The Unbride - A Unique and Unusual Wedding Blog » Invitations + Favors

Save the Dates Hollywood Style

Ellen — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:58:08 +0000

This super stylish save the date comes from one of our absolute favorite husband and wife photography teams, Michelle Ferry and Josh Beller of Mi Belle. No superimposing here, they actually had the sign custom set to announce their date. Way to go the extra mile and completely set the mood for a fabulous celebration.

(Un)Vitation

Ellen — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:20:31 +0000

This invitation or unvitation, came to us from a dear friend of ours. Don’t know how she stumbled upon it, but it tells the story of how this couple Jill and Matt met, dated, moved, visited, and courted across 48,284 miles before…tying the knot. Their story is unique. The way they decided to tell it is so inspirational it makes a great post even though they were married in 2008. Also, the typography is pretty slammin’.

Invitation designed (I’m assuming) by Matt Dorfman, NYC

Paper Olive

Justine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:25:01 +0000

Happy Monday Unbrides, today I hope you’ll take the time to visit Paper Olive, our newest featured vendor.

Website: www.paperolive.com

Paper Olive is paper couture. Our specialty is luxury invitation design that features vibrant color, clean cliens, and chic modern updates for brides who like their classics with a twist. From lush silk boxes to vintage letterpress, from exotic destination themes to swanky urban style, we transform your wedding stationary into a fabulous first impression, setting the tone for an event that will be joyous, stunning and unforgettable.

Paper Olive

Justine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:18:43 +0000

Happy Monday Unbrides, today I hope you’ll take the time to visit Paper Olive, our newest featured vendor.

Website: www.paperolive.com

Unique LA

Ellen — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:39:18 +0000

Here at the UnBride we are all things Unique and Unusual. Especially when it comes to individual artisans sharing their wares. There is no better place in Los Angeles than the annual Unique LA. If you are looking for Jewelry, fashion or letterpress vendors for your wedding, OR an amazing place to buy Holiday gifts…this is it! You can also just walk around and drink in all those creative juices (that’s what I will be doing). Stop by our friend Carrie’s booth for Anemone Letterpress, and give her an UnBride hello.

The Invitation – Setting the tone

Justine — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:29:40 +0000

The wedding invitation might be one of the more overlooked details when it comes to wedding planning but if well thought out, it can really set the tone for your event…and sometimes even help out of town guests decide whether or not they are going to attend. But it doesn’t have to be expensive to have impact. Check out this gorgeous letterpress number I received for a wedding I photographed a couple of weeks ago. It was just this one piece in a simple white envelope.

No envelopments, inner envelopes, reception or reply cards…nothing to cloud the delivery of the message which is all right there whispering to you in a very subtle way. As soon as I saw this beautifully designed, sweet, invitation I started getting super excited for this wedding…mostly because I knew that the wedding would be unfussy and beautifully personalized…which it was.

So if you’re in the throes of wedding planning, take a minute to think about the impact that your wedding invitation might have. It should do something to convey the type of event you’re having…formal, casual, light-hearted, rock ‘n roll, eco-friendly. What are you communicating to your invited guests? Have you sold them on dropping big bucks to fly across the country or the world to come to your wedding? An invitation that says “you won’t want to miss this”…now there’s a statement.

Photobooth Scrapbooks

Justine — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:23:12 +0000

I have been meaning to write a post about this for absolutely ages so here goes. Since I’m a photographer myself, I knew that that one of my top priorities for my wedding was going to be having a vintage photo booth. I have some great memories of going into those things as a kid and making funny faces. It was always a great keepsake from what I remembered as fun times…so why not have one at my wedding, right?

I was very happy to find Photobooth Scrapbooks after a google search who not only provided the booth but even had an attendant there who was responsible for instructing guests on what to do and even put together a fantastic guest book for us which is now one of my most prized possessions.

Photobooth Scrapbooks is a national company so you can get them in just about any city. Tell them that you heard about them on The Unbride.

Unique LA – Invitations

Ellen — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:23:00 +0000

Our great friend, and a-a-amazing letterpress printer Carrie, from Anemone Letterpress will be unveiling her new wedding line this weekend at Unique LA. This is a very cool event that happens twice a year featuring independent designers in fashion, jewelry, accessories and beautiful papergoods. Here’s a sneak of what Carrie will be showing. Some of invites are to be filled in, some are to be customized, but they are all yummy and gorgeous and completely unique. Contact Carrie directly at Anemone Letterpress, if you are not able to attend the event and are interested in talking to her about your invitations.

Unique Save the Dates

Ellen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:46:05 +0000

Coming from a graphic design background, I love the idea of making your save the dates your own. It is a great opportunity to really set the tone for your signature day. In this era of bridal websites and cyber-planning, your Save The Date can be nothing more than a tease. Your names and a date, maybe a web address. What about just a photo and a date. I love this company, Gumdrop Cookie Shop and have been looking for an excuse to use them for a long time. They create custom cookies, what a delicious way to announce your upcoming nuptials.

Here are some of my favorite save the dates. First up favorite of all time: Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro, all irony aside on the “Til Death Do We Part”. But conceptually amazing not to mention photographed by my personal hero David LaChapelle.

I love the next two save the dates by Jenn White Topliff of 13 Creative, she is such an amazing designer, her invitations make me want to get married all over again. I love the simplicity of “I Do” and the foldout STD’s are just simply gorgeous.

The possibilities are endless, and this is the first impression of your wedding. Make it the spark that gets everyone excited about your unique day.

Ellen Petty of Identity Kitchen is one of my closest friends and my partner in The Unbride. She is not only a brilliant designer but was also the brains behind the our CBGB concept and designed our wedding logo, save-the-dates, wedding invitations and thank-you notes.

