Passport Wedding Invitation

If you are anything like me, than you have a passion for traveling and vintage style, which is why I opted for a vintage-travel themed wedding. And what is a must for a wonderful and adventurous journey? A passport of course! I decided from the very beginning of planning that I wanted unique touches all over my wedding, because where I'm from, everyone does the same old meet-at-the-church-for-the-same-thing-everyone-else-does reception. I wanted mine to stand out, and show a little more of mine and Kyle's personalities. Now I wasn't sure what I wanted my invites to look like, but I stumbled upon the amazing idea to do a passport themed wedding invite and fell in love! After a bunch of research, and jealous envy, I came up with a template that suited us the most. I used a few ideas from different sources I found, and added my own twists and ideas to it.

The first one I found had a dark blue cover, and gold letters. Closer to a real passport, but way to far from my color scheme. So we decided to go with a cream color, and simple black letters. (although we did run out of cream, and of course the craft store did too, so half of my invites were on a light green paper :Z) For the front logo and picture, we thought about using a standard passport image with our wedding date attatched. But all of the ones we found were... ehem.. ugly. Then fate stepped in and we stumbled across the birdcage you see before you. Perfect! I love birdcages, and it matched my ring box quite nicely.

However, this is where things got a bit tricky. I had to add some of the vine texture by hand, as well as our initials in the center of the cage because the original picture said "LOVE" instead. So I had to trace the image with pen, and add my own details before copying it back onto the computer. After I copied it, I decided to color the birds so they would stand out a little. It just so happened that the blue and pink matched our outfits we wore for our engagement pictures. Awesome right?? The title in front isn't the most spectacular or creative, but we couldn't come up with anything catchy enough, so August 16, 2012 was going to have to do.

For the inside, we decided to scan a map from my scrapbook paper for the background so it wasn't too plain. The hardest thing about this whole project was figuring out the layout of words and where they would be placed once printed. (I only have microsoft word, it would probably be easier with a card maker.) After what seemed like a billion trial prints later, we had everything exactly where we wanted it.

Next we decided we wanted to have an extra flap in there so it would resemble a book, or what a passport looks like inside. We decided to use four of our favorite engagement pictures to show them off a little, afterall isn't that the point of getting them done? My mama has a picture of Venice in her room with the quote "You are my favorite journey, I love where you take me" on it, which I thought fit the theme perfectly. We added it at the end to make the invitiation feel complete.

To finish them up, we rounded the edges with a nifty crafting paper cutter, and tied them together with some hemp string. (Which of course we ran out of as well as the store again, so we had to get thicker string for some of them. Have you ever tried to tie hemp string? Particularly thick hemp string? It's a little tricky. Just sayin..) I don't mean to toot my own horn or anything, but I absolutely love the way they turned out! They exceeded my expectations by a billion and one.

The best part of this project was that Kyle helped with every step of it ;)