Paper porn

Yesterday, Chris and I braved the rain and wind to explore paper shops in Manhattan. We are making our own wedding invitations, because this seems like one of the most creative parts of planning and we can't imagine paying someone else to take the fun away. We hit a sort of holy trinity of paper places:

1) Kate's Paperie 

We dropped by the Spring Street store and were overwhelmed by the beautiful, though expensive, selection. While I saw about three thousand stationery sets I'd love to call my own, nothing quite hit the note we were looking for with the wedding invites. Also, this is the type of store where you are greeted in rapid succession by several chipper shopkeeps, dying to sell you something you don't need. Being trailed by fourteen employees while I feel up the paper makes me feel like a creep. But if you find yourself in there, these Italian envelopes feel fantastic:

2) Jam Paper

The complete opposite of Kate's. This is a paper warehouse of sorts, where you can dig in to gigantic boxes of "closeout" envelopes of every shape, size, and color. We found a few cool envelope options at this place, but finding accompanying cards and other matchy pieces proved rather difficult. I would go here in a heartbeat for any more casual type of mailing needs. They also carry boxes, bags, recycled papers, handmade wrapping papers, and this nifty map paper (and envelopes!): 

3) Paper Presentation

Our final and most successful stop. Gorgeous coordinates in just about every type of texture, color, and fold imaginable. Like Kate's, they also carry tons of other embellishments—rubber stamps, inks, embossing tools, ribbons, adhesive thingies of all kinds. The creative wheels started spinning out of control and we had to keep reminding ourselves to keep it simple. We have a LOT of these invites to make. Unfortunately, we made it to this shop near closing time, so we didn't get as much time to look around as we would've liked. Instead of deciding on anything final, we picked out individual sheets of a couple paper stocks we liked, so we can try them with the typewriter and see if the ink will even work well with them. So another trip to this place is in our future. Oh, darn!