Manolo for the Brides

Wedding invitation calligraphy — a trio of words you wouldn’t have found anywhere in my wedding budget. We were doing things on the cheap as it was, so the thought of paying someone to address my fancifully hand address my invitations was not one that even occurred to me. Our wedding invitation (seal-and-send, so utterly lacking in envelopes anyway) featured my off-kilter script and The Beard’s jagged letters, yet found their way to our recipients anyway. Still, I don’t fault brides and grooms for paying for wedding invitation calligraphy since for many, the whole point of a wedding is that everything involved ought to be a cut above normal.

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not a huge calligraphy fan. I do like, however, Neither Snow’s unique writing style, which veers away from girly and is… I don’t know… messily elegant? It reminds me of the sort of handwriting one sees on very old pieces of correspondence written by people on very good terms with their intended recipients. It’s familiar, not formal, but still fancy enough to satisfy those who want everything at their weddings to be a bit better than good. And you know what else is familiar, fancy, but not fussy? Letterpress invitations, of course! I thought it would be fun to pair some of Neither Snow’s work with invitations from the gorgeous Parrott Design Studio, with its lovely, simple invitations inspired by vintage ephemera, flora, and fauna. So here goes!

(more…)

I absolutely adored the wedding invitations my esteemed colleague showed us the other day by a pair of amazing DIY divas. Beyond fabulous stuff, that.

The sad truth, though, is that not everyone is able to pull off that level of design and execution by themselves. That’s when you need a professional to help you out.

The other day, Mr. Twistie met one such professional and pointed me at his wares.

The good folks at Volta Press do custom design and printing using the Letterpress method. They do some gorgeous wedding invitations, and they even have an Etsy Store where they sell them.
(more…)

One of the benefits of writing this blog is that I get to highlight awesome, well, everything. And sometimes, that means I get to showcase the weddings or wedding gear of friends or family. In today’s post, I wanted to give you a taste of the super drool-worthy wedding stationery suite put together by an old friend of mine, S.R., and his now wife, M.S.R. I would have bet my left pinky that their invitations and so on were professionally designed, but nope! Everything you see here was the product of DIY amazingness.

Their absolutely gorgeous save-the-date!

(more…)

Let’s say that your budget didn’t allow inviting everyone and anyone to your wedding, but there are still members of your extended family and peer group who might want to know that you’ve tied the knot. Assuming these people are not close enough to you or your new spouse to have heard from you or your mother or your best friend’s mother’s coworker from the last company she worked at that you’re married, wedding announcements may come into play.

A wedding announcement is a bit like a wedding invitation with all of the scheduling info removed, in that it contains some of the same details and is frequently sent on stationery as fancy as the wedding invitations themselves. Note, however, that you don’t have to rock the ecru cardstock with black lettering if something more colorful would suit you better. The bride’s parents may have the “honour of announcing the marriage” of the new Mr. and Mrs. (or Mr. and Mr. or Mrs. and Mrs.) So-and-So, or not. A typical wedding announcement might read something like this:

(more…)

It struck me that brides and grooms thinking of planning a baseball themed wedding like my friend Mike mentioned in last week’s post might be inspired and impressed by seeing some of his plans. These are some of his and his fiancee’s wedding plans, and I am truly astounded by their thoroughness. It’s one thing to weave a theme into your wedding, but quite another to let your theme take center stage!

• I had David Wright help me with the proposal — he’s one of the most popular players on the Mets right now, if you didn’t know.
• The ceremony is going to be held at Citi Field, where the Mets play. How cool is that? All of the Mets games start 10 minutes after the hour, so the ceremony is going to begin at 1:10 p.m. and the reception will start at 7:10 p.m.
• We invited everyone attending our baseball themed wedding to join us on our first week of the honeymoon on a cruise, so we sent out magnetic save-the-dates with the wedding date and cruise dates colored in the way a baseball team does on its schedule of games.
• Our wedding invites are going to look like tickets with the stub being the RSVP.
• The wedding programs will look like baseball programs, with the bridal party listed as the starting lineup, the minister as the umpire, our parents as the managers, etc.
• Trish’s dress has a Mets blue sash, and my tuxedo vest will have the Mets logo on it.
• We even found a place that makes boutonnieres out of baseballs! And Trish’s flowers will be either blue or white or orange and white.
• The tables will be blue and orange and named after Mets players instead of the typical 1-12, and we’ll be at the number 41:Tom Seaver table. (We were going to make each table a baseball stadium that we have gone to.)
• We will be introduced at the reception as a starting lineup, and Trish’s daughter is going to throw out the first pitch to me. (ed. – awwww) I also think the bridal party is going to make arches with baseball bats for us to walk under.
• The last hour of the reception, instead of being a Viennese hour, will be a baseball hour with peanuts, Cracker Jack, ice cream in batting helmets, pretzels, hot dogs, etc. And we are going to change into “Team Wilder” baseball jerseys for that.
• Finally, the thank you cards will look like baseball cards featuring me and Trish.

