Oh So Beautiful Paper

Archive for October, 2009

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!  Aside from Halloween festivities, I'll be busy working on the second half of the 2010 calendar round-up and pulling together more holiday goodies to share with you next week!  But in the meantime…

…a few fun things from the week:

• I'm so inspired by the photographs from Jane's trip home to Ireland – such a magical landscape!
• Cute library card business cards on Simple + Pretty.
• Beautiful styling work from Shana Faust, a former deputy style editor at Martha Stewart Weddings.
• A must-read post for any brides: this list of questions to ask your wedding photographer before signing a contract on Elizabeth Anne Designs. Speaking from personal experience, you don't want to overlook any of these important details!
• I've fallen completely in love with these dresses (particularly the plaid!) from Lauren Moffatt via The City Sage.
• Don't forget to check out this week's real invitations: a gorgeous yellow + gray apothecary-inspired design and a Jackson Hole wood veneer suite.
• For those of you on Twitter, you'll have noticed the introduction of a new function called "lists" – which both allows you to organize people (whether you follow them or not) by a category of your choosing and, by checking out other people's lists, discover new people to follow.  So if you're looking for some fun new people to follow on Twitter, here are a few of my lists that you might want to check out:
• Paper professionals: A list of anyone in the stationery industry, including invitation designers, gift wrap, letterpress printers, and more.
• Letterpress: A sub-set of the paper professionals list, with a particular focus on letterpress printers and designers.
• Weddings: A mix of talented wedding industry professionals and wedding bloggers, each with a unique perspective and full of wedding inspiration.  
• Interior and lifestyle blogs: A list of people who inspire me on a daily basis, with a particular focus on interiors, fashion, food, and just living a good life.   

Also, for any engaged couples in the DC area, I'll be speaking at an event called the Not So Big Wedding next Sunday, November 8, in Potomac, MD:

The event is organized by the folks who manage my wedding venue, Woodlawn Manor, and I'll be speaking as part of a panel of recent newlyweds.  If you're in the area, I hope you'll swing by and say hello! 

{image credit: Happy Cavalier}

Artist Karen O'Leary creates map papercuts; she's done New York and Paris so far, and is working on London.  Each one takes months to complete.  Simply amazing.  

She also takes custom orders via her Etsy shop.

{image credits: Karen O'Leary, found via paper tastebuds and The Best Part}

Good morning everyone!  Are you all ready for the weekend and, more importantly, Halloween?  I am!  But before you all start running off in a candy-induced haze, I’ve got one final Halloween-inspired design to share with you.  This time, it’s Halloween-inspired letterpress Save the Dates from Haute Papier:

So fun!

By the way, my apologies to those of you who read via RSS feeders.  For some reason yesterday’s posts didn’t show up in Google Reader until really late in the evening, but hopefully whatever glitch prompted the delay won’t happen again today!

{image credits: Haute Papier}

These wedding invitations are a wonderful reminder that even a simple design – in this case involving a few hand-carved linoleum stamps – can achieve an absolutely beautiful result:

Not that I’ll ever renounce my love for letterpress, but I love seeing linocuts used to create a wedding invitation.  These invitations were lovingly handmade by the groom’s brother – check out the full story over on FPO.

{image credits: David Senior via FPO}

I was absolutely thrilled when Kathleen sent over this apothecary-inspired invitation suite that she recently designed for a medical student bride.  The entire suite just fits together beautifully - from the marigold and gray color palette to the beautiful vintage-inspired graphics and font choices.  I love the way Kathleen translated the bride’s background and inspiration sources into the invitation design, so let’s take a closer look:

From Kathleen: Anna came to me with a vision of apothecary inspired wedding invitations. She is currently a medical student and was inspired by a vintage pharmaceutical labels. I was beyond excited for the opportunity to design her invitations – the direction was right up my alley.  She was currently using marigold and brown as her color palette and her husband-to-be really loved the idea of letterpress printed invitations. So those were the parameters I was working within.

Along with using vintage prescription labels for inspiration I thumbed through an old medical book for additional imagery.  I came across a vintage line drawing of veins and thought it was perfect. When I gave Anna a first edit of the design she loved it as well – she especially liked that the veins also translated as branches, as her fiance proposed to her under a tree.

Overall, I wanted to pair organic imagery with refined and ornate elements; to balance the flourishy script typeface with a straight forward serif; to make the marigold pop by coupling it with a sophisticated grey.

So gorgeous!  Kathleen’s use of unusual design elements – like the veins! – in an otherwise traditional wedding invitation design are a perfect match for the bride’s background and initial inspiration.  This is definitely one of the coolest invitations I’ve seen recently – thanks so much to Kathleen for sharing them with us!

{image credits: Kathleen Shannon}