Well first of all… happy 100 posts!

Seems like only yesterday I was sewing with unstoppable fervor and prepping the nest for our little creature. While he finished the final touches on his sweet little self, nestled away in his cocoon, I wrote my first blog post. And now here we are, 8-ish months later with a trail of baby socks and pacifiers from one end of our apartment to the other and the most perfectly wonderful and engaging small person to share our lives with :)

I just realized I’m gushing.

On top of that we’re getting married!

I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop.

But really, I’m completely off-topic, this post is about invitations. Wedding invitations.

BD and I are both designers and illustrators. We spend a lot of our life focusing on other people’s visual needs (always fighting the good fight, information priority vs. aesthetics, mind you). Now we have this thrilling challenge to create a piece that is entirely our own! And we can do anything we want… Terrifying. How is it that endless options are so daunting?!

We’ve spent weeks talking and thinking and looking at images, discussing our lives, important or symbolic aspects of our union, trying to narrow down the perfect theme/direction. Finally we decided that since our wedding will be at a barn in Maine we liked the idea of a woodsie theme, which of course lead us to animals.

We have a special sort of thing about raccoons. Sometimes during drives in our early dating days, on the occasion that we would pass an ill-fated raccoon I would always comment, ‘Often, tragically, you would see pairs of little raccoon bodies along the road. They mate for life and when one is hit the second won’t leave their mate’s body.’ Morbid, I know, but beautiful and romantic in a noble, bittersweet sort of way. At some point I stopped repeating this little factoid and instead BD and I would just sort of nod, take a little respective moment of silence or give a little hand squeeze.

But we also thought people might associate the the raccoons with trash. So we moved on to birds.

We ended up leaning towards the Robin or the Blue Bird [of happiness], which lead us to the Eastern Mountain Bluebird, with their stunning  coloring. Not only are they great aesthetically but the Blue Bird is the state bird of Idaho, giving a little nod to my Western roots. 

So we got down to sketching and working through ideas, though there were multiple brainstorming sessions where we ended up pouring over our favorite art books and inspirations, completely forgetting the task at hand.

SO - we have a couple of rough layout sketches I wanted to share. Next step, commit! To a design first, then to each other :)

Here are some very cool links to an assortment of beautiful and creative invites. Click here, here, here and here!