Blog: wedding stationery
Samantha Samantha

Modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration at historic Arche Noah in Austria

Samantha

Bride and groom at Arche Noah // Modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration // The Natural Wedding Company // Agnes & Andi Photography

Today’s modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration shoot aims to illustrate that ‘having a vegan wedding does not mean a bride wearing a bag for a dress.’ According to the Vegan Society veganism has grown 350% in the last ten years. It is then great to see that industries such as the wedding industry are starting to embrace the trend which goes hand in hand with eco-friendly values.

As we very well know choosing eco-friendly doesn’t mean you need to compromise on style. The same can now be said for a vegan weddingHellbunt Events the team behind the concept and styling have created such a beautiful shoot with an incredible dessert table featuring edible succulents, a gorgeous bridal couple wearing fair-trade clothing and rings, and classy flower arrangements in shades of blush. 

Vegan cactus-shaped cupcakes for a modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration // The Natural Wedding Company // Agnes & Andi Photography

Rose and eucalyptus bouquet for a modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration // The Natural Wedding Company // Agnes & Andi Photography

Recycled paper wedding stationery for modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration // The Natural Wedding Company // Agnes & Andi Photography

Bride and groom // Modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration // The Natural Wedding Company // Agnes & Andi Photography

Roses table arrangement // Modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration // The Natural Wedding Company // Agnes & Andi Photography

Arche Noah // Modern botanical vegan wedding inspiration // The Natural Wedding Company // Agnes & Andi Photography

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Samantha Samantha

An eco farmhouse wedding shoot with a vintage inspired tea party, pretty lavender details and watercolour invites

Samantha

Eco vintage wedding tea party and naked wedding cake // Photography Daniela Müller // The Natural Wedding Company

Eco farmhouse wedding photoshoot

Set at a gorgeous German farmhouse, today’s eco-inspired wedding shoot showcases beautiful simple details including a vintage tea party with a naked wedding cake, loose bouquets of lavender and herbs, watercolour invites, and a truly romantic real life love story.

Curated by the clever people at Lovely White Weddings  who wanted to provide a fully eco-friendly inspirational shoot to promote to brides-to-be the talented ethical wedding businesses in Germany, where they have yet to gain much mainstream attention. Lisa, Lena and Dani from Lovely White Weddings explain,

“In Germany we still pretty much live in a ‘green wedding desert’, there really is almost no good blog, magazine or specifically green wedding vendor to be found if you do not exactly know what to look for. Since we ourselves try to live as organic and sustainable as possible, we agreed that it was high time to fill that gap and to push the green wedding trend in Germany by throwing together one of the first truly eco German styled shoots.”

Lavender and herb wedding bouquet // Photography Daniela Müller // The Natural Wedding Company

Naked wedding cake and living herb wedding centrepieces // Photography Daniela Müller // The Natural Wedding Company

Wedding rings with lavender // Photography Daniela Müller // The Natural Wedding Company

Bridal bouquet of lavender and herbs // Photography Daniela Müller // The Natural Wedding Company

Lavender watercolour wedding invites // Photography Daniela Müller // The Natural Wedding Company

An eco farmhouse wedding shoot with a vintage inspired tea party, pretty lavender details and watercolour invites // Photography Daniela Müller // The Natural Wedding Company

An eco farmhouse wedding shoot with a vintage inspired tea party, pretty lavender details and watercolour invites // Photography Daniela Müller // The Natural Wedding Company

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Charlie Charlie

Rustic eco-chic nautical ‘tying the knot’ save the dates and invitations with hessian, lace and twine

Charlie

Rustic eco-chic nautical 'tying the knot' save the dates // The Natural Wedding Company

Nautical tying the knot save the dates

Some of my favourite emails are from brides/couples who have been inspired by the stationery I made for my own wedding – both our save the dates and our invitations. Rachel was one of those brides who got in touch to share photos of what they created and I particularly loved hers because her and her husband-to-be Lee are sailors – so the ‘tying the knot’ version of our save the dates couldn’t be more appropriate.

It is so exciting to hear that couples all over the world have been inspired by the design I created for our save the dates, and it’s pretty satisfying when emails pop into my inbox with photos attached of what everybody’s been busy creating.

>> View Rachel and Lee’s autumn lake house wedding here <<

Rustic eco-chic nautical 'tying the knot' save the dates // The Natural Wedding Company

Nautical graphics for tying the knot wedding invitations

Rachel asked her friend and designer Anne Trencher to design her a few graphics for her wedding stationery, and to choose fonts for them to use – and don’t they look beautiful!

