Today’s real invitations come courtesy of Michelle from Armas Design.  Michelle’s rockin’ wedding was featured on snippet & ink a few weeks back, where I fell in love with her Paris-themed invitations.  Michelle was kind enough to send over some additional photos and information about how she put her invitations together – so I’ll turn things over to Michelle:

We had a small wedding, and I wanted to make the invitations very special, but not too precious. I wanted the invitations to exude a playful, quirky quality but with a crisp, buttoned up undertone.  That pretty much sums up our wedding look!

We also had a tight budget, so I bought some plain ivory cards embossed with a wreath on the top and printed the invitations at home:

The special details come from the vintage reproduction maps of Paris that I used to line the envelopes with, which were too dull and thin on their own, and vintage stamps. I bought tons of vintage stamps on eBay and peppered the envelopes and the reply envelopes with gorgeous colored stamps:

I also printed the programs and the reply cards at home. For our thank you cards, I bought an embosser with our initials and some red rimmed cards from Crane and made “custom” thank you cards.  I also used that embosser to make our programs unique and give them a more tactile feel:

To add a little bit more of an irregular, organic element, I had the post office hand stamp the envelopes, so they have that nice round stamp on on them.  It was a nice finishing touch since the suite was very symmetrical and classical.

I love the way Michelle incorporated vintage maps and stamps to balance out the more classic invitation elements.  And the use of a custom embosser is one of my favorite details – particularly since it can be used to customize any future personal correspondence.  Just lovely!

{images via Armas Design – thanks Michelle!}