Wax Sealed Garden Bridal Shower Invites
In just over a week, one of my very best friends from high school is getting married! I’m spending this long holiday weekend prepping a few last things for her, including wedding signage and custom beverage labels (hello, honey lavender cider, I can’t wait to drink you.) It’s going to be an incredible celebration in a gorgeous redwood forest and I can’t wait to ugly cry during the ceremony and dance my hardest at the reception. Ryan is officiating for the first time, so I’m also excited to watch him do that! It’s so fun that we both get to use our professions this time to bless our friends at their wedding.
I wanted to share the invitations I created for Kaitlin’s beautiful backyard garden bridal shower back in May. She’s a history teacher with vintage flair, and loves things to be simple and laid-back. I knew immediately I wanted to order a custom wax seal with her and her fiance’s initials. Back in high school we loved adding old world touches to projects using her mom’s stamps, seals, and wood burning tools so it was the perfect hand made element to inspire the invites.
I still wanted the look to feel elegant and modern, so as I began thinking about color and typography, I chose a summery silver sage palette as a nod to the garden setting and lettered my own modern calligraphy to ensure the wax seal didn’t make things feel too old or stuffy. To complete the look, one of my favorite trends right now is adding dried flowers or plants to paper goods, so when I found dried bunnytail grass at Anthropologie I immediately knew I had to add it as a finishing touch! It gave the seal more of a purpose to hold the grass on there and added texture/interest to an otherwise plain paper. Keeping the invite itself simple in a single color helped not make things too busy.
The envelopes pretty much chose themselves - I knew I wanted to keep things simple and go monochromatic, so I looked for my favorite self-sealing envelopes and luckily found them in exactly the right shade! I’ve been very into simple white calligraphy on colored envelopes, and it worked perfectly paired with the calligraphy I did on the invites anyways.
I do want to note that using anything bulky like the seals or grass means that the envelopes count as non-machinable when going through the post, aka costs extra because it is more than 1/4 in thick. I put two stamps on each envelope (which is more than necessary, but I like the way it looked, ugh) but you can get the square stamps that are the correct amount of postage needed for envelopes that have to be hand cancelled. Wedding paper is such a special thing to me that it was definitely worth it! :)
The invites definitely got people excited for this event and it was so easy to tie all the day of goods into the same simple, beautiful look/feel! Would you consider trying this for your own wedding or shower? Let me know in the comments!
xo, M
SHOP THE POST:
Silver Sage Wax // Artisaire
Dried Bunnytail Grass // Anthropologie // Shop Similar
Envelopes // Envelopes.com
Cactus Stamps // USPS
White Ink // Dr. Ph. Martin’s
Glue Gun for Wax // Amazon