Original post author: Ryan
I don’t remember when or how we decided to make custom-designed bandanas for our wedding favors. But, the decision felt right to us because it allowed us to share a little bit about ourselves and push forward the themes/aesthetics of the wedding, all while using a medium that is near and dear to our hearts (if you didn’t know, we collect bandanas for our dog, Violet).
In the beginning, I photographed all of my favorite bandanas from Violet’s collection, then studied them to figure out what design aspects I liked and disliked. I quickly learned that I preferred traditional bandana designs, which tend to have concentric borders and intricate floral designs. Execution-wise, I decided to draw the bandana at 1:1 scale with ink on thick card stock. This plan minimized the need for post-production in photoshop.
The design consisted of the following:
For the outer-most border, I drew a series of small “glyphs” that have some meaning in our lives (along with some “filler glyphs” such as hearts and flowers).
I drew some flowers for the second border, which helped carry forward the traditional bandana aesthetic. Violets were used on one side (naturally) and trumpet vines on the other side.
For the third border, I made an homage to music festival culture by drawing a big continuous “kandi” bracelet. On one side, the bracelet spells out our names, the wedding date, and the wedding location. On the other side, the bracelet spells out some of the light-hearted phrases you might see on an actual kandi bracelet.
The very middle of a bandana is “no man’s land” - it might seem like prime real estate, but it’s not. The middle is not visible when a bandana is actually used in most “real life” applications. So, for these wedding favors, I chose to draw some “cover art” in the middle - and we would plan to fold the bandanas in such a way that the “cover” is facing out when on display.
Adjacent to the cover art, we put the second half of the reading from our wedding ceremony. Needless to say, we found this reading to be poignant, realistic, and powerful.
Above and below the cover art, I tiled a few doodles (vignettes) that represent various memories from our relationship.
After completing all drawings, I made high-quality scans, imported them into photoshop, made use of some copy-and-paste (leveraging symmetry), then did a few touch-ups.
Then, I went to the screen printers! Screen printing manufacturers tend to be hard to work with. But, for this specific project, the coordination was a breeze and the prints looked great on the first try.
The tie dye process was a whole other operation. Jessica and I started doing test runs before the final bandanas even arrived. We tested a wide range of color combinations and ratios, measuring and documenting along the way. Getting the dye colors right was a lot harder than we initially thought it would be. We wanted to have rust and gold colors (to match our wedding theme colors) - but we found that those colors would very easily look like blood and pee. After a lot of iterations, we decided to go with a light blue and a light peach color. We kept the colors light because we wanted the art to stay visible.
When it was time to do full scale production, we the process all worked out. We only had our little apartment to work in, so we built many small workstations in Tupperware containers. That allowed us to dye/rinse/dry all of the bandanas in one big batch.
We were really happy and proud of these wedding favors. We put a lot of time and energy into them, but it was a fun project for us. We enjoyed being able to share the little bits and pieces of our lives depicted on these bandanas with our guests.
Comet Catch-up! This post is related to something that happened in October 2021. I took an unplanned 16-month hiatus from blogging, and these Comet Catch-up posts cover some of the things that happened in my life during that time. Thanks for reading!