In addition to her save the dates, Rachel also emailed me photos of her wedding stationery – an elegant design with rustic elements of hessian, lace and twine incorporated.

Rustic eco-chic nautical wedding stationery with hessian, lace and twine // The Natural Wedding Company

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Charlie Charlie

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

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Fern's 'how to' guide for the pretty envelopes she made for her bird and wildflower inspired wedding stationery // The Natural Wedding Company

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

Brown craft card bird and wildflower inspired wedding stationery // The Natural Wedding Company

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

DIY guide to making your own floral envelopes // The Natural Wedding Company
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.

Fern's bird and wildflower inspired wedding stationery // The Natural Wedding Company

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.

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Charlie Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Emma tells us about her botanical inspired wedding stationery and illustrated save the dates

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Emma tells us about her botanical inspired wedding stationery and illustrated save the dates

It is less than a month now to Emma and Shane’s wedding – I can’t believe the time has flown by so quickly! Fingers-crossed Emma will be able to squeeze in another blog post or two if we’re lucky with a few more details about their beautiful sounding natural city wedding. You can catch up on all her posts so far here.

Today she’s sharing details of her botanical inspired invitations (I love this design so much!), so over to Emma…

Love Local, or, A Tale of Two Cities

In all aspects of our wedding we’ve aimed to make the most of the incredible pool of local talent, and our wedding invitations are no exception! Although I must admit that if I had the time and skill I would have loved nothing more than to make all of the wedding stationery myself.

It was important to us that they reflected our day and felt personal and informal – I spent an inordinate amount of time searching for “the one”. As we had a small budget for stationery, we couldn’t go the bespoke route, so I looked instead for something off-the-peg that could be customised.

Botanical inspired wedding invitations by https://www.etsy.com/shop/FreckledStationery

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Lauren Lauren

Rustic floral stationery from Sarah Wants inspired by The Blue Carrot’s cutting garden in high summer

Lauren

Rustic floral stationery from Sarah Wants inspired by The Blue Carrot’s cutting garden in high summer

I can’t think of a nicer outing than a visit to a working cutting garden, full of British blooms – choosing the flowers was definitely my favourite part of wedding planning! I remember visiting a local grower on several occasions and seeing little seedlings flourish into gorgeous wedding-worthy flowers was quite a privilege. 

There are some wonderful florists who grow their own on the directory and if you’re lucky, you may even be invited to visit their cutting garden as part of your consultation.

The Blue Carrot's cutting garden in Cornwall

When Charlie was planning the TNWC South West Roadtrip back last summer, scheduling a visit to meet Suzanne of The Blue Carrot in Cornwall was high on her priority list. You can read all about what she got up tohere.

On the day of her trip, Charlie was also joined by Sarah from Sarah Wants, an award winning wedding stationery designer and self-confessed country bumpkin who today shares with us the idyllic visit which inspired a new collection. Plus there’s an exclusive discount for TNWC readers!

Over to Sarah…

On a day of sunshine and blue skies, I met Charlie and Suzanne for a lovely lunch at the Hidden Hut just above the beach in Porthcurnick. Afterwards, I was very privileged to visit Suzanne’s beautiful walled cutting garden which was such a treat, it felt like a little hidden secret!

Flowers from The Blue Carrot's cutting garden

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Charlie Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Lisa has been getting her guests in the festival mood with quirky invitations

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Lisa has been getting her guests in the festival mood with quirky invitations

Your ‘save the dates’ and wedding invitations are often the first thing that tells your guests what to expect from your wedding – I remember when we were making ours that I really wanted them to hint at what our wedding would be like to our family and friends. 

TNWC Real Bride Lisa is sharing their quirky wedding invitations with hand drawn illustrations for their festival inspired wedding in Wales. I love how they look like a ticket – perfect!

Over to Lisa to tell you all about them…

Quirky invitations to get our guests into the festival mood

There is nothing nicer than receiving mail; it’s like a little journey back in time. I don’t mean all that junk mail that litters the mat but birthday cards, Christmas cards, good old fashioned letters and my absolute favourite, invitations. I remember getting my first birthday invitation when I was very young and have loved receiving them ever since.

So for me the invitations to our big day were important, they can really set the tone of your wedding. They can fit into the colour scheme; let the guest know if it’s an elegant, traditional affair or a more quirky, unusual celebration and can really get the excitement going.

