Us Bengalis really like to get creative with our wedding invitations, and over the years I have seen everything from invitations delivered in miniature palkis (palanquins), in boxes of sweets, in glass bottles and in the form of hilarious movie posters with caricatures of the bride and groom.

For our invitations we wanted to give our guests a sneak peak into the theme of our Holud (one the pre-wedding events which I will be posting about soon), Rustic Glam. As we have multiple events in our weddings, we also have multiple invitations, and this is especially important as each of the events have somewhat different guest lists, despite having great degree of overlap. You can imagine how much fun planning all of this must be.

Traditionally, the bride and the groom’s families gift matching attires to close friends and families to wear to the Holud – think bridesmaids and groomsmen, except this was many of our close friends and almost all of our extended family, meaning hundreds of people dressed in attires from the groom’s side, or the bride’s. These attires are usually given with the invitations and so, we thought of designing a box in the Rustic Glam theme, which would contain the invitations, the attires, chocolates as a sweet treat and a special little gift they could keep as memorabilia, an engraved crystal pen.

The box was designed by my mother and she hand selected each of the items, everything from the burlap to the lace and the pearls, that was to adorn them. Although it was exhausting, putting together the invitations was incredible fun.

One of the stacks of invitations as we were putting them together

Naveed and I personally designed the inserts of our cards and searched long and hard to find complementary, yet dissimilar laser cut cards. The butterfly card, which was the Holud invitation just gave a little touch of the garden theme and some of the unused butterflies were actually used to decorate the carriage in which I entered our Holud – more on this soon ! Stay tuned.

A few members of team bride (red) and team groom (green) on the day of the Holud 🙂