“A truly green economy means living lightly on the Earth with simple, joyful elegance.” (From Co-op America, first principle)

I really love the “simple, joyful elegance” part. Really says love, really says a gathering of friends and family : really says Weddings. (Sorry bridezilla!)

Let’s talk about ’simple’ for a while. What is simple? What does simple really mean? Simple can mean unsophisticated — but it can also mean the essential — something that cannot be divided further.

So — when planning your green wedding, ask yourselves : What is our essence? What are our core values and beliefs? I think that that is what comes across in elegant people: their essentialness comes right through so gracefully. They can have a great richness about them, but fundamentally, they are simple. So — being conscious of your essential values and nature, will help throughout your selection process.

Joyful. Oh my. I study Energy Medicine, and in EM, there are two very simple energetic states: fear (protection mode) and joy (or health and growth). In Donna Eden’s version of Energy Medicine, these are called the radiant circuits. We share these energetic states with single cell creatures. These states are communicative : we all notice when a fearful/angry person comes into a room. We find happy people contagious. So, joy can be a very communal, sharing state. How do we help create the joyful state among our guests, and prevent the fearful state? (Some people call this skill having good manners.)

Awareness of these human conditions will help you create a simple, joyfully elegant celebration.

Taking inspiration from Co-op America’s Quarterly Feature, we’re going to apply 25 Ways to Green the World, to Green Weddings and Events. Since weddings are a time for joy, exuberance and being great hosts, we will favor generosity (of spirit AND objects) over, ummm, hyper minimalism.

What a fun and beautiful event with ears on!
InviteSite (and Helen personally) catches special mention at an event attended by Mickey. Thank you, Tim and Melanie.

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.

A new blog advises you to reduce the number of guests invited to your wedding. The reason? To reduce the amount of paper you have to use in your invitations and handouts.

Your wedding is an opportunity to express your commitment to our environment, but it’s far more important to do this every day in the office and at home. Your wedding is above all about the bounty of love, friendship. InviteSite’s passion for tree-free and 100% postconsumer recycled invitations is our reason for being here for you. Using e-mail is for business and saying “Whassup.” Using it to substitute for a formal announcement of two people and two families joining, is cheap and unsatisfying.

Demand is the only force in the world that will make alternative papers viable. You can be lavish with 100% postconsumer recycled papers and post harvest waste papers on your wedding day.

After being “pretty appalled” by everything they were finding in their diy wedding ceremony program research, Davash posted in a blog, “It’s Only Paper,” that InviteSite was the answer. We are always pleased to be blogged about, especially when our designs get caught in action by professional photographers.
Peter Doyle Photography

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.

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.

We’ve been seeing a lot of black used as an accent color for the past year. We use a black satin ribbon for our Garbo wedding invitation.

Something to consider, though, if you are thinking about using a black border framing your wedding invitation: black bordered cards have a rather grim use historically. Called “mourning paper” or mourning stationery, black bordered cards have been used for hundreds of years by widows and widowers.

I became really familiar with mourning stationery when I sold and catalogued rare books and manuscripts. If one was trying to date a letter signed by a famous 19th century writer (Yeats, Twain or Dickens for example) and it was written on a black bordered card, you knew a close family member or spouse, had died in the past year.

We’ve seen a few wedding invitation designs with black borders, and have to figure the designer doesn’t know much about stationery history. Black borders are intimately associated with the recent death of a spouse.

InviteSite Mentioned on Kate and James’ Entry in Dynamite Weddings

InviteSite makes the invitations long before the event, but we are not forgotten. After all these years it’s still a thrill for us to be listed as a part of such a beautiful event. All of our couples’ events are beautiful, but Kate recalls the event as “…not just a formality, but deeply spiritual…”

Sentiments like this keep us going, because it is what we honor and support in everyone.

The InviteSite Staff

Photography by Allegro.