My Wedding - The Stationery #2

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

You'll see from the title of this article, that I'm still obsessing about stationery. It's got to the stage where I really need to get our Save the Dates out. We're not getting married till 28th May 2011, but I'm keen for everyone to be able to pick up the cheapest Easyjet flights, so we need to be organised.

After endless agonising and pondering, I've finally settled on stamping the Save the Date statement on a business card-sized piece of balsa wood, stamping the other side with my key symbol, adding a Mini Moo card with the details of our website, and pegging them together with a tiny peg. These will all go in a miniature brown envelope. Whew! Lots of fiddly bits, but I'd like to add intrigue to the invitations, and build the anticipation for the wedding. Originally I was going to use luggage tags, but I really liked the unusual, natural element of the wood, and it fitted in with my Secret Garden theme.

 Meanwhile, I've been a big fan of Mini Moo cards for a few years. They enable you to create your own designs, and the finished products arrive in these cute boxes, and are just the most desirable things ever. The added bonus is that because I get their newsletter, I get their discounts, so 100 of them only cost about £10 including postage - bargain! The balsa wood cards were a custom order from Perch Papiers, and I already had those from early in my planning, but choosing an ink stamp was really difficult. I spent hours and hours looking through Etsy for the perfect stamp, and then realised that if my stationery is going to look a professional package, then I'm going to need everything to be in the same font. 

If you're DIY-ing your stationery, then you've probably already figured this out, but if you're just starting out, my advice is to choose a font first. Now in my quest to be constantly original, I didn't want to use just any old Windows font, so I went in search of special free ones online. Be warned - there are thousands. And then there are thousands more that cost about $40 each, and they're even more beautiful. Prepare to spend several days choosing - I browsed DaFont, 1001 Free Fonts and Urban Fonts, but there's loads more sites. Eventually, I picked a free font called English, which looks just like the picture above!

It's a bit scrolly and a bit romantic, but not so fussy that my elderly relatives won't be able to read it. What do you think? The relief of having finally made a decision was huge - I felt I'd achieved something! Now it came to the fun bit - I designed the Mini Moo cards, and the Save the Date stamp and set about getting it all made. The Moo cards will have 'Hooray! A wedding in Provence' on one side {white on grey}, and 'Excited? Want to know more?' and the details of our wedding website {grey on white} on the other side.

Originally I wanted the Save the Date stamp to look like the picture on the left, but I got in touch with Purple Lemon Designs, on Etsy, and the lovely Kelly suggested a slightly different looking stamp, which I loved, so I decided to go ahead with that. All in all the whole package will cost about £65 pre-postage - bargain!