Happy New Year!

Happy 2011 everyone!  It was so nice to take a little break and unplug last week, but I’m slowly easing back into my routine.  I still haven’t really wrapped my head around 2011 yet, have you?  2010 was such a whirlwind and full of transition from start to finish.  I met some of my favorite bloggers (and make new friends) at Alt, moved to a new apartment that feels more like home, and lost my grandmother – all within the first month of 2010.  A winter storm left us with more than 2 feet of snow and kept us housebound for nearly a full week.  A bit later in the year I quit my day job (yay!), started a second blog, and then the months started to fly by even faster.  There are more big changes in store for 2011, but I’m optimistic about the challenges to come.

I’ll be back with some beautiful wedding invitations just a bit later.  But since I didn’t do my usual weekly round-up last week, I thought I’d do a quick round-up to start off the week:

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and New Year!

{image via mary ruffle}

Modern Foil Stamp Wedding Invitations

Dan and Barbara’s wedding invitations combine modern and romantic elements all together in one lovely design.  Dan, a graphic designer, incorporated black and white foil stamp text and wood veneer into the invitation design, along with gorgeous calligraphy details by Mara from Neither Snow.  Love it!

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From Dan:  The invitations were designed around a simple philosophy: present the information in an elegant and understated way, and allow the elegance of the occasion to speak from the moment our guests opened the envelopes.

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The invitations were triple bonded black paper, stamped with black and white foils.  The main invitation and save the dates were bonded with a wood backing – we choose Wenge for the save the dates and curly maple for the invitation.

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Dan worked with AccuColor Plus in Chicago on the invitation printing.  I love the subtle effect of the black foiling on black paper on the invitation enclosures, and the contrast with the white foil stamp text through the rest of the invitation.

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Gorgeous calligraphy on the outer envelopes from Neither Snow:

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Thank you so much Dan!

{image credits: Barbara Mouradian}

Burlap + Twine Invitations

I love seeing different materials incorporated into invitations, whether for weddings, showers, or birthday parties.  So when I received an e-mail from a reader (Hi Brandi!) seeking inspiration for a Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer party, the first thing that popped into my head was burlap!  I wasn’t able to find any photos of invitations printed directly onto burlap, but here are a few images incorporating burlap and twine as lovely accent materials:

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{image by Brandon Kidd via Once Wed}

The wedding invitation above by D*lsh Design for photographer Brandon Kidd features a band of burlap tied around kraft and cotton paper invitation elements. 

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Christine mailed her own wedding invitations (above) in a dark green burlap envelope – such a great idea!

 

twine wedding invitations

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Love the use of twine in the above invitation suite by Bird and Banner

 

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I could totally see these cotton handkerchief invitations from XOWYO being mailed in a burlap inner envelope, or attached to burlap backing.

 

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{erica turner via ruffled}

Hand-stamped burlap accents for a rustic fall wedding.

 

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{gertrude and mabel photography via chewing the cud}

I love fabric pockets for invitations and ceremony programs – burlap could easily be substituted for cotton in these ceremony program pockets from Chewing the Cud for a more rustic feel.

Have any of you used burlap or twine in your invitations?  If so, I’d love to see photos!

{images from their respective sources}

Jen + Dan’s Wedding – Crafting with Rubber Stamps

Hi everyone! I'm Jen with the haystack needle. I'm so happy to be guest blogging this week here on Oh So Beautiful Paper while Nole moves into her new apartment!  I'm a huge fan of OSBP, and there are few things (besides homemade gelato) that I love more than stationery and pretty paper goodness.  To kick off the week, I thought I'd share some details from my wedding. 

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I had so much fun planning and crafting the elements of our wedding — for seven months I was stamping, snipping, and sewing on our living room floor.  Dan and I got married on a farm in Maine (his home state), so I let the natural setting inspire all the details.

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I've always loved skeleton keys, and I liked the idea of having guests pick up a key to find their seat. I organized our 60 guests into seating groups by animals (and the butterfly, my favorite).  These key tags also served as an alternative guestbook.  I made a sign telling everyone to sign the back of their tag, and then my friend Sue-Anne picked them all up.  I have a vintage blue mason jar filled with the key tags now on our dresser.  It's fun to read the messages every once in a while.  By the way, the keys I used were actually wooden skeleton keys I found on Etsy.  I couldn't find a lot of skeleton keys for a good price on eBay, and I liked the idea of wooden keys.

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The table cards were everyday letterpress cards by Pancake & Franks (who also designed our custom wedding invitations, which I'm sharing tomorrow!).  I brought the cards to a local rubber stamp maker who created custom stamps from the images of the cow, horse, pig, bird, butterfly, and rooster on the cards.  Then I stamped river rocks at each place setting to make the seat groupings
clear, since we were using long communal tables rather than separate
round tables.  I loved Stacy Pancake's horseshoe card, so Dan and I used the good luck horseshoe to mark our seats.

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The photo above is of our handmade ceremony programs.  Here's what I used: bakers twine, rubber stamps, faux bois paper, Japanese screw punch, and I printed out the program text on kraft brown paper.

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I like to use my ever-growing collection of rubber stamps whenever possible.  So the stamping didn't stop with the paper.  I bought floursack towels from Kmart and dressed them up with a little pattern using stamps and fabric paint, and we used the printed tea towels at each place setting. (Do not try this with a large wedding!)  In hindsight, I should have figured out how to silkscreen the pattern, which would have saved a ton of time.  After the wedding, the tea towels were a sweet way to say thanks to my friends who were a tremendous help pulling everything together with me.  We went with biodegradable bamboo forks, knives, spoons, and plates — I saved a ton of money on rentals and didn't need to hire a dishwasher. 

