Tuesday 17 January 2012

Printing Your Own Wedding Invitations

Most people try to save money on their wedding invitations, whether this is by designing and printing your own at home, or having them designed for you, then printing them yourself.

It might seem easy to design your own wedding invitation, after all it's just a pretty picture with wording on nice paper or card.  But depending on how comfortable you are with a computer or pencil if you're going to hand draw your art work, you might find it more difficult than you first thought.

There are loads of things to consider when designing your own, such as colours, font choices and invitation size.  A great place to get colour inspiration if you're not sure what you want to use or don't know which colours to combine is a free site called colour lovers.  It provides you with palettes of different colours created by other users for you to think about.  There are also some wedding groups on there that focus on wedding scheme colours.

Another great place to find inspiration for your designs is Zazzle, again this is a place where designers put forward their own designs for you to buy, so don't go copying these designs, just use them to jump start your own creativeness.

One more place for wedding invitation design inspiration is a relatively new site called Pinterest.  This site is by invitation only but if you leave me your email details in the comments section below, I'll send you an invite and you can then look through the invitations already pinned by other members and pin your own finds so you have a design board full of designs that inspire you.

If you find designing your own wedding invitation to much hard work or your worried that your own efforts don't look professional enough, you can still print your wedding invitation at home.  There are many sellers on Etsy who provide customised wedding invitations ready for you to print yourself or take to your local printers.   These customised wedding invitations are priced around £20, so are an affordable alternative if you're just not that creative.

Once your invitations have been designed they need to be printed.  Many chose to print them on their home printer which is fine but ensure that the card stock isn't to thick to go through the paper feeder. Another thing to watch out for is that the ink doesn't smear on the paper.

Monday 9 January 2012

Making your own crystal hair accessories

If you want to save yourself a bit of cash for fancy creating something handmade for your wedding then crystal hair accessories are pretty easy to do with some practice and the right tools.


The tools you will need are wire cutters and needle nose pliers, both available from a craft shop, but if your considering taking up making jewellery as a hobby you might want to buy these in a set.

You'll also need hair grip or pins, metal wire in 0.4mm gauge and crystals that you want to use.

First cut yourself a piece of wire roughly 20cm in length, the longer wire gives you something to grab hold of. Thread the wire between through the gap in the hair grip or pin and wrap it around the top of it at the bend and pull it tight. Wrap at least 3 times. Once the wire is wrapped securely, thread on your crystal and wrap the wire again around the grip another 3 times. Pull this tight, then cut the wire with the wire cutters close as possible to the hair grip. Flatten the cut end of the wire against the hair grip using the needle nose pliers, to complete your crystal hair grip. Repeat for the number of grips that you need.

Monday 2 January 2012

Wedding Wishing Tree

You'll have to excuse the week or so I haven't posted, it's been Christmas and more importantly I took a little time off to give birth to my daughter (who's gorgeous by the way).

Today I thought I would write about wedding wishing trees.  I live in the UK and we don't tend to use this lovely tradition but I bet it will become more popular as the years go by as many American customs tend too.

Instead of a wishing tree we tend to use guest books and it's in these that the wedding guests write the hopes and dreams for the happy couple.

But I like the wedding wishing tree over the guest book for a number of reasons.

  • They make a very pretty wedding decoration
  • You can make it yourself
  • The tags can be incorporated into a memory book with photos of your guests a other momentos from the day.


Here's a video to show you how easy it is to make a wedding wishing tree


If you want to buy the tags for your wishing tree then head over to etsy and check out these wedding wishing tags.