Save the date invitations

I have had such good fun recently designing some save the date proofs for a bride, who has a great colour scheme of coral, grey and yellow. I love couples that go for a bright colour schemes, and this colour scheme was no exception. The coral and yellow really complemented each other and the grey providing the calming influence to make sure that the designs didn't veer towards being a bit too loud. I played it very safe at my own wedding, choosing ivory, blue and grey as my main colours, but I think if you choose your colours well, they can look really eye-catching and stunning.

For these designs, the bride sent me through some examples of the types of save the dates/ invites they liked and the type of fonts. It was clear from these that this couple favoured a design with a slight vintage feel to them and importantly the font needed to be the perfect combination of handwritten and italic.

When I am designing I always make sure that the proofs I design have a couple of designs that are at the extremes within the brief to see whether the bride chooses something different when they see it, as it's always good just to make sure that we are on the right lines with the design.

For the first two designs, I followed the brief pretty much to the letter and included vintage frame elements, handwritten style fonts and incorporated the three key colours.

Simple frame design

Coral circle frame design

The third design was a very modern style design, that did not have vintage elements apart from in the italic font chosen. This design was all about the striking italic date design that will instantly catch the eye and attention of the guests, and worked perfectly with the coral colour.

striking italic design

The final design, was a more elegant design in a 5'x5' square style, which included vintage style graphics as a border at the bottom of the invite,. The writing on this one was less handwritten and more of a modern italic style font. This design would look great printed using letterpress or thermographic printing. The letterpress, would press the coral regalia print into the card, whereas thermographic printing basically lifts the print off the page slightly so if you ran your fingers across it you would be able to feel the print. Thermographic printing creates a stunning glossy style of printing, that it's hard to replicate with other types of printing. Both types of printing come at a premium though which is why a lot of wedding couples opt for digital printing as it is more affordable.

Coral regalia border design

Would love to hear which design is your favourite, so please let me know

Back soon
L xx

I am on the hunt for an old, distressed looking wooden ladder!!

Let me explain why....

About a year ago, Adrian and I redecorated our irritatingly shaped and pretty small box room so it went from a plain magnolia space that looked like this (sorry for the poor photo)

 

 

 

 

 and ended up looking like this...

 

 

Adrian and I (more of him and less of me!) made the bed and the bookcase from scratch so we’re pretty proud of ourselves J.

I’ll digress slightly for a minute just to tell you a bit more about this bed. When we first moved into this house we set a desk up in the room, and then piled all our boxes into the recess in the room but it was a really bad use of space and looked pretty dreadful if I’m honest. So last Christmas, as I lay in bed with a chest infection, I started to sketch out some ideas for what we could do – much to the delight of my husband who got greeted with these ideas every night when he arrived home from work! I ignored the ideas that our house builder had for this room, which was in one word ‘horrific!’

 Anyway during these searching sessions, I found this day bed on pottery barn and thought it would look great in our room and would provide us with an additional small bed for when my friend’s come to stay with their children and when my little niece is old enough to come and stay.

 

 

However we couldn’t afford the money for the bed as it was a whopping $899 plus shipping and import tax!! I then found this amazing site call ana white (click HERE to go to her site) that shows you how to make specific bits of wooden furniture from scratch.

So off Mr W and I went to the timber yard up the road and hey presto, a little bit of drilling, swearing and painting later – we had a base for the bed!!! I think it cost us about £60 to make the base for the bed!

 

 

 

Add a mattress, some baskets and some bedding and cushions later and we had our bed!!

 

Inspired by making this bed we then moved onto making a bookcase that would fit the alcove within this room. Mr W turned into my very own handy Andy over the couple of weekends where we were doing this :-) The bookcase looks a bit of a jumble at the moment, but at least the picture gives you a feel for how the room looks.

Ever since we completed this woodwork class, I have been looking for 2 things to finish off the room:

1.  A wooden small, distressed looking step so that little people that use this bed when they come to stay can get in it.
 
2. An old looking ladder that can form a magazine rack so we can sit on this bed and catch up on some reading.

Here is my inspiration for the ladder...

 

 And for the step....

 

This blog post will frustrate my dad no end as he can’t understand why I would want to fill my house with old things! But I think they will look brilliant in this room and really finish the room off. So far though I have drawn a blank, so keep your eyes peeled people as I am becoming desperate…

Once I find these I need to move onto finding a small table and a lamp.  I love this side table from cox and cox – nudge nudge wink wink Mr W!!!

 

 

If anyone finds me that ladder, I will quite literally love them forever!

