A plane affair

So while I was in Ethiopia, Mr.PapayaDog received our invitations. I was so excited, I was tempted to have him take pictures of them and send them to me. I really wanted to see them! I realize making him take pictures of something I would see in 3 days would be silly especially since I took our camera on my trip with me.

Knowing our invitations were just waiting to be sent out made me think about how I was going to address the mailing tubes. Because of the size of the invitation, we had to invest in mailing tubes. They were pretty cheap, less than $0.35 a piece but shipping them to us cost about $20.00. In all, they came out to less than $50. The only problem with the mailing tubes is that their shape makes addressing them (without a label) really hard. I thought about using calligraphy on clear labels but then realized that A) You could tell that there were labels even though I was trying to hide it, and B) Calligraphy just would match the unconventional style of the invitations.

I knew I wanted to have the address labels reflect the style of the invites, but I didn’t know how to do it on a poster tube. Then I thought, why should hide the label? Why not use a white label? I could incorporate a smaller version of the bells design onto the label and layer the addresses on top of it. Perfect! I played around with text and style of addressing the labels. Instead of using a person’s title and full name (i.e. Ms. Little Bee), I just went with first names. I tried to spell out addresses as often as I could, but Washington is a long state name and once you get a city like Sammamish, fitting Washington on the same line is impossible.

Once I finished the design of the label, I realized I needed a place and way to display our return address. Another label would be weird but I didn’t want to not place our return address on the tube. How was I going to get all the information on the tube and still make it look pretty? I thought about it all night.

I headed to airport in the morning and when I got to the airline counter, I pulled out an envelope with my passport and itinerary in it. As I waited for my ticket I noticed an address label was used on the envelope and that at the top of the label was the logo of the sender and the return address printed in a lighter shade of red. Eureka! I spent the first 4 hours of my 21 hours journey home finishing the labels. I created a “logo” and put our address in a light shade of grey at the top of the label. I had a label template on my computer from Avery already so I pasted the individual images on each label. I think it looks pretty good and hope they print all right!

Have you come up against a planning roadblock only to discover the solution at an unlikely place or time?