My partner and I have been together for ten years. We were supposed to have a ten year 'we're not getting married' party, but my partner ruined that idea by proposing to me last year on my birthday in Bath. I've never considered marriage to be goal to aim for, but when the man you love asks you to be your wife, there really is only answer to give...
Anyway, the most important thing for me about our wedding, is that it's about US as a couple. Not about me as a bride. There seems to be such an emphasis on weddings being Her day, and it just seems ridiculous to me. It's not MY day, I haven't planned for this day my whole life. This day is about me and David celebrating our life together and looking forward to a future together, it's not about living out a fantasy of big white wedding dresses and extortinate amount of money being spent and flowers and so on, and so on. I might be sounding like bit of a grump now, but after a few months of planning and family politics and working out the guest list and having to put up with the cheeky remarks about the groom not being involved with the wedding, I do feel a bit grumpy. Becasue for me, this wedding is about us. But it's not really the wedding day that is important - that's for everyone to have a party and celebrate love... but what I'm really interested in is the marriage.
Anyway, back to my original point... I wanted this to be about us as a couple. And I wanted our invitations to reflect this. Now, David is not somebody likely to get excited about invitations (and let's be honest, there are very few men who would do - and who can blame them, some of them are yawningly boring and similar - the invites I mean, not the men). I'm not really into all the white and ribbon and floral prettiness of the majority of the invites out there. And then I googled an idea, and came across these invitations on Etzy: Record Invites
Straight away I knew that these were the invites for us. Not least because when I showed them to David he was enthusiastic straight away. Music is really important to him, it's an important part of our relationship, and we both love that retro style.The only problem was the cost of having them made and sent from America. It was out of our budget.
So, I emailed the link to Jennifer and I said... any chance we can make these?
And Jennifer, being the wonderful friend and crafter that she is, said 'of course.'
So we embarked on gathering the materials, planning the best way to make the sleeve, making dummy ones, templates and having each stage checked off with David as to colour, size, look, feel etc. We even managed to find black card grooved like a record.
We used circle cutters for the records and and record labels, created a template for the sleeve and then we set up a prodcution line of cutting, folding, sticking. Then I set about individually hand stamping 'Rosie and David' on all the record labels, and stamping 'RB&DH' on the corner of all the sleeves. We went for bright colours to really try and get that retro look for vinyl singles and all stacked up they looked fantastic - it was quite sad separating them to send off. I did however get some lovely comments and feedback from them - the best of which from a friend who said 'coolest wedding invite ever!'
Here's how they turned out:
That's it for now. I'll be posting soon to show you some bunting that I'm doing for the wedding. Well, I say I'm doing it... in fact everyone who received an invitation also received a couple of triangles of bunting and a fabric crayon... can you guess what their challenge was?
All will be revealed in the next post...
Until then, happy crafting!
Rosie x
