Save The Dates Archives - Smashing the Glass

The ultimate ‘Smashing The Glass’ Save The Date design!

09/02/2015 by Karen

One of my readers, Alon, and his fiancà©e, Sharon, sent in their Save The Date design to me and I just had to share it…

Alon told me. “We wanted an original and funny Save The Date, and the idea of me practicing smashing the glass just came up! We took the photo in my parents’ garden, and my younger brother and sister helped with wrapping the glasses and taking the picture.”

“When we posted it on Facebook we got amazing reactions from friends and family! Everybody laughed and said it was the best Save The Date they’d ever seen! It was a lot of fun taking the pictures and we loved getting those great reactions….”

Thank you for sending this my way Alon. I’m a big fan of it too! What about you lovely readers – did you do something fun for your Save The Date? Tell me all about it…

How to personalise your wedding #2: create some easy DIY memorable wedding stationery

01/07/2013 by Karen

One of my favourite websites, when I’m wearing my design hat, is the printing site moo.com. They provide brilliant customisable printed products at really good prices. I used them for my ‘JK’ monogram stickers that I created for my wedding stationery and they can help you produce all sorts of creative personalised wedding ideas. Here are some lovely ideas that other creative brides and grooms have done:

SAVE THE DATE CARDS
Another fun idea are these ‘tying the knot’ save-the-date cards. The pictures of the bride and groom (Kerry and Terrell) at various ages are printed on Moo Minicards and then are tied to a home-printed card carrying the details, with a perfect knot.

[image: moo.com]

PLACEHOLDER CARDS
Kelly Harris personalised Moo’s minicards with the faces of her guests to make everyone feel special (they make great icebreakers too). Kelly laboriously sourced photos of her 300+ friends and family from Facebook and other means and then displayed the place holder cards in corks which she found in on eBay. Absolutely gorgeous!

[image: moo.com]

GUEST WISHCARDS
Gary and Luzel made guest wishcards for their wedding using lots of their favourite photos printed on Minicards on one side, and a printed little “advice for the newlyweds” message on the reverse. Very cute and very memorable.

[image: i-do-it-yourself.com]

EXTRA WEDDING DETAILS BUNDLES
Chris Hannah designed some Business Cards in the same colour as his invitations to make a cute little package that included cards for things like Wedding Gift List, Dietary Requirements and wallet sized Travel Directions. He then bound them with hand-cut paper strips, held together with round stickers, customised with his wedding monogram.

[image: moo.com]

THANK YOU CARDS
Use a mix of your official shots on business cards, greeting cards or postcards for Thank you card, like Tania Chau did.

[image: mikomiao’s flickr page]

Have a look at the Moo weddings website and also the Flickr Pool for more inspiration. You can find thank you cards and share-your-photos cards and lots more inspirations for affordable,creative wedding stationery ideas.

How to personalise your wedding: Create a logo and brand your Big Day

05/06/2013 by Karen

One of the most stylish, cost-effective and easiest ways of personalising your Big Day is to create a logo of you and your fiancà©’s initials or names and use it on your invitations, RSVP cards, thank you cards, menus and any other printed materials.

But why stop there? How about also printing bespoke stickers or having a custom stamp made and personalising even more elements of your day? It’s amazing how simple this is to do and how much fun you can have branding different details of your day.

For my wedding to Jeremy, I used our initials J and K, to create a very clean symbol that represented our union. As is often the case with logos, the simpler the better – the litmus test is said to be can you draw your logo with a stick in the sand? (Try that out on your honeymoon!).

Here you can see our wedding logo’s first outing on our ‘Save The Date’ that I designed.

Next on my design list, was creating the invitations and with these I combined the simplicity of the logo with a pop-art influenced collage of imagery that represented the two of us, our childhoods, and important landmarks and locations in our relationship. We wanted to make our invitations fun and also wanted to share elements of our personalities and relationship with our guests. The printing and production techniques were as important to me as the design so we chose to print them on a beautiful thick 640gsm stock called Omnia that has the texture of watercolour paper. I felt like our guests would almost be receiving a small pop art screen print when they received our invitation!

The text and logo on the reverse of the invitation also had a quality feel as they were printed with raised thermography, and the font itself was traditional and pretty. No swirly wedding text for us! Our printers, Ashwyk, were fabulous to deal with, gave a really attentive service, and produced outstanding results that we were over the moon with.

image: Ashwyk

The finishing touch was custom made square envelopes from Mount Street Printers with our logo on round stickers from Moo on the reverse. For our address labels we used these fantastic clear labels and printed them at home with the same font we used on the invitation. The result was that the addresses looked as though they were professionally printed direct on the envelopes but it was actually all done on a home printer with these amazing clear labels. I really recommend them!