The best part of my day is getting the chance to chat it up with brides who are full of inspiration and excitement over their big day. After a fabulous chat with a bride, Ashlynn, she sent over her Pinterest board of inspiration and boy did it inspire me! Her inspiration is an apple orcahard-esque theme filled with fab DIYing and a bit of homemade glory. I thought this would be a fabulous opportunity to inspire those of you who are planning a late-summer wedding filled with homemade love.
I love these dish towel save the dates! In fact, I want to get a few for myself to remember our wedding day. :) Apple butter on vintage pieces are so awesome. Similar to jam, these are great favors that guests will love and will love to eat.
Source: Apple butter, dish towels, barn
Don’t you just wish there were more red barns around? I sure do. I don’t think I have found one in all of my searches, so if you are in a place that has one, I highly envy you! And, yarn letters are definitely becoming a favorite of mine at the moment.
Source: Table Number, Centerpiece, Invite
Source: Love, Lemonade, Cans, Orchard, Cake, Flatware
Source: Flowers, Tablescape, Ceremony
I loved researching wedding invitations, all the different types of printing, typography, types of paper…the list goes on and on. I have to say my first choice was letterpress, it’s just so beautiful! But unfortunately it just wasn’t in our budget. We decided to go with digital printing – and I couldn’t be happier with our invites! Our day-of coordinator did such a fabulous job designing them! I can’t show you them just yet – since we haven’t sent them out and we don’t want family & friends to see them before they get them in the mail. But to give you an idea, here are a few key things I knew I wanted to incorporate.
Kraft Paper. I love the color & texture of kraft paper, it is exactly the right touch of rustic chic that I was hoping to bring to the invitations. We opted for kraft paper envelopes. I think it gives us a more relaxed feel to our invitations. I love these kraft + chevron save the dates by Lande & Maze, they are so different and pretty darn cool.
Quirky Food Pictures: I love animal + veggie symbols for the rsvp cards, so that was a detail we chose to include. It’s not something I’ve received on invitations too often (though I know it’s all over wedding blogs) so I still felt it was somewhat unique.
Fun Graphics: I just love the graphics on these invites – the bunting is perfect, and it doesn’t hurt that they’re from a wedding in Philly! We have a chevron and stripes pattern in our wedding colors (grey + yellow).
Font: I’m a sucker for a cool font. We went with a font similar to the Hello Lucky invitation below, that we’d also used on our save the dates. We thought keeping the font the same helped us have a more cohesive look to our paper goods.
Fun Wording: I also love a double-sided response card – especially when they bring such a fun vibe to the invitation suite. We did a mini response card with funny wording (but not quite as funny as this rsvp below)..
And of course I’m a sucker for anything yellow, plus the twine is the perfect touch.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
I’m excited to mail them, but a little worried about all the rsvp’s – I’ve heard seating charts are a nightmare! We are going to number the back of each rsvp, just in case someone forgets their name! If you have any good tips on staying organized I’d love to hear them!
Somewhere along the way I fell in love with white font. Unsurprisingly (hello blonde), it took me a while to sort out that you can’t actually print white ink on a printer. Too late. I was in love. Nothing more I could do about it.
There are a few ways to get white ink, and all of them are either super expensive or super labor intensive. But they all turn out GORGEOUS! So I must have it. And seeing as I don’t sleep on a pile of money, this means that we need to go the labor intensive DIY route.
There are a few ways to achieve the white ink look. You can use letterpress, but I’ve heard that the white never tuns out that bright. So a better option if you have the room in your budget is engraving.
You can also use foil stamping, which turns out beautifully, but isn’t exactly the most affordable option.
You can also screen print your white text, which is a nice little (or big) DIY project! Or you can pay someone else to do it and keep some of your hair. It makes the white really pop, and gives it a nice vintage feel.
You can also have custom rubber stamps made and hand stamp all of your invites, like Michael and Tim here did (way to set the bar high, guys). Isn’t this stunning?!
And you can always incorporate white ink on the envelopes or in places inside the invite with a white pen. I wish I had handwriting this beautiful!
Sources: engraving, foil stamping, screen printing 1 & 2, stamps, pen
We decided to go with the screen printing option, because we really like the look of paint on paper. So now that I’ve finally agreed to be done with the design, we’re in the process of attempting to screen print all of our Save the Dates. And with all of the experience we have (i.e. NONE), this should be easy! We’re hoping to finish these up in the next couple of weeks, so I’ll have some photos and updates for you in the coming weeks.
Have any of you worked with white ink? Or have you screen printed your own invites? Am I going to hate myself by the end of this? I’d love to hear from you!
I could really use some words of wisdom and encouragement before embarking on this daunting DIY :)
