Our Wedding: The Favors

I know favors are one of those things that aren’t absolutely nec­es­sary at a wed­ding, but we were really excited for another oppor­tu­nity to design some­thing fun for our guests. This was one of the first ideas we came up with dur­ing wed­ding plan­ning, and one of the eas­i­est deci­sions to make. Keeping in mind the fact that the major­ity of our guests were trav­el­ing to us, we decided to do a set of post­cards. And being that music and New York are both hugely impor­tant to us, we came up with the theme of “The Songs of New York”.

Each set was pack­aged in a yel­low bak­ery bag, and sealed with a navy and white stripe rib­bon (pur­chased at M&J Trimming) and cus­tom tag.

There were five cards in all, each fea­tur­ing a lyric from a song about New York. Some songs were no-brainers, but we found this awe­some Wikipedia page to help us decide on the others.


all pho­tos taken by me

The back of each card listed the song and artist, plus room for a mes­sage so that the cards could actu­ally be mailed. What was really fun was that we came back from our hon­ey­moon to find that some of our guests had filled them out and mailed them to us.

November 9, 2010 – 8:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Our Wedding, Paper Goods | Comments (3)

From A-Z

For his wed­ding, Robert Murdock of Postmammal, cre­ated this elab­o­rate A-Z Guide to the bride and groom. Here are just a few of the spreads, but the rest of it is cer­tainly worth a look. Check it out right here.

November 8, 2010 – 9:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Design, Paper Goods | Comments (0)

Our Wedding: The Music

Music was pretty huge for us — we spent for­ever putting together our playlists. Our DJ, Brad Langer from Absolute Entertainment, did an awe­some job of mix­ing things up based on the crowd’s response and stick­ing to our wish­list. We didn’t want a lot of the typ­i­cal weddng music, so that was def­i­nitely a con­cern. There’s not enough room to include every sin­gle song here, but I’ll give you some highlights…

Before the cer­e­mony we wanted music play­ing as our guests came in to wel­come them, so we picked out a mix of love songs, both old and new.

The cer­e­mony was really sim­ple, we just included a few songs:

Processional

Bride Processional

Recessional

Since most peo­ple are pay­ing atten­tion to the food and drinks at the Cocktail Hour, we def­i­nitely incor­po­rated a lot more indie music that would mean some­thing to us and our friends.

For the recep­tion we were def­i­nitely con­cerned with play­ing music that fits with our tastes, but that also pleases the crowd. So it took awhile to get a good mix together, but I think we did it, based on how rowdy the party turned out to be. And for our first dance we def­i­nitely didn’t worry about any­one but our­selves, so we chose the song below, which maybe 10 other peo­ple at the wed­ding knew. But it def­i­nitely meant a lot to us.

Our First Dance

For the par­ent dances we put any pref­er­ences aside and let our par­ents do the deci­sion mak­ing. Turns out they both picked clas­sics that every­one knows and loves.

Father Daughter Dance

Mother Son Dance

(As you can see we’re big Beatles fans.)

And then it was time to dance!

For the last song of the day, there was no ques­tion we’d be choos­ing the one below. It’s become a bit of a tra­di­tion amongst our friends, who seem­ingly all got mar­ried in the last year or two, plus it’s just a super fun song to cap off the day and also start the after party.

Unless oth­er­wise noted, all pho­tos by Unusually Fine

November 8, 2010 – 8:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Our Wedding | Comments (0)

Invitation du Jour

Awhile back I fea­tured fel­low designer Joe Anderson’s ena­gage­ment pho­tos. Since then I’ve been dying to see their invi­ta­tions, so I’m excited to share them with you today. I’m lov­ing the not-so-common very ver­ti­cal for­mat and their bold use of color and type.

This lit­tle graphic may be my favorite touch. I love the spot illus­tra­tion of the cou­ple danc­ing. It def­i­nitely sets the stage for a fun, cel­e­bra­tory event.

All of the let­ter­press print­ing was done by The Nomadic Press

October 29, 2010 – 8:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Our Wedding: The Guest Books

As wed­ding atten­dees, one prob­lem we always found with guest books was that peo­ple don’t nec­es­sar­ily know what to write (that or they can’t find them, which hap­pens to me sur­pris­ingly often). And as a result, some guests either don’t sign them or just sim­ply sign their names, which is fine, but we were look­ing for a way to engage peo­ple fur­ther. We thought about design­ing more of a poster/wall-hanging type thing, but our walls are already cov­ered with show posters and other art­work. And we went through a bunch of other non-traditional ideas, but noth­ing seemed time­less enough for us to keep around for years to come. So we came to the con­clu­sion that we still wanted a book of some sort, but we didn’t want any­thing pre-made. And then I came across this idea from Martha Stewart Weddings.

