ENVELOPE CALLIGRAPHY
If this envelope came in your mail, would you open it first? It looks like fun, whatever it is. That's the first impression you'd like your guests to have of your upcomming wedding. You want them to eagerly await your big day, because if the envelope is this much fun, they're thinking the entire event will be a blast.

I like my envelopes to look not so much as if they were done by a calligrapher, but rather that they were done by a "character" with expressive penmanship. If someone is planning a very quiet, very formal wedding I'll alter my script to set that mood.
The inner envelope used with most traditional invitations is inscribed with the last name only. I generally like to add a few extra swirls on this envelope as there's alot of space to fill.

I can alter the style a bit to suit your needs or to match the mood of the typography of your invitation.

Price: 3.00 for the outside envelope, $1.50 for the inner.
Place Cards & Escort Cards
When most people ask for place cards, they mean to say "escort cards". Escort cards differ from place cards in that they inform the bearer the number of the table where they shall sit. The table number is written on the inside of the tented card.
Another version of the escort card is seen above. Inside a small envelope bearing the names of your guests is a small card with a table number written upon it. This method provides the hostess with the greatest flexibility. She can mix and match the cards and envelopes up to the last minute.

For those who want to control the exact location of each guest a place card will be needed to put at each setting. For small weddings (with fewer than six or so tables) a place card will probably be preferable to an escort card.

Escort/Place cards are $1.50 each

Customized Place and Escort Cards
You might wish to have me design a unique place card to match the decor of the wedding. Here are a few that I've produced for recent clients.
This place card was adapted from the map I designed for a "Desitination Wedding" in Bermuda. The couple's initials make up the decorative border as well as the compass rose of the map and the escort card.
This lively place card was at the seat where Mary Smith sat down to a great lobster at the reception dinner of a seaside ceremony.

This was a rather informal dinner, so the drawing I produced was a bit sketchier than I might have done had the event been "black tie".
A different seaside wedding had an image of a lighthouse as a motif. For the place card I redrew that image adding a beam of light illuminating the guest's name.
Sometimes name-tags are helpful at weddings. This one shows the initials of the couple's newly hyphenated last name.
Here the ever-popular Smiths are invited to a rehersal dinner for a Chinese wedding. The fortune cookie's message directs them to the correct table.
Here follows a fun way of an escort card doing double duty.
Lucille and Richard had a rather large wedding. As in many weddings, guests only had a clear idea of only one of the main characters. The couple wanted a written history of their colorful courtship available to the curious minds of their guests. We came up with an idea of creating faux post cards as the vehicle to get the guest to the correct table as well as tell their story.

On the back of each of the 20 different cards was written a carefully crafted factoid relating to the place shown. One had the ugly office building where they met, another the bride's family farm in Vermont. The captions were chosen carefully so that one learned much. When Mr. John Smith sat at table four he discovered the other nine guests each had a different card, so by the end of the evening all 200 guests had a rather complete history of our couple.

The back of the card shows a personalized postage stamp and a canellation date (that of the wedding, of course). Pretty cool, huh?
This was fun!

Morris Weinstein was an amateur entemologist - bugs (and spiders) were his thing. Though his parents were more traditional with respect to the invitation, they allowed their son to have fun with the dinner reception and party after the service.

Instead of numbering the tables we identified them with illustrations of some of his favorite creepy crawlies. Guests opened the escort envelope to see a fanciful six or eight, or in the case of the centepede, 100-legged creature staring them in the face through their compound eyes.

Morris originally wanted me to be a realist, drawing them with scientific precision, but I suggested that I could make them personalized with his initials: W M were hidden in each creature. It bacame a game to see who could find all hidden letters first.

You see the answers below. The tarantula was completely made up of Ms and Ws, with the exception of its eight beady eyeballs. (Girls that Morris wanted to torment were seated at that table.)
Rather than numbering your tables, we could do something like this.

Illustrations of a shared hobby, places you visited, different trees or flowers. The sky is the limit.....how about stellar costellations?

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