brown card Archives - The Natural Wedding Company

Blog: brown card

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Fern’s ‘how to’ guide for the pretty envelopes she made for her bird and wildflower inspired wedding stationery

Charlie

I have just the loveliest post today from TNWC Real Bride Fern, who has not only made the most heavenly bird and wildflower inspired wedding stationery (and with my favourite brown craft card featuring!), but she has put together an easy-to-follow ‘how to’ guide for how she made the pretty envelopes. Plus she’s also shared details of how she created her different wedding stationery items.

I just know you are going to love this wedding stationery and it’s beautiful little details. If you are on the hunt for eco-friendly materials to make items for your wedding, do check out our DIY Resources section of the directory for a great selection of businesses that we love.

>> View Fern and Dominic’s woodland bird and country flower inspired wedding here <<

How to guide for pretty envelopes

It is always lovely to receive special parcels and post by mail, and wedding invitations can tell you so much about a wedding. Most of the weddings we have been to, couples have handmade their invitations and I never considered doing my invites any other way, but I really wanted my wedding invitations to have a wow factor as soon as they land through the letter box. So it was clear very quickly that I was going to make my envelopes as well.

I have included a ‘how to’ guide for making envelopes below, but I will tell you about my other stationary first.

DIY Floral Envelopes

Full ‘how to’ guide below!

Invitations, save the dates and RSVPs

I designed all the stationary myself in Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Word, inspired by my finds on Pinterest. As I had decided that my envelopes would hold lots of colour it meant that I could keep my invitations more simple.

The fonts were Segeo Script used for our names on the save the dates and the rest of stationary we only used Traditional Arabic but varied use in all capitals or italics. The save the dates I made in Publisher by using the layout guides to divide the page into 8. I did for the RSVPs in Word; it is do-able but a lot fiddlier. I printed them on A4 and then cut them up with a guillotine.

The card for the invitations I found in a local shop with 10 brown kraft and 10 white sheets in. The design of my invites was dictated by this and its size. These were designed in Microsoft Word by customising the page size, even the map on the details.

We decided to trim all the corners to tie in with the envelopes, hole punch and tie together with ribbon. I then also made an afternoon invitation in the same way by customising the page size to A5 and then putting amended details inside. I printed everything at home on my own printer. It has cost around £35 for everything, not including postage, but I still have things left over for other projects.

Charlie

Rustic postcard save the dates with stamped lettering on recycled brown card

Charlie

Oooh I do love a great but simple idea, and this one is just downright fab. I know there is a huge following for rustic brown recycled wedding stationery on this blog (there’s lots of you after my own heart and I love it), so I’m pretty sure this design will interest a few of you.

Designed by the very talented Allie Ruth, this is a postcard sized save the date, very simply stamped on one side with the words ‘Save the Date’, and on the back the basic details such as date and place, along with space for your guests address and a stamp. The white lace motifs were also stamped on.

What’s brilliant, is that Allie Ruth has a fab Etsy shop where you can buy that lovely ‘Save the Date’ stamp, complete with arrow struck heart, plus she also does custom address stamps should you be looking for a new ‘Mr and Mrs’ style return address stamp.

Charlie

Rustic shabby chic wedding stationery with brown card, lace and luggage tags

Charlie

Some of my favourite emails are from you lovely readers, sending me pictures of your wedding stationery that has been inspired by my own wedding invitations or save the dates. Today I get to share with you Hollie’s wedding stationery, which was also inspired by ours, with a few tweaks and her own stamp on it.

She combined our two ideas, turning her wedding invitations into a larger version of our sealed save the dates. I love this idea, I can imagine it would be lovely to receive one of these in the post and to unfold it.

Charlie

Photobooth and brown luggage tag wedding invitations and how you can make your own

Charlie

If you don’t want to do anything too complicated for your wedding invitations then this idea might be perfect for you, whilst still being fun and personal to you as a couple. A photobooth style strip of pictures (with details on the back) and a brown luggage tag fastened together with string.

Making the photobooth style pictures

Both these items could be printed at home – there are lots of photo programmes that allow you to make collages like these (I like Photoscape which is free to download), so you could take some pictures and put them into a collage to create a photobooth style strip without having to leave home. This would enable you to easily print details onto the back of the photos too.

