Birds wedding invites

Today I thought I would share an image made up of different colour schemes that recent customers have chosen for their Birds in Trees wedding stationery. I love the fact my customers come up with so many different colour combinations that I probably wouldn't have thought of on my own!

My favourites are the red and grey on white chosen by Vicky and Stephen (4th image down) and the sage green and duck egg blue on ivory chosen by Louise and Mark (3rd image down). I've picked these two as the end results look totally different even though everything on the designs except the colours are the same. Colour theory in action ...!

Say It Says Mini Interview

The Leaf Press has featured in a mini-interview with Folksy sellers on the fabulous Say It Says blog. I have a range of wedding invitation samples for sale on Folksy. You can read the interview here.

Say it Says interview with The Leaf Press

Wedding favours

Wedding favours are something I plan to introduce in the coming months as part of my wedding stationery range. As luck would have it I have had the opportunity to practise recently with the favours for my sister's wedding. I was presented with crackers (with silver charms) for the ladies and a packet of popping candy for the men. Here are the results:

Cracker with navy tag and navy ribbon with the Bride & Groom's names and wedding date.

The text inside the tag.

Popping candy in a glassine envelope with a navy and silver tag.

There was a slight predicament with the crackers which turned out to be Christmas themed. This led to a tedious 2 hours pulling the contents out and replacing with non-Christmas related charms!

I already produce guest books as part of my range of journals but I designed a slightly different front panel and end sheets to fit in with the snowflake them my sister is having for her wedding. (Yes, I know it's August!)

Owls watching tennis

Today the owls are nervously watching Andy Murray play in the Wimbledon final.

It's a nerve-wracking business so they're looking forward to returning to their tree where they feature on the owl wedding invites.

Baby shower and leaving school cards

I thought I would share images of two recent commissions I have done.

The first is for previous wedding stationery customers who are now having a baby (yay - congratulations Alex & Craig!) who requested invitation cards for their baby shower which were based on the design they had for their wedding invites - birds in trees. As you'll see from the image, the birds are still sitting in the tree and a stork is delivering their baby.

The second is for a friend who works in a school as a teaching assistant and who wanted to give the leaving pupils a goodbye and good luck card each. This design features owls designed to appeal to 11 year olds - they're wearing the school uniform (okay, perhaps that bit won't appeal!) and are texting each other. One owl is holding a book with the title 'books are cool' as a tribute to the fact that my friend specialises in reading/literacy. The other is (perhaps more typically) plugged into earphones.

a close up of the owls:

I think I had the easy bit - she now has to write messages on 30 cards!

Floral wedding stationery

This is a design introduced recently which features a  design made up of swirls with leaves, flowers and butterflies (made from heart shapes) .

Most of my designs are centred on two colours but I've gone for a one colour base for this range, to suit couples whose theme is centred on just one colour which they'd like to be as prominent as possible.

This range of stationery was on display at the recent Glemham Hall Open Day.  Glemham Hall is a fantastic wedding venue in mid Suffolk (just off the A12). I provided stationery for the tables in the marquee. There was a classical theme with birdcages draped with butterflies and foliage as centre pieces.

Here is the stationery on the tables.

The Floral range of wedding stationery can be viewed on this page with samples available to purchase for 90p + £1.00 postage here .

Glemham Hall is on the A12 between Lowestoft and Ipswich. Their website is  http://www.glemhamhall.co.uk/.

'Confetti' wedding planning book

This is a second design for a wedding planning notebook. I'd originally intended to come up with a larger spiral bound planner using this design but found the spiral binding meant the end result wasn't quite as neat as I'd have liked. So it's the same format as the 'My Wedding Plans' notebook - A6 size to fit in a pocket or bag. There are four colour schemes which I hope will fit most people's wedding colour schemes or just favourite colour preferences.

