TNWC Real Brides: Nik tells us about their DIY wedding invitations and building a wedding website
Charlie
Welcome to our second TNWC Real Brides guest post of the week! Today we’ve got the lovely Nik to tell us all about her beautiful DIY wedding invitations and how they created their wedding website. I’m a little bit jealous because I love the style of Nik and Chris’ invitations and think they fit so well with their coastal farm wedding.
If you’ve not read Nik’s first few guest posts, you should first read about her plans for their relaxed coastal farm wedding, and her experience of choosing an ethical wedding dress.
One of the first jobs we tackled upon choosing our chosen wedding venue was our invitations. Our announcement of plans for a summer wedding was immediately met with panic from several relatives and friends about potential holiday clashes. Getting the invites out six months in advance gave everyone plenty of time to plan their hols around the wedding, and has meant that we’ve only had one clash resulting in absent friends on the day.
Our wedding celebrations will be split into two very different parts: a very small ceremony with 25 close family and friends on the farm where we live in Pembrokeshire; and a big all day reception two days later in our home county of West Yorkshire. This gives us the best of both worlds: a relaxed, intimate ceremony where we can focus on the day and what it means, but also the opportunity to celebrate our marriage with our wider network of friends, which is very important to us.
Ceremony Invites
We planned to DIY our invites from the word go: we wanted them to be very personal, I wanted them printed on ‘green’ paper and Chris is a graphic/web designer so it seemed silly not to take advantage of that! However, in the end, we decided to buy our ceremony invites ‘off the rack’ as we realised that we just couldn’t print them at home without compromising on the quality and appearance. Lela of doodlelove was fantastic and worked with us to create a complementary design to match our theme, even incorporating the little chicken illustration that has sort of become our invitation mascot!
Reception Invites
Moving to Pembrokeshire last August fulfilled a long-held dream of living by the sea for us, and we have already amassed quite a collection of photographs of the area. Early on we decided that having one of our own photos of Pembrokeshire on the front of our reception invites was a total no-brainer. We didn’t realise how impossible they would be to choose between…
…thankfully, I had a brain-wave. At a blogging conference I’d attended last year, I was handed a business card from another blogger, and had noticed that each of her cards had a different image on the front. Enquiries revealed that Moo offer this service as standard, and so the business card wedding invite was born! In the end we chose seven images ? including one of our favourite hen, Mrs Dorothy Brown, relaxing in the wheelbarrow outside our front door – which were printed on 100% recycled card. I’m so glad we didn’t have to choose between our photos – it has provided a great talking point for our guests!
The Wedding Website
We kept the information on the invites to a minimum ? to avoid using tons of paper and because many of the details were undecided when the invitations were sent out. Instead, I built a wedding website (feel free to nosey around it here!) using the Getting Married software.
The site has coordinated all our RSVPs, allowed guests to see where local accommodation is located, will handle our gift list and also allowed us to include a little section on the background of our relationship and how we met. The different images on the reception invites are also up there, so that people can read a bit about the places they feature and see the alternative versions of the invitations. Best of all it was completely free to use!
Making our own wedding invitations was a great way to get a completely unique, personalised invite at a fraction of the cost, and we’ve had so many lovely comments from our guests about them. The website has been a godsend, and is being continually updated and amended.
However, if you are considering DIYing your invitations, I would caution that you really mustn’t underestimate the effort and time required to put them together – printer issues, time fiddling with designs and deciding on layout, getting quotes for printing, choosing paper and envelopes, sourcing stamps to match your colour scheme… etc. etc.! It took us two weeks working every night after work to get all our invites out, so it was no mean feat. But we’re very proud of the end result 🙂
Don’t you just love Nik and Chris’ farm themed wedding stationery? I really like the extra details like the calligraphy style addressed envelopes and the chicken mascot. Next week we’ll be hearing the latest from TNWC Real Brides Myfanwy and Sarah.
Images: (1) Illustration by Izzy Burton; (2 – 6) Brides own pictures
Categories: Planning
Tags: DIY project > farm wedding > real bride Nik > tnwc real brides > wedding invitations
predator | Little House In Town on 28. May, 2013
[…] are certainly grieving our departed, which include Mrs Dorothy Brown (who featured on our wedding invites and was Chris’s favourite), Bianca (a cuddly pure white hen) and Pebble 2 (a very […]