Going Somewhere, Sweethearts.

The best part of any mass mailing is the mailing. Holding plump little packages in your arms and imagining all of the doorsteps they'll cross. When I was living in DC, I took a stack of valentines for post. A woman asked me if I was getting married. I said nope, they're just valentines. She said "well, you've sure got a lot of sweethearts." It was one of the nicest things a stranger has ever said. I think about that every time I drop 50 some-odd envelopes into the mail. There's something so rich and sweet about real mail.

Generally, with the valentines the envelope is an exhausted afterthought. For these invitations, the envelope set the scheme. The innards took some serious time to wrangle and might have been way more labor intensive than I assumed, but the satisfaction of seeing them all together was worth it.*  By chance, the teal scrolling on the stamp matches the envelope and the little orange heart matches the reply card. Little twists of design luck. Delicious.

Not all of the invites have reached their doors, so I won't post the entire design, but here are the envelopes, each tip-tap-typed by hand (a few with the help of a 5 year old! The typewriter, in all of its glory continues to be an object of fascination).

All of the insides also lined up richly with their golden bobbles. 

*NB: The mailing of these envelopes in any capacity would have been impossible without my Mom, who drove up here special to join the assembly line to get them out.  She's the best.