Creating the luggage tags

Brown luggage tags come in all sizes so you could find the right size for you and simply stamp a message like they have done here onto the front. If you wanted to include more details printed directly onto the luggage tag, then you can print onto recycled brown card (available from some of these businesses) then cut them out and trim the corners to make them appear like a luggage tag.

You can punch a hole and stick on the hole reinforcers (brown ones are available from Etsy if you search for ‘reinforcements’ under ‘All Items’) and they should look just like a ready bought luggage tag, but with all the details you want printed on – and no nightmare thoughts of how you put a luggage tag through your home printer!!

I love fonts, and am a regular visitor to Dafont in search of fun fonts. I believe (this shows how much of a font geek I am) that the font used on the brown luggage tag in the pictures, is one called Artistamp Medium. I love it and use it quite a lot, if you take a look at my Directory Showcase features it is used on my graphics. You should be able to type the name into the Dafont search engine and download it for home use.

Alternatively, print your details onto paper and glue them onto the back of the luggage tags like they have done here. You could also jazz up your invitations by using coloured raffia or stripey butcher twine instead of white string.

Charlie

Our wedding stationery inspired this reader to create her own handmade invitations

Charlie

One of my lovely readers, Eulyn, got in touch to share her wedding invitations with me after being inspired by the wedding stationery we made for our wedding. I can’t tell you how lovely it is to get emails and pictures like this, knowing that something you did inspired someone else – and a photo of another couples hard work.

If you’ve been inspired by the ‘save the dates’ or stationery that we created for our wedding, do send me an email – I’d love to hear from you and attach a couple of pictures so I can see (and maybe even share on the blog) what you’ve created – it would make my day. It can get very lonely blogging away, sharing ideas and inspiration, so hearing that you were inspired by something you found here really makes me happy.

Charlie

Handmade ‘tying the knot’ save the dates made from brown card and twine

Charlie

The joys of having a photographer husband-to-be! If you’re the lovely Lisa, one of my blog readers, it means you can make pretty wedding details and get great pictures of them – which in turn means lovely photos to share with you all.

Lisa was inspired by my own rustic ‘save the dates’ and got in touch to share hers – I think they are so beautiful and they incorporate a really neat extra that Lisa found on this blog whilst searching for inspiration – a twine knot.

Charlie

Beautiful favours and crafty supplies for the creative bride

Charlie

It was lovely this afternoon to discover that one of the newest businesses to join the directory has featured The Natural Wedding Company on their blog. The delightful Wedding in a Teacup can be found in our Stationery, Details and DIY sections and is a treasure trove of beautiful things for the creative bride. Lots of their products are sourced ethically or eco-friendly, so a perfect match for the directory.

I thought I’d share some of my favourite products from their wonderful website…

Meant to Bee Honey Favour Stickers

Charlie

Exquisitely illustrated eco-friendly wedding stationery

Charlie

This post is long over due – I met the lovely Nia of Nia Fiori at the Love My Dress Summer Soiree back in August and I just adore her stunning illustrated cards. What’s particularly fab, is she’s brought out a range called ‘Friendly Fiori’ which is eco-friendly.

Nia was kind enough to send me one of her cards and they are really lovely – the simple palette of colours, the black text against the brown card, and the odd bit that glistens makes for a beautiful handmade card.

Charlie

Do it yourself: rustic handmade wedding stationery ~ part 1

Charlie

I’ve decided to split the ‘do it yourself’ for our wedding stationery into four parts as there seemed too much to share in just one post, and I didn’t want you all nodding off. So without further ado, here’s Part 1.

First off, you should know I did all of this in Microsoft Word. Perhaps insane, as Word is not meant for graphic design, but it’s what I have. I don’t have any fancy software packages, so I had to do the best that I could with what I had. Yes, it undoubtedly caused headaches and extra time faffing about, but I got where I wanted in the end and I’m proud of my effort.

The Invitation

Inspiration

For me, our invitation needed to reflect what our wedding was going to be about. I wanted people to get excited (hopefully!) and have a sense of what kind of wedding they were going to.

I went through various different ideas, including sewing mini bunting onto each card, which I decided might kill me off and wasn’t a true reflection of our wedding day. Here are the some of the ideas I was inspired by…

From left to right starting at the top: found Once Wed; Perch Papiers; Junkaholique; Ruffled; unknown; found Snippet & Ink; unknown; Heather Ross; Ruffled; found Twig & Thistle