Becky of Sugar Plum Invitations {Wedding Invitations}

Becky is probably one of the sweetest persons you will ever meet. She is the brains and the heart behind Sugar Plum Invitations. She is the only person on the Central Coast brave enough to do letterpress invitations, business cards and thank you notes. If you don’t know what letterpress is then read on!

Letterpress is a historic form of printing which leaves impressions into the paper. These kind of invitations are fast becoming desirable in the wedding industry like what vinyl is to a record collector. Becky’s letterpress machines are monstrous beasts of metal and iron. It’s amazing to imagine this little lady managing 100 year old presses and turning out these delicate and beautiful invitations. Becky tells us that she learned how to letterpress from a couple of old men who perfected their art before computers were even invented. She couldn’t do it without her husband who is her maintenance man; piecing together old machines and bringing them back to life. Thanks Becky for preserving and reviving this lost art for couples who want their invites to impress their guests with crisp lines, elegant patterns and bold typography.


People don’t usually understand letterpress – what do you tell people when they ask what letter press is?
It’s an old fashion form of printing where an inked image is pressed into paper. Letterpress gives a great textual impression, especially if combined with heavy cotton rag paper. It's a unique look and feel that other forms of printing can't match.

Do you feel that letterpress is a dying art?
I think because it has become popular, many people are working to save this print form. It’s great to see old presses saved and in use again.

Do you do in house design?
We do design in house, but we also offer print only services for designers.

What all do you offer?
Wedding invitations, business stationary, birth announcements, and custom printing.


Tell us about how letterpress happens.
We have to ink the press, with a single color (we can only print one color at a time). We set the plate in the press, each piece of paper is hand fed. Rollers ink the image, the press closes with the paper inside and then you have a print. You remove the print and add another sheet. To print the second color you have to re-set up the press and plate and re-feed all the paper through again. It’s very time consuming, but beautiful.

Do you have any magazine features coming up?
We’ll be featured in the Knot magazine in July, and in an upcoming Knot book on the best of wedding colors. We’re very excited and honored.

How do most people hear about you? Where do you get most of your business?
A lot of our clients come by “word-of-mouth” referrals from other brides, and many of our new clients find out about us from the web. Many of our clients are international and from the East Coast.


Do you mix your own colors?
Yes, we hand mix our own colors. We use the Pantone color system, so we can do our best to match flowers, dresses, linens etc.

How much time does it take to get a finished product; from design to invites?
Typically about 6 weeks, sometimes faster. We can work with the bride to expedite if necessary.

What is your favorite part of your job?
Seeing the final product turn out perfectly and the bride being happy.


What inspires you the most?
Nature and vintage fabrics

Besides letterpress, what are some other ways you like to express your creativity?
Watercolor painting when I have time, which is never, cooking, and blogging on my wedding style blog -{She Walks in Beauty}.

Your blog {She Walks in Beauty} addresses all things weddings and much more. What is the inspiration behind your posts?
Family, friends, daily life, colors, fun trends, travel, things I love.




Send Becky a note:
805.748.5409
becky@sugarpluminvitations.com
Sugar Plum Invitations

Paper Sky {Wedding Invitations}

Paper Sky is the creative love child of Jessica and Tim (but mostly Jessica). Years ago when I was just a fledgling photographer I shot a wedding in which Jessica was the Matron of honor. Since then we have bumped into each other from Uptown to downtown where her beautiful storefront is now located. I have been thrilled to watch her business grow and flourish in such a short time. She is making a big difference in the wedding industry here in San Luis Obispo and is making the town a more colorful place to live and even shop. Anna and I really enjoyed our time hearing all of the details that make Paper Sky such a beautiful reality. Enjoy the interview!

How did you get into this? How did you start making invitations?
It has really been this huge evolving thing. Ive always loved paper because its inexpensive and you can do so much with it. Basically, Tim and I got engaged and I wanted to make our own invitations. I worked at Hands Gallery {located across the street} all through college. I was an anatomy physiology major at Poly, but I had an alter ego creative side and they really let me explore that there. I was allowed to do displays in the windows and I began to buy for them at shows in San Francisco. It just opened up my world to really artistic stuff and people. This {location} came up for sale and my old boss at Hands told us we needed to jump on it. It quickly fell into our laps and everything clicked that I really loved paper and color and it was completely meant to be. It was awesome; it still is awesome! {laughs}



Has this been an outlet for your creativity?
Absolutely; huge amazing creative outlet for me! I’m always learning and I’m always evolving. Especially on the wedding invitation side. I get really excited to sit down with a new bride and we ask, ‘What are we going to come up with?’ I love that initial blank screen design process. I don’t think that it will ever get old to me because it’s new every time. Even just doing the window display. You can pretty much make anything with paper. Its fun to come up with new themes and new ways to dress that window and we always get really great feedback from the community about it and it puts a big smile on my face. Anna: Ive never seen anybody do with paper what you do!

