Wedding Week

It's Wedding Week here at Rambling Renovators. Yes, you heard right... no house talk, no reno talk, but lots and lots and lots of DIY. I'm a newlywed only for a few hours longer so hope you folks can indulge me as a prattle on one last time about the day I became Mrs. HandyMan. We're off in New York City enjoying our first anniversary but I hope you'll enjoy these posts while we're off galavanting (I've always loved that word - galavanting - but never find the chance to use it in everyday conversation :) ).


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Today we're talking... Paper Goods! Nothing sets the mood more for a wedding than those invitations and programs and menus that you give to your guests. First though, before we got to work on the paper, we had to decide on the theme for the wedding. Tropical... green&brown... lush... fresh... summery... sunday brunch breezy... relaxed... those are the feelings HandyMan and I wanted to invoke with our wedding. We came up with a look that was "Asian Contemporary" and over the week you'll see how we brought that look to life.




I knew that I wanted to design the stationary myself. Through wedding chat boards like this one and this one, I found a wealth of sources for paper, stock images, fonts and inspiration. We decided we wanted bamboo as a running theme throughout our wedding. I found a great image on istockphoto.com that only cost a few $ and could be used over and over on our invitations, menus, placecards etc.

Now that the "theme" had been set, I let the design for the invitations stew in my brain for a while. A long while, HandyMan will tell you, because I must have showed him at least 37 variations of the invitation or so until I settled on the final one. "Originality" was the key for the invites... I wanted to give our guests something that they had never seen before. Something to whet their appetites. Something to give a glimpse of the wedding to come. Using pocketfolds from

Cardsandpockets.com and my design for the inserts, we continued the Asian Contemporary theme with these fresh and crisp invitations.
With these, our mission was accomplished. Our guests eagerly looked forward to our Sunday daytime wedding. Why Sunday? Why not! Who isn't relaxed and happy on a Sunday morning?

But that was just the beginning of the paper trail. I love stationery and fonts and graphics so I'll admit I may have gone a bit overboard. I whipped together menus, table numbers, a bar drink menu, directional signage, and seat signage. The fabulous Martha even inspired me to make my own accordion-fold programs.



But by far, my favourite paper project were these placecards. Given that there are always last minute seating arrangement changes at weddings, I wanted a placecard where the seat could be assigned at the last minute. These hole-punched cuties are what I came up with. The coloured floral on the top left also indicated meal choice (pink = vegetarian; green = chicken...) so it was multi-functional too :)



After grabbing their placecards, our guests found these favours at their seats... chocolate covered coffee beans in capiz boxes. For the tags, I printed up photos of me and HandyMan on Moo cards and put a thank you message on the back.



And finally, when all was said and done, after the I Do's were traded, the cake was eaten, and the flowers wilted away, I sent off these little Thank You cards. We wrote a message to each of our guests on the cardstock and included one of our Thank You photo cards.




Whew, that's a lot of paper! If you enjoyed that, drop by later this week for the next wedding instalment... DIY decor!