I’m getting married in September, and these are the handmade, home-silkscreened invitations I recently sent out. I’m really happy with how they turned out, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about the process of making them.

1) Research: I started with research. I looked around the web for designs that caught my eye, though not necessarily just wedding invitation designs. The purpose was to get an idea of the general mood I wanted to convey, and the design elements that inspired that mood. Not being very familiar with invitation design, or print design in general for that matter, this was really inspiring. i particularly loved the work of Kenzie Kate, though I wanted something less traditional, more rough around the edges like the amazing work ofHammerpress.

2) Sketching: Once I had some ideas, I started sketching. These were just rough thumbnails I sketched in my notebook, often on the bus to work. I had a lot of good ideas I ended up tossing, and finally settled on a concept and color scheme.

3) Drawing: Next, I drew some designs in earnest. I was creating a somewhat abstracted floral design, so I found lots of reference photos on Flickr, and used those to create the floral silhouette borders in pencil, at actual size. I could also have done this in Photoshop or Illustrator, but I preferred pencil for this.

4) Mock-ups: Now I needed to get some sense of what the real design would look and feel like, so I scanned this drawing in and used photoshop to create a more high-fidelity mock-up, at actual size, in approximately the right colors. I designed the front and back, as well as the wording for the inside. I printed a black and white version on plain copy paper, which I could fold into the right shape. Things were looking good, and I was ready to start printing!

In the next post, I’ll talk about the process of silkscreening all of these babies at home!

See more posts about about handcrafting my wedding!