This my friends, is a love story.
A story of the truest, most beautiful, life long love there ever was.
I’m talking about Mr. Gaunt my Wedding Invitations…Le Sigh.
There are little girls that dream of the perfect dress, the perfect man, the perfect cake. For me it was ALWAYS about the invitation. So let me take you back, way back, to tell the tale of our sweet sweet romance.
It all started when I crawled out of the womb and declared upon the world
“I, MORGAN MELIM WILL NOT ALLOW A SINGLE POSTER, PRESENTATION, SCRAPBOOK, CARD OR OTHER PAPER ARTFORM BE TACKY OR WITHOUT GREATNESS!”
I’m not lying folks, that really happened.
And so throughout my 13 years in the public school system, I disguised my sheer lack of grammar, spelling (shush you! Dont act like you don’t notice!) math skills, geography skills, or any other REAL intelligence with the most ass-kicking visual aids you have EVER seen! I tell no lies!
Whats that? You need to design a flag for a made up country? DONE!
You need to make a pretty cover for your book report? DONE!
You need a whole yearbook designed? DONE!
And so on. I actually blame the public school systems for being so easily fooled by my visual talent that here I sit today, not being able to spell or locate any of the countries we may or may not be at war with as I type. It’s fine, I listen to NPR.
So there you have it, Kindergarten through 12th grade wrapped up in 1/2 a blog post.
Moving on. My first REAL-ish job was during my senior year in highschool when I worked for 9 months at The Paper Zone! Which for those of you who are not blessed to live in the Pacific Northwest, is an awesome paper/craft/scrapbook supply store. Also the discount was amazing. I’m pretty sure though, while working there I was told more than once that I had to re direct my attention from making “Example Displays” to actually talking to customers…huh? No thanks.
Since then I have excelled at any job that has allowed me to be creative (kitchen designing, painting, home decor) and FAILED at all jobs involving customer service, math, money, and boredom. Why wont someone pay me to make dioramas all day!?
So now that you have my history, lets narrow this down to my wedding invitations. I always knew they had to be AMAZING, well at least by my standards. There were so many cool ideas that I found out there, but in the end there were 3 big things we had to take into consideration.
1. Cost of Materials. This eliminated anything in this family
2. Cost to Ship. I had wanted to do posters, but I couldn’t afford the tubes and postage.
3. Could we easily DIY 100 of them?
Which brings us to the design we created. I actually got the idea last Valentines day when I bought this adorable book for Mr. Gaunt.
Rob Ryan is an AMAZING artist, who works manly in the art of “Paper Cutting” or the more technical term Scherenschnitte. There is also a local artist name Nikki McClure who’s work you may have seen around, she also inspired our invitation, as all of her art is also done by paper cutting.
So I told Mr. Gaunt about this idea of mine (originally to do a poster in this medium) and told him to design something. Although I am very creative and very good at pulling together a look, actual “fine art” is not my style. In the month that I was in Washington and he was in Colorado I gave him the task of designing an image to cut out.
In the end he did the whole design all by himself, including cutting it out. And then I added the heart and all the wording. It was a joint effort. In the image the basis is him and I and Hula walking down a path. The left side (his side) is all Colorado themed, with the Rockies, the bear and the mountain feel. The right side (my side) is all Washington with the ocean, the San Juan Islands, a Madrona Tree and a Whale.
FACTS ON THE CUT OUT:
-It was done on white 80lb paper 8.5″ x 11″
-Cut with an Exacto Blade and Nail scissors
-The first draft was done on a brown paper bag, this was draft #2.
After the cut out was done we realized we would have to make it smaller, a 5″ x 8″ instead of 8.5″ x 11″. I also wanted to figure out how to make it sharper, without losing the look of a cut-out. This was hard. I originally took pictures (see above) of the cut out on wood, but then when I imported it in to Photoshop, I quickly realized the background had to go if I wanted to clean it up. So I smoothed and edited the image and then realized that I still wanted the background, so I brought it back, only better. I ended up finding a large image of “Woodgrain” and layered it in the back. It doesn’t look 100% 3D, but it’s not too bad.
After that we went to the Paper Zone and picked out a grey and “Mustard” color cardstock to have printed. I designed the backside in Photoshop, and made files to have the front and back printed. I’d like to note that I bought a few different sheets of white (glossy, mat, thick, thin) and did a test print to see which showed the wood grain best, it really make a difference. We also used the same font that we had downloaded for our Save the Dates. I also really encourage people to use an interesting font.
I mentioned about having our invites all printed and cut at kinkos in this post. Then we made a little production line and put these bad boys together!
The whole thing cost us about $60 to make all of them, awesome! We also have plans to frame the original cut out, because I love it! And I know they are funky and not as traditional and elegant as some might like, but they are PERFECT for us! I really couldn’t be happier!
The Family Chapters 
