We just launched a new blog at Invitesite.com. Please visit and check it out for invitation and wedding ideas (both green and just weddings).

We’ll be rebuilding and relaunching Green Weddings and the Green Wedding Blog next year with a bunch of new features. Until then….

With a 15% rise in wedding supplies this year and predicted next year, Tara and Mike were delighted that their wedding coordinator was resourceful and found them real value in InviteSite.

They say that Do-It-Yourself wedding invitations are well worth the savings.

Updated to October 15th, news about the couple’s wedding appears on this blog.

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.

InviteSite Relaunches Wedding Invitation Website

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.

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.

So here we are getting ready to launch the brand new Invitesite. Almost a year of work. The new site is all custom coded by Alex, and we’ll be able to offer loads of new designs for your Green Wedding pleasure . Lots of new letterpress decorated designs coming too. (We just rebuilt a lovely large press with sturdy bearings and a large bed.) So, with our inventory of 7 large presses we’ll be able to execute some fine designs. Scott and I are looking forward to an extremely creative year. YIPEEEE!!!

Invitesite’s eco wedding invitations are featured in the upcoming local ABC News feature on Green Weddings. Great stuff and good suggestions.

Yipee,  a group of local green wedding vendors will be exhibiting at the upcoming Los Feliz Street Fair, Sunday June 8th, 11 am – 8pm. We will be located in the “Green Scene” Eco Showcase. 
Our group includes Angelica from Angelique Events and GreenWeddings.net. Cake, signature drinks and some neat giveaways are in the offing… Invitesite will be showing some of our fabulous new eco wedding invitations.

Will update more today — looks like some fabulous bands will be playing.