I always think that these books will be purchased for the Bride-to-be but recent orders have included books for the Bride and Groom-to-be together, as a gift to accompany the proposal (hope she said yes!), a hen party gift and a set of notebooks to be given by the Bride-to-be to the Chief Bridesmaid, Mother of the Bride and Husband-to-be for them to make their own notes. Perhaps I should include these ideas in my advertising!

New wedding stationery ranges

I have been neglecting my blog again, aaaagh! This post is going to focus on the new wedding stationery ranges I've introduced this year.  In forthcoming posts I'm going to talk about other new designs I've been working on, wedding fairs, other wedding related ideas and products and ideas for those of you who are interested in making your own books (although you could of course buy mine!).

So back to the wedding stationery.  I've introduced five new ranges recently.  Two of them are a new style of ticket based information. They come with a perforated RSVP slip and are presented in a card wallet (similar to what you would receive tickets in). One is themed in the style of a concert ticket and the other as an airline type ticket.

'Just the ticket' -

'Travel ticket' -

The third design is called 'Spots' for obvious reasons. It's a design I started last year but couldn't get it to look as I wanted it to, because I'd over-complicated it I think. Here it is in a variety of colours (customers can choose any two colours).

'Spots' -

The fourth design is similar to my Birds in Trees design but this time features owls (in response to customer requests). It's the first design which I've done in landscape layout, which threw up a few additional challenges in terms of laying the text out.

'Owls' -

The fifth design I'm going to talk about in my next post. It started life as a design for use at a local wedding venue's open day.

All of the wedding stationery ranges can be viewed on my website at http://www.theleafpress.co.uk/theleafpressshop/cat_304098--015-Wedding-stationery.html .

Thanks for reading!

Wedding fair notebooks

A blog post mostly made up of pictures today.  Recently I have been producing small notebooks to go in goody bags at the Glemham Hall Wedding Fair this weekend (at Little Glemham, Suffolk).  I've made bulk quantities of notebooks before, but never 200 at a time so I thought it would be interesting to document each stage.

Firstly I designed and printed the covers.  The covers feature several different wedding related images all drawn in Illustrator and in black (because it's quicker to print than colour) and printed on to coloured covers.  

Next the paper was folded for the inside, having been trimmed slightly in the guillotine.  Each book had 6 sheets of paper stacked one inside the other, making 12 pages or 24 sides.

Holes were then punched in both the covers and inside papers.  Here they are ready for sewing.  Each notebook was sewn in a different colour thread to the cover.  The sewing probably took about 4 hours (and was done while I was watching TV!).

Finally an wedding invitation sample (the object of the exercise for me!) was attached to each notebook with thread and a tag.

Here they are boxed and ready to go ...

Hope the brides-to-be at Glemham Hall this weekend like them!

Today’s blog post focuses on a great new campaign – Support Handmade However It’s Made (#SHHIM for short!). 

This has come about primarily as a response to changes by Folksy, who from November are only going to allow items to be sold if they are the seller’s own design or are made from only handcrafted components.  I don’t think any of my books or stationery will be affected but I’m struggling to work out who these changes are good for.  Yes, some items on Folksy are made of mass produced components and some products clearly involve more work than others but this is usually reflected in both the description and price and surely it only benefits the consumer.  People have different tastes and budgets, especially in the current economic climate.  

Up until now I’ve always been relatively satisfied with the service offered by Folksy, with the exception of the fact that certain sellers/items are repeatedly promoted via their ‘featured sellers’ and ‘top picks’ while a far greater proportion never feature, which seems a bit cliquey.  Create.net, who I have my main website with, seem to have a more equitable system (by inviting sellers to be featured) and, as a result, showcase a wider variety of sites. 

So back to SHHIM, this is an initiative by the creator of the Diddybears™ site which sells adorable hand-crafted and collectable mini teddy bears.  Until the end of December she is offering free advertising for anyone affected by the Folksy situation.  Details can be found here http://www.diddybears.com/handmade.html and you can also visit the wonderful shops on this page.  I’m very big on inclusivity and am proud to display the SHHIM badge on my blog!