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It was blueberry season in Maine in September when we got married.  Early on, we decided our favor should be a food treat and we fell in love with the idea of blueberry jam.  I sampled a bunch of Maine blueberry jams and found them to be too sweet, too jiggly, too pasty, or just not quite right.  Spoon had just debuted their collection of homemade jams, and after sampling their blueberry jam, I knew it was the one.  And it was sweet that Spoon packages their jams in pretty jars  — even the turquoise blue label coincidentally fit in my wedding color palette.  I made paper butterfly tags to dress up the jars.  I love how the butterflies look like they're about to take flight. 

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More details on our wedding tomorrow — including our invitations!  See you soon.  

All photographs by our wedding photographer, Charlotte Jenks Lewis.  She's amazing!

Danielle + Greg’s Vintage Cinema-Inspired Wedding Invitations

So last week was all about music-inspired invitations, and this week I’ve got some totally awesome real wedding invitations inspired by foreign cinema!  Kathryn featured Danielle and Greg’s wedding a few months back, and I was so smitten with her vintage cinema inspiration that I asked Danielle, the talented designer behind Tallu-lah, if she’d be willing to share her invitations and paper ephemera in greater detail.  Lucky for us, Danielle was more than willing to oblige, so let’s get right to it!

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Danielle and Greg’s foreign cinema invitation theme was inspired in part by their wedding venue and in part by their shared love of vintage lettering and illustrations.  With these two ideas they started the creation of a vintage movie themed event:

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From Danielle: Since we’re both in the wedding industry — I work as an event planner for Samantha Smith Productions and Greg is a wedding photographer — we knew we wanted something unique and fun.  After a year and a half of being engaged and looking at venues all over the United States and Mexico, we finally found a place very close to our personalities and home, Foreign Cinema.  More then just one of the best-known restaurants in the city, the venue includes an outside courtyard where movies are shown drive-in-speaker style and a modern art gallery.  The décor is industrial chic meets Northern California.

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Once they settled on their vintage cinema theme and wedding venue, it was time to get to work on their Save the Dates.  To give their guests their first glimpse into the cinema theme of the wedding, Danielle and Greg created a Save the Date in the style of a movie poster:

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We created the look and feel and Hatch Show Print of Tennessee made it come to life though old vintage images and the process of letterpress printing.  We used words on the save the date to give guests the feel that they would be coming to a show.

Danielle’s designs for Tallu-lah are all letterpress printed, and she knew she wanted the wedding invitations to be letterpressed too.  For the invitation design, Danielle and Greg turned to Hello!Lucky to help bring their vintage cinema inspiration to life:

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The rest of the paper goods (invitations, playbill, ceremony programs, cocktail napkins, seating cards/tickets, menu, reception cards and parting gifts, Poco Dolce candy boxes, thank you cards) were created by both Danielle and Eunice Moyle of Hello!Lucky.

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I asked Eunice if she would take on the project of designing for us, I couldn’t think of anyone better to ask — she was the perfect designer for the project and was already a great business friend living in the same town as me, San Francisco.  She out-did herself, they were perfect!

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Once designed, my stationery company, Tallu-lah, printed the invites on over-sized, extra thick paper and included special details like a hand drawn map of San Francisco by calligrapher Mo Seder, a list of the top 10 things to do in San Francisco, hand stamped RSVP envelopes, and customized postage stamps – all assembled in a glassine sleeve packaged in a star-studded lined and letterpressed envelope.

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Other vintage movie items were added into the wedding like truffled popcorn before the ceremony and “hooray flags” for each guest to wave when Danielle and Greg walked back down the aisle at the end of the ceremony:

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I love that Danielle and Greg carried their cinema theme through to the escort cards – which were designed to look like vintage movie tickets and then hung for guests to find on their way to the reception:

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Danielle and Greg printed cocktail napkins to match the flow of their wedding, from the ceremony (“The Show”) in the outside courtyard, to the cocktail reception (“Intermission”) to the dinner and after-party (“The Final Act- It’s A Wrap!”) in two separate lounges – one for Mr. Piché and another Mrs. Piché – that the newlyweds created:

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Mr. Piché’s lounge (in the courtyard) is where our guests could watch “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” on cozy furniture and snack on movie treats from the “concession stand” or mini cones with salted caramel and lavender ice cream (Ed note: yum!) – while singing along to the live music of Syd and Matt York. For guests wanting to dance, Mrs. Pichés lounge (in the art gallery) offered a hip local DJ, as well as the opportunity to watch “Grease” and try treats from the dessert bar including a wedding cake covered in 300 truffles, Poco Dolce chocolate tastings accompanied with port, and an array of French macarons baked by the chef.

The vintage cinema theme was also incorporated into these reception cards, which were provided on each dinner table and contained both the menu and details for each lounge:

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As a final touch, favors from Poco Dolce chocolates packaged in a little paper box printed with the saying all old movies end with “And they lived happily ever after.  The End.”  Such a nice touch!

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Do you all love Danielle’s invitations and wedding stationery as much as I do?  I love the foreign cinema theme – and both Danielle and Hello!Lucky did an amazing job in translating the inspiration into a beautiful design.  For more photos from Danielle and Greg’s wedding, be sure to check out their feature on Snippet and Ink right here – and a huge thanks to Danielle for sharing her wedding stationery with us!