’t get your mail returned. Don’t get caught by surprise. Never mail out your invitations without getting a finished piece weighed at your local post office.

If you get frustrated with the lack of aesthetics when choosing stamps for the extra postage, check out the fun you can have making your own stamps with Zazzle.

The Democratic National Convention, held in August in Denver, has created strong environmental mandates and standards about food (local and healthy), catering supplies (compostable), transportation, and Democratic Party related consumer goods. (fanny packs, totes, etc) Some good people are on board to help them pull it off, but so far, the press has reported only on problems. Last week in the Wall Street Journal and this weekend in the NY Times. Some of the catering companies have been moaning about the local food requirements.
If the organizers can pull this off, it will do great things for the green events cause.