Invitations!

Juliana Bibas over at the A Stamp a Day blog , who goes to my church, offered to make our wedding invitations BY HAND. Of course I said yes. They are far more gorgeous than I have seen in any of the chain stores.

The blue matches my aquamarine engagement ring exactly, and the red pops just like my "Saint Petersburgundy" nail polish. (I know--best. name. ever.)

Juliana has an etsy shop with more samples of her work--everything from wedding invitations to birth announcements to cute hand-stamped onesies! My invitations are the Jacqui Envelope Style, which is ideal for bilingual invitations like the ones we ordered. Though everyone we invited does speak English, we thought including Russian was a nice nod to our (very subtle) theme: our respective cultures.

We're getting married on Presidents Day weekend in a Russian Orthodox church, so I embraced a red, white, and blue color palette, which the American and the Russian flags have in common. Of course I was careful to steer clear of too-obvious patriotic symbols, but I wanted to make our wedding a celebration of our two cultures uniting by focusing on what we have in common. The service itself will be bilingual, so I'm excited that the invitations could reflect that.