Today on Swamps’ posts..

STATIONERY TIME!

I’m excited for today’s post – I love me some paper goods. I’ll hand straight over to her now!

Why hello guys. I hope you are enjoying the start of our lovely British summertime. If some of you have been as lucky as me and Matt Bee you will have had some of the most beaut weather over the last couple of weeks. I’m L.O.V.I.N.G it! We have also decided to buy a bigger house so we are all full of excitement. We are also obviously slightly mentally insane as I do believe planning a wedding and moving house are (apparently) two of the most stressful things you do in your life time, and we will be doing both in the next 3 and a half months.

Yes, Gasp, its 3 and a half months until the wedding. 14 weeks. 102 days, 18 hours and 10 minutes to be precise. T’s and C’s clause: This only applies whilst I’m writing this, and by the time you read this we may even be down to double figures. Eeeeeek!

So May has brought some military style wedding planning. We went to our penultimate meeting with our wedding co-ordinator. As I said when I very first started writing my blog for you lovely lot I feel excited but I also feel incredibly nervous. This is only getting worse the closer we get. In the car on the way I literally forgot how to breathe which ended up with my hyperventilating. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a paper bag in sight so I just had to ride it out! I genuinely think I’m going to have to go and see my doctor and get him to prescribe me something that will make me feel all floaty and fluffy for the big day, otherwise I might never make it down the isle. That would be seriously mean on Matt Bee. Failing that, one of my bridesmaids normally has a handbag full of what she calls ‘painkillers’. I however, do not believe they’re ‘painkillers’ for a moment and have seen how majorly chilled out she is when she takes them, so ill have what ever she’s having!

The meeting consisted of some seriously precise planning. I now know which order my bridesmaids will enter the building in. It’s just a shame that I don’t really care! I struggle to see the relevance of why this is remotely important but I guess ‘normal’ brides may be bothered by it. I’m too busy worrying about remembering to breathe so I don’t embarrassingly pass out in front of all of my friends and fam.

So, let’s get down to business. I have been waiting for this months post for aggggeeeeeeeees. As you all know Matt Bee is a super talented artist. He is an illustrator if we are being technical and a bloomin’ good one too. This leaves us in a very fortunate position from a wedding stationary point of view. We started with our save the dates. I swear ‘Save the Dates’ never existed before the last couple of years. They seem to have become super trendy. From a planning point of view they do come in handy though.  It buys you loads more time in which to actually pull your finger out and get your real invites out. People won’t book holidays and the likes so you can be more certain you lucky ‘chosen ones’ will be able to attend.

We decided quite early on that we wanted our theme to have a natural feel. Being the chilled out wedding planners that we are we decided not to really have colour scheme. Controversial I know. With this in mind we decided that we would bind the lack of theme together with things like brown paper and natural coloured string to give it some sort of connection throughout the day. 

To be honest I never even spoke to Matt Bee about what I had in mind. It was kind of his ‘baby’ so I just gave him the driving seat and sat back and watched loads of ‘Made in Chelsea’, also controversial I know ha! I am just obsessed with awkward silences and ultimate poshness. This means I fully can’t take any credit what so ever for his amazing handy work. He came up with this for our save the date..

It is magnificent, and our guests were well impressed. He made the little calendar in real life. It was teeny tiny and he even threaded the metal rings through it and cut out the writing out of little pieces of card. It’s so intricate and it’s something we can keep forever. Then he simply took a picture of it and then we had it printed onto business cards. We used www.moo.com and they were really reasonably priced too. We got to choose from lots of small touches like matte finish and curved corners and they came out super lovely. They also cost us a measly £40 – you cant complain at that!

When I was looking for the save the dates ill be honest I struggled to find any really good ideas for inspiration. But when it came to the actual invites there was LOADS. It’s just a shame my budget didn’t support a lot of them. I think the invites are actually super important as it kind of sets the scene for your guest about what to expect. I am all for making your invites yourself but what ever you go for I think needs to make some sort of impact. You don’t want your guests to be under whelmed at the first hurdle. 

My absolute all time fave invite idea I came across was this one, and it is super cool..

Source

It’s also SUPER expensive but if you’ve had a small lottery win or your fam are chipping in a fair wack then you should totes go for this idea. I definitely would have if we had a spare few grand lying around. Humph! It’s an actual VIEW MASTER! You can have your invites put inside it, or anything else for that matter, and then your guests receive it like a little parcel. Now that’s what you call impact! Your guests would be like children in a sweetshop. I would be the most jeal ever of anyone who actually had this as their invite. I’m kind of glad none of my friends are super wealthy as I couldn’t control excitement if one of these came through the post! 

Some of our friends had a super lovely wedding invite too. They had them printed onto a really thin layer of wood. They looked AMAZE. I so wish I had taken a picture for you all to see as they were so cute and it really set the scene for their wedding too. Because I loved theirs so much we did look into getting ours printed onto wood but so as not to be the ultimate copy cat I quite liked the idea of having them laser cut. Once upon a time back when me and Matt Bee weren’t doing a marriage he brought me a Rob Ryan card which was officially the cutest card ever made! It literally made me turn to mush. 

I loved it that much that we are actually going to try and get it framed and display it somewhere at the wedding. Matt Bee is too cute sometimes. So, my love for this card is what inspired me to go hunting for the laser cut invites idea. I found this super lovely one that I thought was really pretty too. It wasn’t actually laser cut in the end but it was a similar style and I fell in love with it a little bit. It was a much more mid ranged priced invite. It comes in at £4.25 per invite and I found it here.

