Rustic Ranch Wedding Invitations

I loved this wedding in the latest issue of MS Weddings, but I’m so glad that Maggie from Eat, Drink, Marry tracked down the online photos of this beautiful wedding.  The bride, Satoko, created all the wedding stationery, including the invitation with ranch-inspired graphics of roosters and cows with perforated RSVP card and a screenprinted cloth invitation with red stitching. The invitations were enclosed in a chipboard envelope. So pretty!

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The matching favor bags were also screenprinted and contained recipes used at the wedding.  Handmade paper flowers (from kits available at Paper-Source) also matched the wedding stationery.

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Head on over to Eat, Drink, Marry for more photos from this rustic ranch wedding.

{images from MS Weddings via Eat, Drink, Marry}

Erica + Patrick’s Modern Folk Art Wedding Invitations

I am SO excited to be able to share these invitations with you!  This invitation set is one of my all time favorites – I literally had to resist the urge to do a complete re-design of my own invitations when I saw them.  Erica of the lovely blog thoughtful day had an absolutely beautiful destination wedding in Jamaica this past May, and her invitations perfectly captured the design aesthetic for her wedding.  Erica was kind enough to send over a few additional photos of her invitations and other stationery elements:

Invite
{the main invitation}

Wknd_itinerary
{the weekend itinerary enclosure}

Envelopment
{envelopes from Paper-Source with letterpress tags}

Envelope_liners
{liners for the external envelopes}

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The image above served as the design inspiration for Erica’s wedding stationery – you can see clearly how the inspiration translated into the actual invitation and Save the Date design:

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{the final, printed Save the Dates – I’m completely in love with the sewn-on patterned backing!}

After her wedding, Erica posted a few pieces of advice for other brides, including this very useful tidbit:

Pick your colors. Then pick your inspiration. I knew my color story before I knew anything else, it helped set the tone and feel of what I wanted our wedding to be. Light, fun, and whimsical. Above is the cover of a vintage American folk art book and to the right is our save the date artwork, it set the tone for the rest of the stationery suite.

You can also see how these design elements were carried over into the RSVP card, thank-you cards, and place cards:

Rsvp
{RSVP card}

Thank_you {thank-you cards}

ThoughtfulDay3{place cards}

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The lemon centerpiece from Rebecca Thuss in the upper left served as the basic inspiration for Erica’s wedding color scheme and lemon theme, inspiring many of the details at the wedding.  You can see how the lemon theme continues with the lemon drop favors and other wedding details:

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Lemon_drops

Thanks so much for sharing your gorgeous wedding stationery Erica!  If you haven’t already, you can see more from Erica’s beautiful wedding on thoughtfulday.  Erica will also be launching her own line of wedding invitations in January, which will include both custom work and her own line of new designs.  Erica will be back in touch when her new site goes live – and I can’t wait to see her new designs!

Check out the Designer Rolodex for more tal­ented wed­ding invi­ta­tion design­ers and the real invi­ta­tions gallery for more wedding invitation ideas!

{all images by Erica of thoughtfulday}

Wedding Menu Card Ideas

I love the idea of providing menus for guests at a wedding.  Your guests will appreciate knowing what they’re eating, and it’s a great way of continuing the design elements from your invitations or your wedding theme/style.  And even if you don’t have the time or budget for a menu at every place setting, you could easily display one or two per table or next to the food for a buffet-style reception.  So I thought I’d round up a few of my favorite menu ideas for those of you in need of a bit of menu inspiration:

Menu - MSWeddings
Of course, you can’t go wrong with these templates from Martha…


Also from Martha, a tutorial on a clever way to combine place cards and menu stands

These fortune-teller menus were used by Mrs. Peacock for her wedding

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Luckily, Vintage Glam blog created a template for these menus, which you can find and download here

Smp_menu

I love this idea of framing your menus on top of patterned fabric or paper, found via Style Me Pretty

Chewingcudmenu

Viola from Chewing the Cud incorporated a fake quiz into her menus for fun twist

For a garden wedding, consider displaying your menus in wire stands next to your centerpiece arrangements. Menus can either be displayed on each guest table for a sit-down dinner, as done by Tara from In this instance (above)…

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…or can be displayed next to the food for buffet or food-station style receptions, like I did for my wedding (photo by Punam Bean)

More wire inspiration from this wedding via MS Weddings

A vintage-inspired menu from serendipity

These two menus above – a vintage-inspired hand-written menu from RubyPR and a calligraphed menu from Brides – both found via Snippet & Ink are a great way to bring beautiful handwriting into the reception (just make sure your guests can read the handwriting!). If you don’t have the budget for calligraphy, just ask a friend (or a few) with good or unique handwriting to help out

The menu above (via Tec Petaja) would be easy to recreate using a Gocco or rubber stamps from Paper Source – the text could be printed on your home printer on Paper Source card stock.
{images via their respective sources}

Wedding Invitations — Michael Fusco Design

I’m so glad that everyone loved Mike & Emma’s invitations as much as I did, but you may not know that they weren’t Mike’s first set of invitations. Mike is a talented graphic designer and runs an eponymous design studio called Michael Fusco Designs and I’m excited to share some of his other wedding invitation work with you today.

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Two-color floral-inspired letterpress invitations

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Screen printed invitations with a bird motif

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Save the Date postcards

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More floral-inspired letterpress invitations

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And these fun, bright orange invitations with a detachable RSVP card.

Mike also does some really amazing poster design:

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Magnetic Fields tour poster

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Blue Ox Reading Series screenprinted posters

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David Berkeley screenprinted poster

You can see all these and more here on the MFD website. Mike and Emma are currently on tour with the Magnetic Fields for a few weeks, but you can also follow their personal blog airplanes.donuts.distortion.

{image credits: michael fusco design}