Sunday 26 February 2012

The wonderful world of wedding stationary!

So since booking the venue and deciding in a theme(ish) for the Big Day the vast majority of my spare time has been taken up with wedding stationary! I know the thought of invites, order of the days and seating plans is a little premature but I wanted to let our family and closest friends know the date of the wedding and that we would like them to be part of our special day. Hence why we are sending out Save the Date cards. I work in a design office so I am a little particular when it comes to things like fonts, colour shades, illustrations and paper! I also wanted all our stationary to match right from our save the dates through to our thank you cards. You would think this would be easy and relatively pain/stress free...it's not, especially if you are as fussy as I am!


Type wedding stationary into google and your presented with 1000's of websites!!! The vast majority of which stock very traditional invites, you know the ones with some form of satin ribbon and embellished with diamanté and lots of sparkle! Lovely as these are, they are not my taste I wanted something much less formal and more personal. So after much thought I decided I would design the wedding stationary myself. I set about researching DIY save the date cards and invites and was again presented with hundreds of different websites! The Martha Stewart website (www.marthastewartweddings.com) was great for inspiration as was Rock my Wedding (www.rockmywedding.co.uk). In fact they had a great invite that used a rubber stamp with the couples name and date of their wedding on the front of brown recycled card. I love the idea of using brown recycled card - it has a great texture and really fits the whole eco/home made feel. I decided to take inspiration from this and use the same stamp and card for our invites. The stamps are available from Stamps Direct (www.stampsdirect.co.uk) and the card and paper stock we are using is from Eco-craft (https://secure.eco-craft.co.uk). 


Next I had to decide on the fonts! I spent hours going through all the free fonts available on DaFont (www.dafont.com) and eventually set on the two fonts to be used. I love the idea of mixing two different fonts. Dan of course couldn't tell the difference between the four options I narrowed it down to 'Ange, they all look the same to me, is anyone even going to notice?' 'Yes Daniel- I will'! Anyway, I ended up choosing two without the help of my other half!


I printed off draft one of the invites, thinking that by keeping it simple with two font types and the textured card the invites would speak for themselves. But something was missing! It needed some form of illustration/frame. I found a great website called Istock photo (www.istockphoto.com) where you can buy credits and download professional illustrations for personal use. This website is actually amazing and there are thousands of great images available. I found one that really suited our invites and they have finished of our stationary set perfectly. 


So that was that our wedding stationary was designed. I would love to show the save the date cards, but they haven't been sent out yet and there is a great little gimic that (hopefully) the recipients will love! I promise though, when these are out I will post a blog with photos and the 'how to' for them. However, I now have to go cut all our save the date cards to size so no doubt if you see me in the next week days I will be covered in card cuts and sick of the sight of recycled card!


Thanks for taking the time to read, please feel free to comment or share and also let me know of anything you would like to hear about.


Lots of love


Ange xx


1 comment:

  1. Now I'm going to be really annoying & pick you up on your spelling! Stationery is spelt with an E - I always remember being taught the difference between the two spellings as "cAr" for stationary standing still & "pEn" for paper stationery. Now I have got that out of my system I can say that they sound amazing & I can't wait to see the design xx

    ReplyDelete