Wedding DIYs #1 Paper Stuff

Mitch and I have been married for 6 months :) In a lot of ways it feels like longer but at the same time I can remember every bit of our wedding as if it was last week. To mark this mini milestone, and because all the "thank you" cards have finally be written, I thought it's be fun to share, in a little more detail, some of the stuff we made for our v.DIY wedding...

So, first up is a little bit about all the paper stuff. (I think the traditional term is 'wedding stationary' but that to me sounds like pencils, notebooks etc none of which was present at the wedding. Incidentally, I really struggled with all the "traditional" wedding terms/ettiquette/order in which stuff had to happen - we kinda just did whatever we thought seemed cool in the end.)

Save the Dates
We used Moo.com to print these. They had lots of different options (we opted for the postcard layout) including the ability to upload your own designs (in our case two v.simple geometric designs that I created in InDesign. The more you order the cheaper each indivual item costs so we opted for 50 which meant we had a few spare that I can now add to our 'wedding book'. The delivery was quick and the quality of the postcards was excellent. Really can't fault moo.com.

Invites
Because I'm pendantic and got, let's say, really into the DIY aspect of the wedding (read: controlling), I knew that I wanted to design the invites myself. Mitch, being the most patient and understanding person ever, let me get on with it. I say, let me get on with it but it's actually my dad who brought them to life. He took my original drawings, edited them in Illustrator (v.handy having a graphic designer around) so that they worked on the paper size we'd chosen, drew the map, laid out all the information AND got them printed. They didn't cost a thing in terms of cash but I know that a lot of his time went into them and I couldn't have been be more grateful or happy with the finished thing :)

Seating Plan
Referring back to my *ahem* enthusiam for DIY-ing as much as possible, I was v.keen to make the seating plan and had a v.clear design in my head. We'd already decided to name the tables after places we'd visited on our trip to New York (where Mitch proposed) so all I had to do was to draw a little illustration to go with each table. I used to draw all the time before uni but it's one of my hobbies that's been neglected for years. The wedding was the perfect excuse to pick up my pen and pencil again. It was a pretty laborious task, mostly because the piece of paper was huge and tracing the designs took aaaaages, but I really enjoyed making it.

Thank yous
Our 'Thank You' cards featured my illustrations from the invites and were, like the 'save the dates', in postcard format. Again, my dad v.kindly put them together and had them printed along with a photo of me and Mitch. Seeing as how straightforward they were to make I really had no excuse for how long it took me to send them out. Apologies friends and family if you're reading this, we are rubbish.