Our Wedding Stationery

Today, I'm going to talk about our wedding stationery.

I'm using the word stationery to refer to the entire category of our Save the Date, Wedding Invitation, and Wedding Program.  There are many ways you can do these things:  order them, hire someone else to make them, buy kits, or design yourself.  Well, if you've been reading my blog for any amount of time at all, I bet you can guess which one I did.

We made them all - from the save the dates to the programs.  My reasoning for choosing this route was twofold:  I wanted the invitations to be my my design, and I thought it would be cheaper.  Six ink cartridges down the road, I'm not sure if it was necessarily cheaper - but I definitely got the design I wanted along with lots of inserts.  

I'll tell more stories along the way, but let's get to pictures first!

SAVE THE DATE

First is our Save the Date - which was by far the easiest!  One day the summer after we were engaged, I forced my loving mother to go out in the scorching Oklahoma evening heat to take pictures of us in random places.  We started by an old shed down the street from my parent's house that had vines growing all over it, which had captured my attention for some time.  It had lots of bees too.  That is where our picture came from - however we had an entire other adventure trying to get more photos...but this one just turned out to be the right one.  

I used Photoscape and Gimp to edit the photo to my liking, and then I simply added the fonts on the picture in Photoscape.  Then we just ordered 4x6 prints to send out to our guests through Shutterfly.  They have really great quality prints, in my opinion.

WARNING:  If you are planning your wedding in the year prior to when you wedding actually will take place, don't forget to double check the year when you start printing/order things.  Take it from the girl who ordered 100 photos with the wrong year printed on them.

Have I ever mentioned I love Photoscape and Gimp?  Both are completely free photo editing software, and I absolutely love them.  Go download it.  Now.  You won't get a virus, take my word.  I've had them for years.

WEDDING INVITATION

Next, I'll introduce to you our wedding invitation!  I spent lots of time, hard work, and ink on this little detail.  Besides our save the date, it is the first formal impression our guests will get of our wedding.  These were designed almost entirely with InDesign.

Our invitation had the main invitation card, with two inserts.  Each piece was double sided, so really I designed six pages.  While I tried to keep information and style equally a part of each other, I also wanted to have sides where the information was the simplicity of the design on that page that was uniquely 'us.'  

Above is the main wedding invitation card.  This is front and back, so imagine that the right image is on the back of the left image.  On the front, I used a simple scroll vector image I found online for free (good luck if you go searching for them, genuinely pretty ones for free are hard to find!).  Inside the scroll vector, I used the verse, "I have found the one whom my soul loves."  

On the other side was our information page.  Again, it is adorned and organized using vector images and two separate fonts.

Next, we sent an RSVP card that was not intended to be sent back, just informing guests about our online RSVP.  

One side of the card featured our "Coffee Seal" as I call it, which I designed in Gimp, Photoshop, and InDesign.  The informative side used the same fonts and vector images from the main invitation card.

Since our wedding was somewhat far for most of our guests, we decided it would be best to include a map.  Our wedding venue did not have an actual address, plus we wanted guests to park in a specific area to ride a shuttle, so we wrote out all this information to send with their invitation.  Most of them read it.  ;)

The map was not an easy task, as I couldn't seem to find a website to get that professional looking map you often see in invitations.  I traced a google map with my lovely interior design markers on trash paper, scanned the image in, traced it in photoshop, and added clip art to represent landmarks.

HOWEVER, just weeks after I went through the trouble to do this, I found THE BEST wedding invitation map tool.  It is called maps.stamen.com.  It has multiple what I would call 'map filters' that can make your map look like anything you want.  For weddings, I'd suggest using the toner map.  Check out my wedding location on their map!

CONDENSED INVITATION

This may sound odd, but we also created a condensed invitation.  It was more like a flyer, with all the information from the actual invitation condensed to fit on both sides of a half a page.  We wanted to have an open invitation to those at our church (it is a very small church), but the trouble is that Tyler and I are both horrible with names.  Most people we are friends with we at least know their first name, but we don't always know their significant other, or even their last name.  I'd sent our groomsman on a mission to get all this information, but he gave me a list with more first names!  

I made a decision to just invite everyone flier style and to not mess with names, because it was stressing me out.  And I think that's okay.  Our friends we know by first name basis are still great friends, so I don't feel bad for making this decision.

The first page is exactly the same as our information card of the original invitation.

The second side condensed all the information from the inserts to fit on the back side.

WEDDING PROGRAM

Last, but not least is our program!  I designed this mostly in Microsoft Word as most of it was very linear and text based.  I wanted to include some fun and interactive information, so it was a bit long!

For our front cover, I again used our coffee seal.  If you work hard on something, keep using it!

Our Introductions Page and Timeline

Reception Info Page and Letter to Our Guests

Photo Promo Page and I Spy Game

While You're Waiting Crossword Puzzle

Creating all of our wedding stationery was a lot of work, but definitely worth it in my opinion.  I learned to use some software better, everything was original and made by us.