custom wedding paper: Nick & Stephanie's summer camp wedding in New Jersey

This custom wedding paper is a little bit different because it’s extremely near and dear to my heart- it’s the invitations to my own wedding! Designing your own invitations is the ultimate challenge as an artist. Any creative person knows that TOO much freedom to do what you want can be a bad thing. We chose to get married at a local summer camp so I kept “summer camp wedding” as my loose theme. I created a “brand” with preferred fonts and color swatches to keep me reined in. You’ll see more of that in a later post about all the day-of details for a summer camp wedding!

For our save-the-date, I kept it simple in terms of the design. We staged a “camp” themed engagement shoot for photos and I put the date over top of a photo collage. I had planned on having a very comprehensive wedding website & invitation suite, so I wasn’t worried about conveying too much information on the save-the-date. The invitation itself is really where I put my heart and soul . . .

Our invitation was a combo of hand-drawn illustration and digital layouts. The entire invitation was screen-printed by hand on French Paper, then folded into an 8-page zine. It all folded on itself like a small booklet that was sized 5” x 7”. I designed custom stickers and threw them in with the invitation as well. I opted to do online RSVP’s as we had multiple events for guests to attend on our wedding weekend; designing a paper RSVP would have been cumbersome, plus the added expense of return postage. Here’s all the different spreads in order:

Fun bonus #1: I printed the little lightning bugs in glow-in-the-dark ink by Speedball!

Fun bonus #2: The entire booklet opens up into a poster for the “camp”:

If there’s a challenge I love to take on, it’s custom wedding invitations! Need help with your wedding invitations? Let’s work together! Drop me a line here with your ideas and timeline.

Did you see our wedding on Philadelphia Magazine “Real Weddings” blog?

Many of these photos were taken by Pete of Two17 Photography.