Creative Calligraphy

I love calligraphy. Who doesn’t? It’s romantic and delightful. And it adds an air of formality to wedding invitations. Check out these lovlies:

But it’s ‘spensive! An internet source I found charges $5 per envelope, and that’s for three lines. If you’ve got someone with a super long address, ca-ching! Since we’re dispensing with the inside envelope and the tissue paper in our invites, we were hoping to add a level of pomp and circumstance, but not at that price. Uh uh.

I have tried to teach myself calligraphy before.

Just kidding! My handwriting teacher in grade school was Mrs. Crab. Really. She gave me “unsatisfactory” grades on all my assignments. Not because my handwriting is messy or illegible. It’s not! I got bad grades because I didn’t slant my letters toward the right side of the page. Apparently this showed either that I was obviously defective or willfully disobedient. Either way, she hated me.

Even assuming I could master calligraphy, it would take every spare moment between now and our wedding to address all the invitations. Talk about writer’s cramp. Also I’ve been known to make mistakes when writing things out. I can just imagine my darling aunt wondering why on earth she wasn’t invited to our wedding, when her arch-enemy neighbor with the big towering house that blocks her view of the park was. Invited, that is.

Time for some creative thinking!

There are some amazing fonts out there that look like beeeeautiful calligraphy. AND they can be employed using the guest list and addresses I’ve already typed into the computer. Cool, no? So I get the effect with none of the cost or effort! Here are some examples of the font I selected: Ahem. I am very well connected.

Anyhoo, we intended to use black envelopes for our invitations to fit with our black-and-white color scheme. (Mama thought this was a shocking breach of all that is good and faithful in the world. “But the envelope . . . it’s BLACK!” Dun dun dun!) Black computer printing on black envelopes? Not so much. So! To use what I am now calling “Computer Calligraphy” we’ll have to either: (1) print out labels and affix them to the black envelopes, or (2) use white envelopes and stick them through the printer. I think either idea is grand.

We wouldn’t use those silly Arvey labels from Office Hut. Obviously. I’m a classy girl! We’d make our own labels using The Magical Xyron Machine that my MOH is loaning me. But the sticky label cartridges for the MXM are also ‘spensive. Those white envelopes are looking gooood. I’ll keep you posted.