Welcome Bags Etc.

Justine — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:30:51 +0000

Tonight I picked up Gary and Oliver from the airport and we are all back together in DC safe and sound. My arm is healing nicely from my blood test, although I may still need a little makeup to cover the bruises. The horrifying part of it is that DC apparently just eliminated the syphilis test requirement a couple of weeks ago but neglected to notify the marriage bureau or update the website until last week. So it was all for naught.

Luckily the weather forecast is now looking beautiful for the weekend so that makes me very happy. I did have a very small breakdown on Monday regarding marriage license BS so my sister & maid-of-honor Lauren drove up from Charlotte to come help me run errands & pull it together in general. We spent the past couple of days running around & buying supplies for our hotel room welcome bags & restroom courtesy baskets and last minute toiletries for me.

My father spent the day burning cds of our wedding soundtrack to go in the welcome bags and they really turned out great! I took some pictures of everything…

Gary’s printer CityPrint in LA made these great stickers for us from our logo which we put on all of the bags.

In the bags we put the soundtrack to our wedding…any guesses on the songs we used? I’ll publish the list of songs after the wedding but we want to keep a few things as a surprise. I ordered the cd inserts from White House Custom Colour.

Also from WHCC, I ordered these postcards with the itinerary & info for our guests about things to do in DC and where to eat/ play while they’re in town. I punched holes in one corner and bound them with a 1″ binder ring.

Here are the contents of the bags: pellegrino, cd, advil, tic tacs, info, b&w cookies, nut snack mix.

These are the restroom courtesy bags for the wedding itself…one for the men & one for the ladies. The general contents are: spray deodorant, mouthwash, advil, mints, pepto bismol, band-aids, tampons, dental floss, hand lotion, hand sanitizer. They are in b&w hat boxes from Dunwoody Booth.

I also bought 15 pairs of flip flops from Old Navy (just $2.50/ pair) and a basket from Target that we’ll place next to the dance floor for when all of my friends decide to take their heels off. It happens at almost every wedding and generally coincides with the first drunk person to shatter a glass on the dance floor. I’m not taking any chances.

Of course there are many more things to share but it’s late and I need my beauty rest. We check into the hotel tomorrow (free wifi) so I should be able to post more updates so check in again soon.

Love to you all for your awesome comments and support!

Invitations are in the works…

Justine — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:28:57 +0000

Having sent out most of the save-the-dates now. One was returned due to an old address and a few were delayed because of t-shirt sizes but as far as I can tell most people have received them and we’ve gotten some rave reviews. Yay!

So now the next step is getting the invitations done. It never even occurred to me to purchase invitations from a paperie or website or an invitation designer. Why bother when I have a top designer as a close friend and wedding guest. Anyway, through a combination of sources including The Paper Source and other online retailers, I managed to find all of the envelopes and other nonsense that I needed in order to put together some respectable-looking invitations. Here is the design that Ellen put together for me, a very cool concert poster-style invite. This is going to be letter-pressed and then folded in half to fit into a 5″x7″ inner envelope with a bunch of other stuff to be revealed soon.

For our calligrapher, I have selected the very talented Pretty Pen Jen who is going to do white ink on the black outer envelopes. Jen if you’re reading this, I’m sending the envelopes off to you tomorrow.

Well that’s all for now…

Save The Dates

Justine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:58:10 +0000

So I know we’ve been engaged for over a year but I’m sorry to say that we are major slackers on some of the wedding planning stuff and despite being in the under 4 month countdown, have yet to send out save-the-dates. But I am happy to say that they are in the works. They are going to be black t-shirts with our wedding logo on them and a tag with all of the necessary info. My amazing designer/ friend Ellen designed the logo as well as the tags. The tags have come in and I’ll photograph them soon but here is the design she did.

Wedding Logo…by Identity Kitchen

Justine — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:48:27 +0000

I was without internet almost all day today which was absolute torture, especially since I’ve been so excited to share with you our very cool wedding logo. Luckily Gary came home to my rescue so I’m back in business. The inspiration came from the logo for the old CBGB club in NYC. Since we’re going with sort of a rock theme, we thought it might be fun to take it ever further and make the whole event sort of like a rock club. Anyway, my amazingly talented friend & designer Ellen was kind enough to do this for me.

And here’s ours. This is a first draft, the final logo is going to have letters that go in an arc like the one above.

We thought this would be a fun alternative to a monogram which is just not us anyway…especially considering that I’m not taking Gary’s last name. Anyone else doing a wedding logo?

I knew someone would ask so here you go…The OWFUG stands for Our Wedding For Uplifting Gormandizers, the original is Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.

Here are the new updated versions…

Reply cards

Justine — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:40:09 +0000

I just saw this on A Bride in the Making who actually found it on anotherfuckingwedding.com and think it’s just too funny not to share with my readers. Since Gary and I are still in the process of finalizing our guest list and working on our save-the-dates (which are going to be very unusual, BTW), we have not had this issue as of yet but I have known many others who have had major problems with guests and reply cards. I’m sure that many frustrated brides would fantasize about sending out something like this…

Anyone out there have the balls to send this to your guests?

Save-the-date Inspiration

Justine — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:41:26 +0000

I was soooo excited when I saw this on the Junebug Weddings blog because I’ve been at such a loss for what to do for our save-the-dates which really need to go out soon.
Check out this really cool concert poster-inspired Save-The-Date by Marit Hanson. This is so up our alley. Gary is a huge music fan and since a lot of our musician friends are actually going to go on stage to play songs at our reception, this seems like the perfect fit for us.

My wonderful friend and designer extraordinaire, Ellen Petty is already bursting at the seams with inspiration for our save-the-dates and invitations. Can’t wait to see what she comes up with. I’ll post with lots of updates.