We loved the idea of mak­ing the guest book more of a con­ver­sa­tion, and the ques­tion prompts on each cover were a per­fect way to do that. We also really liked their sug­ges­tion to place one book on every table. However, we already had quite a lot going on there, so it wouldn’t really work for us. In the end we decided to mod­ify the idea by com­ing up with a smaller list of ques­tions and leav­ing mul­ti­ple books out on the table for signing.


above two pho­tos by Unusually Fine

We bought sim­ple black sketch­books with blank pages and then designed a series of cov­ers the books. Remember cov­er­ing your school books with brown paper bags? We basi­cally used the same type of tem­plate for this.


all of the above pho­tos by me

And here are the designs up close. Not sure if we got a bet­ter response than we would have with a more tra­di­tional guest book, but we def­i­nitely got some fun and cre­ative answers, so I’m really glad we went this route.

October 28, 2010 – 8:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Design, Our Wedding, Paper Goods | Comments (8)

Invitation du Jour

I sure do love me some foil stamp­ing. This exam­ple by Andrew Townsend puts a whole new spin on the oth­er­wise casual, hand-drawn-feeling type.

October 27, 2010 – 9:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Paper Goods | Comments (0)

Our Wedding: The Out of Town Gift Boxes

The out of town gift boxes were one project we were really excited to put together. I per­son­ally love kits or sets of any kind, so there’s that. Plus, since so many peo­ple were com­ing from a dis­tance, we fig­ured it was a per­fect oppor­tu­nity to give them a lit­tle intro­duc­tion to our city.

For the boxes them­selves we bought, these navy gable boxes and some hot pink crin­kle shred from Packaging Source.

We made these fun labels that we tied onto each box using the same cord as the programs.

One of my favorite good­ies included in our boxes was Papabubble’s bor­ough can­dies. They’re deli­cious hard can­dies that have all five bor­oughs writ­ten inside each one. (I picked this photo since the Queens ver­sion was front and center).

We also included a lit­tle note inside each box that listed the sched­ule of events for the weekend.


all of the above pho­tos taken by me

Other New York-related things we included in the boxes, in addi­tion to the req­ui­site bot­tles of water and snacks:

  • Nuts for Nuts! You can’t really walk down the street in New York with­out see­ing at least one of these carts. They’re a super cheap snack and they’re actu­ally really deli­cious as well.
  • These mini sub­way maps


photo taken by friends and family

Overall the boxes were a huge hit, and I’m glad we got to wel­come every­one to New York with a lit­tle gift to thank them for being with us that weekend.

October 27, 2010 – 8:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Details, Our Wedding, Paper Goods | Comments (1)

Invitation du Jour

Love this whim­si­cal, illus­trated invi­ta­tion designed for Leah and Carl by Anna Hurley.

October 26, 2010 – 9:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Paper Goods | Comments (0)

Our Wedding: The Programs

The pro­grams came together pretty quickly, design-wise any­way, the pro­duc­tion still took a bit of time. We went with a sim­ple small book­let that tied with a cord at the top. Little shop­ping tip: my friend Dana pointed me in the direc­tion of B.B. Crafts, which has a huge selec­tion of rib­bon at rock bot­tom prices. I got a huge 250 yard roll of this white cord for about $7.

We used this neon card­stock in sev­eral projects through­out the wed­ding. I picked it up at Print Icon on a whim last year because it was on sale and we still have quite a bit left, so we def­i­nitely got our money’s worth.

We also put our cus­tom embosser to use again here and made some C heart B seals with navy paper and our trusty Xyron, another awe­some wedding-project-related purchase.


all of the above pho­tos taken by me


pre­vi­ous two pho­tos by Unusually Fine


photo taken by friends and family

October 26, 2010 – 8:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Our Wedding, Paper Goods | Comments (3)

Our Wedding: The Flowers

I never real­ized how into flow­ers I was until we planned our wed­ding. I’m not claim­ing to be any sort of expert on the dif­fer­ent vari­eties (not even an ama­teur one), but when I look at wed­ding pho­tos now the flow­ers tend to be what I’m drawn to more than any other detail. Sarah from Brooklyn’s Blossom and Branch (who is also a client and friend) was the artist behind all of our flower arrange­ments and bou­quets. And they com­pletely sur­passed my expectations.

I was obsessed with my bou­quet. In fact it’s still sit­ting right here just a few feet away from me (dried, of course). I wanted lots of color, and she def­i­nitely gave it to me. It was just more beau­ti­ful than I could have imagined.

To pick up on all of the col­ors used in my bou­quet, each of the brides­maids had a dif­fer­ent mono­chro­matic color scheme. They were all tied together with the navy and white rib­bon wrapped around the stems.

The bou­ton­nieres were all a bit dif­fer­ent as well…

Laura, our reader, got a cute lit­tle wrist corsage…

I loved how the flower arrange­ments popped off the navy blue table cloths in the white vases.


photo taken by friends and family


photo taken by friends and family


Unless oth­er­wise noted, all pho­tos by Unusually Fine

October 25, 2010 – 10:00 am | By Courtney | Posted in Flowers, Our Wedding | Comments (1)