Be back soon

L xx

Our own wedding decor

For our wedding in 2011, it was my first foray into the world of event design and invitations. The first thing we booked after we had got engaged, was our reception venue. For as long as I can remember I have been on walks through the grounds of Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire with my family and had always dreamt of what it would feel like to be lucky enough to get married at Brocket Hall, and to have your photo taken on the bridge looking back at the golf club and Brocket Hall. So when my parents said that we could have our reception there, I was completely thrilled. The golf club venue provides an absolutely stunning backdrop of a wonderful golf course.

I love all things vintage inspired, and desperately wanted to incorporate this theme into our wedding, especially as I had found a wedding dress with vintage style lace detailing. The venue did not lend itself perfectly to vintage style decor as it was a very light and pretty modern building, but where there is a will there is a way!

For my flowers, I was 100% inspired by Finch and Thistle Design. Rachel, who owns Finch and Thistle was in my form at school until her parents moved to America and I have watched her career and amazing skills with all things floral and decor from a far through the wonders of facebook for the last few years. I printed off pictures of bouquets that Rachel had designed for her brides and gave them to my florist so that I could try and explain what I liked as I have absolutely no idea what any flower is called - apart from maybe a rose and a peony!! The ladies that did my flowers were fab and they created the following bouquets for me and my bridesmaids. Thank you Rachel for your fab inspiration and for all the advice from a far!

At the reception venue we were going to tie in my husband's love of classic books into the decor, so we started this association through using books for the ring bearer to carry the rings on rather than a cushion. William, our page boy, did an amazing job helped by a bit of bribery from the best man (who was helped by William's mum!).

At our reception venue, we use the marquee part of the venue that formed the drinks reception area to set up some of our vintage pieces, which included a vintage typewriter for the guest book, an old suitcases that were used for our table plan and card box, and a photo booth. I found some small, blue, apothecary bottles on etsy and was thrilled that my florist used them!

 

 

 

The photo booth, and the best men, that carried the frames and camera around with them as the night went on, created some of the best photographs of the whole day. I love the one above of 3 of my closest friends!

Having spent many a wedding hobbling around once my feet start to ache from my uncomfortable shoes, although that's not as frequent nowadays that I'm married to a shorter husband (!) I also provided the ladies with flip flops for their tired feet!

For the tables in the marquee we had centrepieces of flowers in urns. You would not believe how far and wide my mum and I searched to find these urns but I'm so glad we found them as they really helped with the vintage vibe.

For the centrepieces on the tables in the main reception area, we really wanted to incorporate my husbands love of old classic books, along with use rustic centrepieces, so we alternated the centrepieces amongst the tables. My lovely friend Helen, who is an extremely talented baker, made my wedding cake for me and made these fabulous table name gingerbreads, which we tied with a tag that had a message from my godson, William.

 

Helen matched the lace detail of my dress to the detailing that she created on the cake - very clever and it looked and tasted great!!



Hope that gives you a flavour of the decor that we used for our special day. It would be remiss of me to write this blog article without thanking my friends that turned up in the pouring rain, the night before the wedding, to help us set up at 11pm! That really is beyond the call of duty and we were very grateful for their help.

I will leave you with two final photos - after 29 years of waiting - I got my photo on the bridge :-)

Back soon

L x

Wedding photographs courtesy of Spencer at Repartage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello World - my first ever blog post!

Hi everyone, I am so excited to be starting a blog, as it will give me a great place to chat through where I get my design inspiration from and to show you some more examples of my work, that I can't always fit onto my website.

One of my closest friends recently got married and asked me to design her table plan for her. I asked her if she wanted a traditional card table plan or if she would be happy for me to design something a bit more unique. Fortunately she said I could design something more creative, and I could hardly contain my excitement. Sophy's wedding reception was going to be quite informal at at a restaurant that had exposed brickwork so I wanted to design something that would help complement that theme. I had seen some examples of table plans were people use old glass paned doors for table plans, like the one below.

 

I knew that this wouldn't work for Sophy's wedding though as there was going to be limited light within the venue. So I had an idea to rip out the insides of a vintage style picture frame/ mirror and interweave twine throughout it to create a mesh effect, that we could then attach the table plan to. So I searched for a mirror and found the perfect one. I then set about using my staple gun and some grey twine and created the mesh. I was really keen that the wording would help to reinforce the informal theme of the wedding, so decided to use the title 'bums on seats.' I used rustic kraft card to print the table details and found a font that worked billiantly to make it look hand written.

 

The table plan was to be a surprise for me friends Sophy and Tim, so I then anxiously waited to the wedding day to hope that the wording wouldn't cause offence but fortunately they loved it - phew! Take a look at the final results below. Hope you like it!

 

 

 

 

 

Since I published a photo of this table plan on my facebook page I have been contacted by several people asking me to design their table plan for their day which is great!! I am having a great fun thinking of ideas for their day and can't wait to show them to you on this page over the next few weeks.

 

Be back soon

 

L x