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