Yup, I got my nibs and ink out. I had/have a stack of envelopes with a beautiful flap. They are the inners to a wedding job from 10 years ago. I'm not sure what was wrong with the Mrs Virgil Vaughn - but it was in the reject pile. I just couldn't throw those flaps away plus I had something lovely to send to Leslie that needed to go inside an envelope - so this seemed like a good way to send it.
You can see that the B was printed. Then each violet was painted by hand. The invitations were done Maria Thomas. I met Maria at the first IAMPETH conference I went to in 2001. At the time, Maria had a studio in (Boston?) and did a lot of very high end invitations. There was at least one person working for her who did all the hand painted flowers They are gorgeous - in person. There are little bits of gold, too. I do not have an images of the invitation - but there were even more hand painted flowers on the invitation.
As I recall, from her website, the invitations ran around $35-40 apiece - but, I could be way off. Maria also designed for Crane's and her distinctive style was very popular. Sometime during the 2000s she came up with the idea of Zentangles and that whole craze took off. She ended up shutting down her calligraphy business and does Zentangle full time.
This invitation was one of the last ones she did and when the person who ordered them called me to do them, I could not understand why they want me to do them rather than Maria, but they insisted. So, I said OK. It was a fun job. Lots of extras and lots of time. I always wanted to run into Maria again some time and ask her to critique my envelope -- how close did I get to her penmanship.
I just searched and her website is still up, but no invitation examples. It says her daughter is running the studio. There are a lot of images on Google - if you want to just search Maria Thomas Calligraphy.
Here's the link to her website:
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