









Bet you've never received a wedding invitation like this before: Folded just so, this card turns into a manually operated paper record player that plays a song recorded by the future bride and groom.

Designer Kelli Anderson wanted to create something original for the wedding of her friends Karen Sandler and Mike Tarantino, and look at (and listen to) the result. Wow.

If recipients aren't pleased with the tinny sound of the hand-spun version, they can pop that "flexi-disc" out of the wedding invitation and let a conventional turntable do the spinning for them, where it'll play just like any other record.

Karen and Mike wrote the lyrics and performed the music, vocals and audio engineering themselves. Certainly a big help was the fact that Mike is a Grammy-nominated audio recording engineer.

We know, musical purists, you probably noticed they're not exactly professional singers, but at least they didn't autotune it to death like some "recording artists" we've encountered lately.

Enhancing the overall originality of the design is the rest of the card, packed with clever graphics. "As a fallback measure (if the record-playing didn’t work for whatever reason), the package sure as hell had to look great," Kelli says.

Mission accomplished. It's a masterpiece. Read more details about the trials and tribulations of making this original wedding invitation at Kelli's site.

UPDATE: I asked Kelli how many of these cards she made, and how long it took to make them: "We made 150 of them," she says. "The project started in February. The whole thing was a really tight turnaround (I had some doubt at moments). It takes a month to get flexis manufactured and it took me about a month (on and off) to design it. A lot of the materials had to be prepped, so we got a group of people over here to help with the tedium of that a few nights in a row (scoring, stickering, wrapping screwposts, punching holes in felt, cutting the flexi records into circle shapes — since they annoyingly came as squares)."

Kelli got the routine down to where she could put together about 10 of them herself in an hour. Wasn't that assembly a bit tedious? She replied, "That part was pretty fun, actually, even though that sounds like a long time to do the same thing."

Has she done other record playing cards or objects? "Nope, this is the first one. Do you think I could get away with doing another, or is that copying myself?"

I think she could get away with it.

Singing Wedding Invitation

Images courtesy Kelli Anderson

Via CoDesign