What is the wedding invitation design process like?
I meet a couple by appointment. I tell them to bring in as much inspiring stuff as they can, whether it be color swatches, magazine clippings, how they got engaged, where they are getting married, how they met. Kinda like the tattoo Save the dates I made. The groom proposed to his bride with ‘Forever?’ and ‘Yes or No’ boxes tattooed to his leg. Every invitation becomes a story about them and its really neat to make it unique to that couple. I think that’s the service that everybody’s looking for; something that’s custom to them. We will typically meet and start talking, drawing and getting conceptual shapes down on paper. Couples can be overwhelmed with a blank slate, so to not freak them out we start with shape. Do you like a circle or square? And we slowly build from there.

{design center}

Do you give comps so that couples can pick what they like once you have begun on a design?
If its an in-house process we will do PDF comps to get the layout and design right. Then we will do a hard copy proof where everything is assembled together. Once the couples give the final OK then they sign off on it and we go to print.

How much time do you need to design a custom invitation?
Ideally, we need about a month because the design process is pretty involved. To get what is in their minds eye into my computer is kinda tricky. Its totally a symbiotic thing. The more we can communicate and make changes that faster we can get what a couple wants. We have a lot of couples that are actually out of state, which requires more emailing back and forth.


What were you like as a child creatively?
I was that quiet introverted child that sat there playing with crayons, markers and paper; always drawing. All my first presents were paint sets. Every Christmas I would get a new art medium. I got my first acrylic set when I was probably like 6. My parents were always really supportive of that but when it came to going to school and deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up artist wasn’t really allowed I guess. I was also really good at science so I became a bio major. When I was younger I always said I was going to be a pediatrician that drew cartoons for my patients. That was always my ideal job.

Are you able to work with any budget?
Yeah, definitely. We can do as much or as little as the couple wants or can afford. If a bride wants to do part of the assembly we can cut costs. That’s how all of this really started. Tim and I wanted to have really cool wedding invitations but we didn’t want to spend a fortune and I knew that I could create and assemble it on my own.

If Paper Sky were an animal what kind of an animal would it be?
It would be a peacock because I am so inspired and turned on by color and love putting different colors together. My favorite thing about this entire store is that wall of paper. I could stare at it all day long just like I could stare at a peacock all day long with its plums and iridescent colors.


What are your plans as far as growth and expansion?
That’s the funny thing! This is the question that Tim and I have to revisit all the time. People come into the store and say we should open a store in such-and-such, but that’s not my heart. I think the pace we are going at now is great, but if it gets any bigger, we need to rethink some stuff. I don’t want to sell stuff online because I want people to come into the store and have an experience. The wedding invite thing is shockingly taking off and we didn’t anticipate it being that successful. Our location is awesome being downtown and I love it being small and personal.

What sets you apart from other invitation companies in the wedding industry?
Because we can meet face to face with a bride and groom and get to know them and create something totally unique for them. Where as other companies you just flip through a book and point out what you want. I worked for a time with a coordinator where I went through him as a middle man and it just didn’t work, because I never met the actual couple. Its just such a different thing when you meet people and see how their eyes light up because of a certain color or idea. I helps me get a good sense of their style.

What is an ideal wedding client for you?
Ideal is like Lindsey Kennedy. She was so easy to work with and so inspiring because she had really great ideas. She actually participated in a lot of the assembly of her invitations because she wanted to cut costs. Basically my ideal clients are people who get really excited about paper and the design process in general and believe that the possibilities are endless. People who are open to stepping outside of that structured wedding invitation box and really into being different and getting creative.

So I decided it would be awesome to get feedback from Lindsey on her experience working with Jessica to obtain her wedding invitation dream. This is what she shared with me.

“Working with Jess at Paper Sky for our wedding invites was not only memorable, but enjoyable. Jessica listened to what artistic elements we wanted involved, conceptualized them into a neat little format that I could visualize and respond to, and she made me feel at ease and totally involved in the whole process. I was inspired by my visit to her store and actually based the artwork on the front of our invitation off a handmade journal I purchased there. Our invitations were a little bit of everything (organza ribbon, sewing, silk twine, textured fiber paper from Nepal, photography, vintage-inspired shape and feel, and poetic nuances of text) and Jessica helped us create art, not just a wedding-day memento, out of discrete elements. Jessica, you are truly a gem. Thank you for making this process truly awesome.”

{This was Lindseys wedding invitation}

Paper Sky Contact Information:
papersky(at)sbcglobal.net / 805.545.9940 / 778 Higuera St. San Luis Obispo, CA. 93405
Website: Paper Sky