Weddingbee PRO
{Images by Jessica Robitaille}
I hope you all had a fun weekend! If you are like me, then you are filled to capacity with sweets. My sister and her husband, along with my parents’ never-ending supply of Halloween props, threw a fantastic Halloween party on Friday night. Halloween was always an extravagant affair that took months of planning around the Parrott household. Each year the four of us spent September coming up with bigger, better, and scarier ideas than the last for our party. My father would transform our garage into a haunted house and my mother would create spooky vignettes throughout the room. My sister and I would design & deliver the invitations to everyone in our neighborhood. We would also map out the haunted “walk” which was a ghost tour {always led by yours truly} through our backyard, around our house, through the front yard, & back to the garage. Everyone went all-out for the event. My father would build a tunnel leading out of the back door of the garage into the backyard, fill it with strobe lights, spider webs, and dry ice, leaving a small opening where he could jump out and scare people. One year our neighbor built a life-size coffin and played Dracula for years. Our shed became a mausoleum. The garden became a graveyard. One year a friend of my father’s dressed as a fencer and stood on top of our picnic table swashing his sword and laughing like a crazy man. To this day he remains the scariest in our cast of characters.
Mary and Bobby are planning a happy and homespun wedding on Mary’s family’s farm in a charming little town in Texas. Mary commissioned Betsy Dunlap to handletter the entire wedding invitation, RSVP, return address, as well as a few words for the map. Betsy’s lettering is perfect for this rustic barn wedding - organic and relaxed with loads of charm!
I am really excited & super proud to present my 2010 limited edition letterpress calendar. It has been a few months in the making, and I am so pleased at the final product. I am so happy I took the leap and decided to letterpress the entire calendar.
I recently had the great privilege to work with Caroline, the talented owner and designer of Paloma’s Nest. Caroline strives to create modern heirlooms that will be cherished for generations, most notably her ring bearer bowl. Each piece is hand cut, free form, with no pattern, giving each piece its own variation in the size, shape, and layout of the text. I love that you can see her hand in each piece, making each one unique. Though she works with clay and I work with paper, I believe we have a very similar aesthetic and artistic process, which is one of the many reasons why I am so drawn to her work. That and I just love her work!
Caroline worked with Creative Shift Design for the design of her new business cards, which came out so lovely! Caroline wanted the impression on the cards to mimic the look of her stamped ceramic work, so I letterpress printed them on super-thick 220 lb. 100% cotton paper in fluorescent white. I hand-fed each of the 1,000 cards through my press three times – once for the nest and eggs, which is a deep blind-deboss {no ink}, second for the website in gold ink, and third for the remainder of the text in black ink.
Continuing with the "theme" of a new take on a previous design, I recently designed and printed these hydrangea wedding invitations for a lovely couple living in Ireland. I did a similar design over a year ago in sea-inspired blues and greens for a childhood friend.
I loved printing in pink and gray; it is so flirty and feminine. Many couples {my fiance and I included} go for more gender neutral colors, but sometimes an all-out floral-filled, swashed and swooped, pink-fest is necessary. I have always been under the impression that hydrangeas are a summer flower growing in the yards of cute cottages on the beaches in Maine and Cape Cod. However, autumn is when some of the most beautiful hydrangeas are in season, including antique hydrangea .
Happy Fall! I love this time of year. These invitations were a new take on some previous invitations. I find I often do not take photographs of designs I have already done, because I feel like I am repeating content, however, with different color combinations & additional pieces, the suites end up looking quite different.
This couple had a small wedding at a private home on Lake Tahoe this past summer. With gerber daisies as the main flower at the wedding, they became the main feature for the wedding invitation in a vibrant yellow ink contrasted with chocolate brown and olive green.
Hi there! I hope you enjoyed your weekend. We went up to Brimfield on Sunday, and we left tired & disppointed. It was the last day of the last show of 2009, so that may be the reason. We are going to give it another try in May 2010.
Before the weekend I sent off another beautiful invitation suite to a couple in Tennessee who are getting married at the Cosmos Club in Washington D.C. The club began as a society that embraced the sciences and the arts and is located in a Beaux Arts mansion. While inspired by the ornate architecture of the building and its rooms, we decided to focus on the word “Cosmos” and shoot straight into the galaxies! Shelley and her fiance, Willie, were looking for a real “deep space” feel to their invitations, so I used hundreds of stars in various shapes and forms to surround the words of the invitations.
Sometimes a week just slips right by, especially when I am trying to get projects out the door. As a follow up to my recent letterpress post, here is the final product! John, the groom, was a friend from college {go PC!}. He and Kelly were both on the sailing team and still love to sail so it was only natural their wedding would be inspired by the sea. They are getting married at the chapel on PC’s campus followed by a reception at the Conanicut Yacht Club.
I had the great honor of printing the lettering of the ever-talented Betsy Dunlap. I tell you, I get quite a thrill out of printing hand-drawn artwork and hand lettering! But let us start from the beginning of this design process.
Rae, the super creative Art Historian & bride, initially contacted me to do her save the dates {okay, so that is the only pic I took of them, but they kind of looked like these}. Once those were complete, she sent me a folder full of wonderful and inspiring photos including arrangements by Saipua, work of her favorite artists, and one image entitled “calligraphy.” I took one look and knew it was Betsy’s lettering. After viewing Rae’s images I could see she was going for a very organic, flowing look, and I knew she had to work with Betsy. And she did!
Hello! I hope you had a fun, long weekend. While I did get some relaxation in with a little camping trip, I spent a lot of the weekend printing. The wedding invitations I am printing are for friends. They were interested in seeing the letterpress process, so I took a few photos and decided to share them with you!
I mix of all of my inks by hand using the Pantone Matching System {PMS}. This specific blue is PMS7459 which actually corresponds with Paper Source’s Lake.
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Sarah Parrott, Rhode Island
Vendor: Invitation Designer
Website: Parrott Design Studio
About Me: I am the designer & printer behind Parrott Design Studio, specializing in custom letterpress and screen printed wedding and event invitations, stationery, and paper goods. With a background in non-profit marketing & art history, I began the studio in 2006 in my small apartment in Providence, RI. Since then I have moved to a studio built my fiancé, acquired a Golding Jobber letterpress, & have been happily printing ever since. I grew up in Portland, Maine, and I have always had an affinity for the ocean, mountains, birds, gardening, & the simple life. When I am not printing, I can be found somewhere outside with my fiancé & playful pup.
