Papergoods!

I've always been really envious of people who have a consistent look to all of their paper goods. The save the date, invite, programs, etc... all "go" together and complement each other AND are reflective of the event. LOVE IT.

Since one of the things Ryan and I have in common is our love of the outdoors, I found myself drawn to the work of Gwen Frostic. Gwen Frostic was a Michigan printmaker who did the most beautiful nature prints. We visited her studio on a family vacation when I was young and I always liked her work. As I've grown older I always have a set of her notecards in my stationary box. They have such a simple beauty. Anyways, I decided I wanted to use her work as inspiration for the invitations and stuff. I thought about just printing directly on notecards you can purchase from the online store, but it was a bit more limiting then I was comfortable with (paper quality isn't so great and it is difficult to print onto non standard size paper.)

I originally figured I would hire someone to design the invites. I do NOT consider myself a graphic designer and didn't want to spend hours and hours fussing with fonts and placements. I ended up doing it myself anyways. Mostly because I am a bit of a control freak when it comes to the look I am going for, and beacuse I wanted it to be truly original. I wanted to be as picky as I wanted about colors and the look without driving some poor person crazy, or racking up tons of money in editing after the original concept was done.

I'm still on the fence about printing on our home printer or having things printed. I am leaning towards bringing my own paper (from PaperSource) and having them printed at Staples or something like that. My printer is OK, but the color can be a bit streaky and inconsistent. Sure would be silly to spend weeks and weeks debating shades of green only to have them turn out yellowish on the printer by the 14th page!

I was looking at pocketfolds (I just love how convenient they are!) and totally fell for the woodgrain ones (below.) So as I design the Save The Date, I've been thinking about how the invitation will look in this pocketfold and how I can make sure to incorporate the woodgrain paper into other things.

www.cardsandpockets.com

Here is the Save The Date as of now... subject to change!

What do you think? Does it look simple, rustic and classy?