Now that’s taking a wedding theme all the way!

(Photo by)

One trend I’m loving in wedding invitations and other things is bright, saturated colors. As we all know, wedding invitations give guests a hint as to the kind of wedding they’ll be attending and can even give them a sneak peek at your wedding colors. When I receive a vividly-hued invite I expect that I’ll be going to a wedding that will be a bit different from one that is heralded by a white wedding invitation with silver lettering.

This beautiful teal wedding invitation suite with its three-tone flower comes from Modern Girl Invitations, which I love for their policy of allowing customers to change the colors on any of their designs for free. They also carry almost all the wedding stationery you could possibly want, from save-the-date cards to place cards to dinner menus to favor tags, and they work with brides and grooms to make every detail perfect. Need help with ordering, proofreading, colors or fonts, wording, or choosing paper? They’ve got you covered.

This colorful wedding invitation suite, also from Modern Girl Invitations, showcases dark purples, oranges, greens, peacock teal, mulberry, and a little gold… which is a lot of colors for one collection of wedding stationery! I don’t think I’ve ever received an invitation (wedding or otherwise) as bold and daring as this, but isn’t it just tremendously evocative of the wedding to follow?

Of course, you don’t necessarily have to choose wedding invitations and stationery that will match your eventual wedding color scheme or even the formality level of your ceremony and reception. But it is nice to give your guests a clue as to how they ought to dress and what kind of affair to expect, and color is one easy way to do it.

Romantic? Check. Elegant? Check. A little bit out of the ordinary? Check. A pink and gold wedding palette is perfect for the feminine bride who wants to plan a wedding that could be described as magical and lovely. Though this palette skyrocketed in popularity after the modern movie version of Marie Antoinette, a pink and gold wedding palette doesn’t have to be inspired by the French Court by default. As pretty as it is, the pink and gold wedding can also be modern.

So what do we have here? Traveling in a vaguely clockwise pattern, there are natural branches studded with tufts of fluffy garden stock blossoms from a party hosted by Tracy Metz, a striking pearl and bird necklace designed by kgarnerdesigns, a lovely soft pink wedding dress by Alisa Benay for 100 Brides for $100K, a pink wedding cake with delicate gold embellishments from The Wedding Cake Shoppe, a gorgeous handpainted wedding invitation from Momental Designs, freaking amazing shoes from Haberdashery Boutique, a delicate rose gold filigree bracelet, and a snapshot from a real wedding that included antique gold bridesmaid dresses from Vera Wang.

The pink and gold wedding palette is truly as sweet as can be!

It strikes me that it’s been a good long while since we’ve talked in more than the most general terms about thank you notes here at Manolo for the Brides.

Now stop all that groaning! It’s really not as bad as you might think. Even if you haven’t written a thank you note since your mother forced you to send a formal note of thanks to your grandmother for that nice check she sent for your high school graduation, you still have an idea of the basic form. Besides, chances are you really are grateful to a lot of people. Thank you notes are a great way to let them know that.

Still, there are some techniques to make the thank you writing process smoother, simpler, and more rewarding for everyone involved. Here are a few ways to make sure it doesn’t turn into the burden people tend to assume it will be.

(more…)

A certain Luis Diaz Santis and a certain Magaly Guerrero Ramirez (both computer scientists) were married earlier this year. I found their awesome (awesome awesome awesomex10) wedding invitation via Temple of Groom, and I just had to share it.

Illustrator Carla Berrocal designed the wedding invitation for the Chilean couple. The graphics and text were created using both freehand drawings and Photoshop effects, which makes me think a layperson could put together something similar with a bit of effort.

What do think? As a child of the 80s, I can’t but help love this homage to early side-scrollers. It makes me smile in a big way.