 I thought that it would really nicely match our natural theme too. Especially the brown envelope touch as well. As much as I loved it it was still a little outside of our price range. We have only really budgeted £9000 for our entire wedding and when you’re having 120  guest across the day it soon adds up!

Again this invite is a really nice keepsake. I think both you and your guests are much more likely to actually keep an invite if you go for something a little less conventional too. I liked the idea that people would actually want to keep it to show to people in the future. It kind of makes you feel a bit proud. Lets face it some weddings can be a little under whelming – YAWN! I think people worry about their wedding day being an anti-climax, even though I know it wont be you still worry, so a creating a bit of a buzz around it helps to ease the BORING WEDDING ALERT nerves.

So onto our ACTUAL wedding invite. I had come across a company aptly called Wedding Tea Towels. Now I hadn’t really considered this idea until I stumbled across it. Nor had I ever come across anyone else who had used this idea either. This company have a series of set designs and they basically customise your details so you can send your guests a tea towel as their wedding invite. I loved this idea. It was the perfect keep sake that I was looking for. 

They break the costs down for you on this one. So you would pay anywhere between £45 and £185 for your design itself depending on if you wanted it to be standardised but customised, or completely bespoke. Then you pay per item, so for e.g. if you brought 100 tea towels it would cost somewhere in the region of £275 on top of the design cost. I though this was quite reasonably priced for what it was. It’s not like it was only being printed onto paper after all.

My only gripe with this idea is that number one, I couldn’t afford to pay for a bespoke design, and why would I when I’m marrying an incredibly talented illustrator. Secondly, if I didn’t get a bespoke one then it seemed like it was severely lacking a personal touch. There was nothing in any of the designs, whilst they were very nice that screamed ‘us’ to any of our guests. So I had to get my thinking cap on when I have a brainwave! 

I don’t know if any of you remember when you were at school and you used to have to do a class tea towel for your rents to buy. They were obviously totally rubbish but it was the thought that counted. Well I managed to find a company who still do it, how very 1990’s. So following this little epiphany it all started to come together. I would rope Matt Bee and his arty skillzzzz into drawing us our very own design, and then I would simply pay a much more reasonably priced company to print them. We ended up using a company called Stuart Morris and they were so easy to deal with. I explained that we needed them printing quite quickly as my military planning had failed me somewhat as my will to sit on my bum and not get organised overtook the need to get a wriggle on. They were great. We sent off our design and had the tea towels back within 2 weeks. They even sent us our original design back at no extra cost. 

Good job really as it took Matt Bee 3 solid weeks to complete! The little trooper. So here is our actual wedding invite. I’m pretty excited about it. We wrapped them up so they looked all pretty when they came through the post too. 

We are really happy with them. it all has relevance to us as a couple and a bit of a story to tell. All of our animals are on there, including the skinny pigs in our tea cups and sprout. The Polaroid’s you can see falling out of Matt’s pocket are actual drawings of pictures we have from our adventures together. The bird houses in the illustrations are the actual bird houses on our living room wall…

You’ll notice that we are both wearing one pair of shoes too. When we went on our first date to Egypt, an Egyptian man was showing us his drawings and he said that in the pictures all of the ladies and men shared a pair of shoes between them as this was a sign of true love. He then proceeded to ask if I was Matt’s wife. A week into our ‘relationship’ this was a little intense but he then balanced out the pressure with a “because you have short wife, you will have long life” so we had the chance to move on very quickly haha. There is lots of little touches like this and to be honest I couldn’t be more proud of what Matt has come up with. Our guests are also loving them too. People are actually framing them and putting them up in their house. Its their chance to display a bit of free EightBit art so I cant say I blame them but to be honest I do find it a little strange people will have our wedding invite framed in their houses haha!

Believe it or not it actually worked out cheaper to print these onto tea towels than it did onto paper in the end. I couldn’t believe my eye holes when I saw the quote. We did decide that to help manage the budget we would do a different invite for our evening guests though. Also it saved Matt Bee spending another 3 weeks drawing another invite with the information on for our evening guests. We decided it would be a good idea to tie the evening wedding invites into the save the dates too. This is what they look like…

We also wrote the super cheeky but obligatory we want money instead of presents poem which we think we managed to do quite tastefully and in not too cringable way, so I thought I would share it with you just in case you can take some inspiration from it.

So that’s it folks. That’s ALL of our wedding stationary. I do hope you approve and can maybe even take a little inspiration from what we have decided to go for. We did it on a budget too, all in all we spent about £170 on our invites which is an absolute BARGAIN as I’m sure you will know if you have already started shopping around for prices of invites… Sheeesh. 

I also feel I should apologise for some of the awful photographs as in true organised style I have also left writing my blog until 10pm and so its pitch black outside and the light it utterly terrible. I promise I will do better next month :]

Also I should point out being the tattooed bride for Marry Me Ink and all I am actually getting tattooed this month. Finally I get to finish my sleeve…well hopefully anyway – WAHOOO! I have 9 hours worth of tattooing booked in so when you get to read my next blog, hopefully, I will be all colourful and finished on the tattoo front. Cant wait to show you…eeeep!

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to hear what you think about our invites and also what you have planned for yours so please leave me some comments folks. I hope you have a super sunny June.

Lots of Love, Swamps <3

How fab are their invites? I love how Matt & Swamps’ kitty-cats are on there too! Be sure to leave them both some love as their big day gets closer and even more exciting!