miss koco

save the dates

February 26, 2012

Andrew and I wanted to spend more time planning our marriage than planning our wedding.  I wanted to make the planning of it all transformative and creative, with art and thoughtful projects at every turn.

The first project was to make the save the dates.  Considering a shorthand name for the project, I found that the acronym wasn’t quite what I was going for, as that would mean I’d be sending out STDs.  And really, that’s just not so cute. I’ll just stick with “save the dates” for now.

I thoughtfully considered ways to make parts of the wedding and the process of getting married an exciting, loving, creative, and connecting/connected experience for me and Andrew, our families, our friends, and our community. I realized just how much of my past I’ve been holding onto and would love to let go of in order to have more space–symbolically and physically. I still want to honor some of this past though; after all, it has made me who I am.

We hosted a paper making party at my father’s studio. My friends brought paper evidence of their pasts–everything from graduate school readings that changed their world view to phone bills reporting hours and hours of conversations with lovers of the past.  Love letters, old tickets, Xmas cards, Halloween party invites… we lovingly said goodbye, put them in the blender to create the pulp, and transformed it all into the paper!  At some point my father came in and cast a little magic (a handful of glitter) into the pulp. The paper came out great!

Then to honor the past, just like my grandfather Calvin (who ran a printshop), I printed the invitations. I took a letterpress printmaking course at UArts in October. I made a polymer plate and debossed the paper with the image of our tandem bike. I hand set the type with our names and the date and printed that on vellum.

On the back of the vellum, I printed a map of Philly and then sewed the two pieces of paper together.  The last design challenge was to figure out the envelope.  We ended up wrapping them in kraft paper and seaming the edges on the sewing machine.  The Garden of Love forever stamps finished them off perfectly and off they went.