Making a List, Checking it Twice

Your budget is small, your wedding desires are large, so where do you draw the line when it comes to your paper products? Most wedding related expenses are necessary: the invitations, dress, photographer; these all play a major role in the celebration of a lifetime. To help you decide what paper products are a must at your wedding, lets take a look at some of the options.

Hi everyone!

Having a husband who is a graphic designer is very convenient for my DIY tendencies. I can completely customize anything I want. From birthday cards to t-shirts, my sweet hubby helps me put it on paper (he designed our logo). Over the past year, he’s taught me a lot about what it takes to make your own event graphics. I thought I would share some ideas with you.

While invitations are undoubtedly the most important element of a wedding stationery suite, it’s equally as important to not forget about other wedding paper ephemera – like seating cards!  Whether place cards or escort cards*, seating cards can help carry design elements from your invitation suite or wedding theme through to the reception and create a cohesive wedding style.  Here are a few of my favorite seating card options:

Eco-chic is a funny thing. The phrase itself makes me laugh…throwing “chic” after any word makes it…well….chic. Rustic chic, shabby chic… but heck. I’m all for making things eco-friendly. After my DIY debaucle last week with our invitations, I started thinking about the sustainability of our wedding. While we will be able to reuse the paper I had originally bought, I still felt wasteful for using all these resources. Because my brother-in-law (to be!) is attending a sustainable MBA program in S.F., I came to him for advice on some ways to make my wedding more eco-friendly.

While I love browsing the wedding collections of stationers and invitation studios, one of my absolute favorite things to do is to feature real invitations – particularly custom and diy invitations.  I just love seeing the way that real couples and designers work together to produce an invitation design that represents the bride and groom as a couple and suits their unique wedding style.  Today, I want to share this lovely custom invitation suite from Paperwink – both because of its beautiful design and the lovely meaning behind the invitations:

Throughout the planning process, I mentioned before that I wanted to stay sane and delegate where I could.  That included finding a florist who I trusted to do just about whatever she wanted, letting my parents be in charge of the catering and the alcohol, and letting my bridesmaids choose much of their own outfits.  However there was one thing I couldn’t let go of – I wanted to make the invitations and other stationery myself.  Naturally, that began with Save the Dates.

Hi Everyone!  I am so, so happy to be back blogging here at EAD – and I just want to start off with a huge “thank you!” to Ami and Rebekah for inviting me to join them as a weekly columnist for the EAD Wedding Blog.

OK, first of all, I’m finally beginning to recover from the stress of the last-minute vow renewal preparations. So I apologize that we have taken until now to pick our top 10 DIY projects to send to our fabulous judges, Emily from Once Wed, the girls from Southern Weddings, Kathryn from Snippet & Ink, Jenna from That Bride, and Maria from Ritzy Bee. These amazing bloggers will vote on the winner, who will receive a $100 gift card to Amazon.com. It was so difficult to determine a top 10, because all of the entries were so unique and fantastic. In the spirit of fair competition, each entrant was limited to one of their projects landing in the top 10.

With all the hustle and bustle of a wedding, sometimes its hard to find time to figure out exactly what information goes on your paper products. When you work with a custom invitation designer like Zenadia Design, they can help take the stress off this area by giving you suggestions. I always refer my clients to Verse It. This is an amazing website, filled with hundreds of ways to word everything from your save the date cards to rehearsal dinner invitations.

After successfully completing our wedding invitations, I knew that I could do the remainder of the wedding stationery myself. I designed, printed, and assembled the rest of our wedding stationery using the same process as I did with our invitations. I created ceremony programs, menus, escort cards, place cards, table signs, table numbers, stickers, out of town boxes, and our rehearsal dinner invitations.

One area where we decided we could save money was in all of the print materials. I had a pretty specific idea of how I wanted the final invitations to look and knew we could create a simple look on our own.

Starting October 15th, Zenadia Design will be running an end of the year special you don’t want to miss!

At six weeks to go until our wedding, we are starting to really think about and plan all the little details like hotel and map enclosures for our invitations, small ceremony details, escort cards, and programs.  I would like to have some sort of program for the ceremony, but I  a) don’t want it to cost a lot and  b) don’t want it to be too complicated.  An idea that I had was to find an interesting printed paper, and use that for the programs and accent on the escort cards.  Originally, I had wanted something that incorporated both the navy blue (even if it was just touches of it) and the terracotta/orange color, but that wasn’t too Asian influenced.  This was much harder than I expected, so if any of you have great sources for paper with printed designs, feel free to share!!  But, while browsing at my local JoAnn fabrics store, I came across this paper which I thought was really pretty, incorporated the creams and golds we are using, and had a nice saying about the memories we make and keep throughout our lives.

Bridget’s gorgeous French-inspired wedding has me drooling.  Let’s tackle her two questions.  First, the invitations!  Ignoring color for a bit, because that’s the easy part, I would choose to incorporate some architectural details into the printing.  The French love to use swirls and complex graphics, and those fit in *so* nicely with the board she has put together.  Here are a few examples of stationery utilizing architectural details:

Jacquelyn and Ryan’s wedding wasn’t just timeless and elegant. It was filled with personalized details that gave a nod to the couple’s relationship, and Clary Photo was there to capture every precious detail. The bride asked The Rebel Florist to fill bouquets and centerpieces with plush peonies because the park in which Ryan proposed was filled with the blooms. They wed inside the Missouri History Museum, beneath a classic white chuppah. For favors, the couple gave a donation to PAWS in honor of their adopted German Shepherd, Moose—each guest found a picture of the pup and a note from the couple at their place setting!

The weeks leading up to your wedding are impossibly busy.  I was pretty organized throughout the process but between designing our programs, creating menu cards and printing escort cards, free time was hard to come by the last few weeks.  Oh and don’t forget about making sure all gifts were purchased and cards written.  And that there was a detailed timeline of the day.  Or, if you’re us, a detailed timeline of the 5-day event starting Wednesday.   Regardless, doing these projects myself made our wedding a labor of love and I enjoyed pouring myself into every last detail.

This week I’m highlighting the work of one of my favorite calligraphers, Bryn Chernoff of Paperfinger Calligraphy.  Bryn’s calligraphy has a wonderful modern sensibility and is absolutely beautiful without being overly formal or fancy – making it perfect for informal and modern weddings!  So, just in case you aren’t familiar with Bryn’s work, I thought I’d gather together a few examples from her portfolio.

If you’ve ever stopped by EA on a Thursday morning, than you know that I’m a huge paper freak!  I could spend hours upon hours in Paper Source; hand me a piece of sumptuous letterpress and I’m in visual and tactile heaven!  So when it came to our wedding and decisions concerning all-things-paper, I was as happy as a pig in slop.