TNWC Real Brides: Lisa has been getting her guests in the festival mood with quirky invitations

Our save the dates were free printable designs from the company that we used for our invitations, we very simply printed them on some good quality card and made them into bookmarks. I then punched a hole at the top, threaded some pretty ribbon through and made a little tie – that was pretty much it. Very simple, very economical and I felt very effective. It was from here that I explored a bit more about the company Something Kinda Cute.

For the invitations, we did really wanted to push the boat out. In my original blog I wrote that I wanted to make my own invitations to give it a real personal touch, however when I saw these particular designs I fell in love with them and thought they fitted our theme perfectly.

TNWC Real Brides: Lisa has been getting her guests in the festival mood with quirky invitations

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Charlie Charlie

Elegant English country garden party inspired handmade wedding stationery from Lucy Says I Do

Charlie

Lucy Says I Do handmade wedding stationery

For all of you embarking on the hunt for you wedding stationery, today’s post is bound to inspire you.  We are joined again by the lovely Lucy from Lucy Says I Do, who has been sharing a number of guest blog posts all about the handmade elements of her own wedding (read all about her bridesmaids dresses, homegrown flowers, and antique wedding dress).

Lucy runs her own business (and one of our recommended suppliers) Lucy Says I Do, creating all kinds of beautiful wedding invitations, paper goods and gifts, so it’s pretty cool to hear about how she designed her own wedding stationery.  

Over to Lucy to tell us all about it…

As with all of the inputs to our wedding, the invitations were a real labour of love!  We wanted all our guests to be given a taster of what our day was about, what was important to us, and hopefully generate a little bit of anticipation for the big day!

Wedding map

English country garden floral tag

Elegant English country garden wedding stationery

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Izzy Izzy

Alice Palace’s guide to getting the wedding stationery that really reflects you as a couple

Izzy

Alice Palace wedding stationery

We have a great guest blog post from the team behind Alice Palace, one of our recommended wedding stationery companies here at The Natural Wedding Company (you can check out their profile page here).  They have been designing and printing wedding stationery for over 6 years now and often get asked about how they come up with their wedding stationery designs and what information should be included on the invitations.

To help our lovely brides- and grooms-to-be they have come up with a fab guide to help you get the wedding stationery which really reflects you as a couple.  We’re going to hand you over to Liz, Alice Palace’s studio manager, to tell take you through their top tips…

Afternoon tea inspired illustrated wedding stationery

How We Came Up With Our Wedding Stationery Designs

When Charlie and I were planning our wedding, we were a bit indecisive, we knew we wanted a small intimate wedding with just our closest friends and family but that was as far as our ideas went!

So first things first, we fixed our budget, sensible I know, but there was no point coming up with ideas if they were going to run off the money scale!  Once we knew what we had to spend (a small budget), we spent a fun evening consuming a (little) bit of wine, and using the following wedding words we wrote down the first idea that came into our heads:

  • Date / time of year we wanted to get married
  • Venue / where we thought we would have it
  • Colour themes
  • What would we eat?
  • Our outfits
  • The cake
  • The flowers
  • Stationery ideas

We each took it in turns to read out the answers and discussed our ideas.  This really helped to see what we both wanted and it was a great way to come up with ideas for our own unique wedding stationery – which can then be passed on to your wedding stationery designer (if you’re using one).

Tea and cake inspired wedding stationery from Alice Palace

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Charlie Charlie

A fabulous 20% discount on all wedding stationery collections from Paper Themes including chalkboard inspired invites

Charlie

'Fairy Tale' wedding invitation from Paper Themes

For any of you brides- and grooms-to-be who are on the hunt for your wedding stationery then today I have an exclusive offer to share with you from one of our recommended suppliers, Paper Themes.

Paper Themes are offering our readers a fabulous 20% discount on all their wedding stationery, which includes wedding invitations, evening invitations, order of service, thank you cards, RSVPs, and place cards.

I particularly like these chalkboard style invitations…

'Chalkboard' wedding invitations from Paper Themes

Mike from Paper Themes told me a little bit more about what they do and offer: “We offer a collection of traditional, modern and contemporary wedding invitations, all of which can be fully personalised to include the details of your big day.  All our invitations are made to order in the UK to the highest standards using only the highest quality materials, delivered to your door in a beautiful presentation box complete with complimentary envelopes.”

'Ticket of Love' letterpress wedding invitation from Paper Themes

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