Weddingbee PRO
I would love to take a little vacation to Italy right about now. Europe around the holidays sounds lovely. Next spring, Jamie and her fiance are getting married on a vineyard in Gaiole in Chianti, Italy at Castello di Meleto. It just sounds romantic, no?
{Image by Li Ward of Fat Orange Cat Studio}
I thought I would peek my head in at least once this week. Hi! I seem to be on a once a week posting schedule as of late. It has been a few weeks of a lot of work with little to show. It happens. But the next couple of weeks are going to be full of new invitation designs for some winter weddings, save the date designs for spring weddings, including my own save the date!
Wedding programs, by nature of their contents, are a last minute item. Your ceremony is your wedding. Most people {myself completely included} tend to focus on the reception as the wedding, but the reason you have a reception is to celebrate your ceremony where you committed your lives to each other in front of family and friends. Therefore it is understandable that you are working on the details of your ceremony until the last minute possible because it is so important. By the time you are done planning your ceremony you may be thinking, program? Do I really need a program? In a short word, yes.
You want your guests to feel welcomed and involved with your wedding. The more involved they feel, the better experience they will have. Wedding programs allow your guests to follow the ceremony, understand what is happening and why, and it is a keepsake of the day. Programs come in all shapes and sizes and there is no set format on what your program should look like. It should work for you and your ceremony and reflect you as a couple.
The key “ingredients” for a program include: your full names, wedding date, city, state, and location of the ceremony, the order of the wedding ceremony including musical selections, the composers and performers, the readings, the source or author, and the readers, wedding party names and their relation to you, your officiant’s name, a thank you note to your parents and guests, and a brief explanation of traditions, rituals, and ethnic customs for both religious and secular ceremonies. You may also wish to honor those who have passed or could not join you by including a memorial.
Below are a few of my favorite programs I have designed along with a description of why the format was chosen for that particular ceremony.
Hello! I hope you had a nice weekend. The weather was just lovely here & continues to be. I recently had the opportunity to once again work with artist & illustrator Jen of Swallowfield. I was quite honored to be asked because these save the dates are for her brother, Sam and his fiance, Laura!
Laura and Sam are getting married under a beautiful live oak tree next Spring, so Jen drew a live oak. Using her illustration to frame the design, I set the text using two simple and elegant typefaces.
{Images by Jessica Robitaille}
I hope you all had a fun weekend! If you are like me, then you are filled to capacity with sweets. My sister and her husband, along with my parents’ never-ending supply of Halloween props, threw a fantastic Halloween party on Friday night. Halloween was always an extravagant affair that took months of planning around the Parrott household. Each year the four of us spent September coming up with bigger, better, and scarier ideas than the last for our party. My father would transform our garage into a haunted house and my mother would create spooky vignettes throughout the room. My sister and I would design & deliver the invitations to everyone in our neighborhood. We would also map out the haunted “walk” which was a ghost tour {always led by yours truly} through our backyard, around our house, through the front yard, & back to the garage. Everyone went all-out for the event. My father would build a tunnel leading out of the back door of the garage into the backyard, fill it with strobe lights, spider webs, and dry ice, leaving a small opening where he could jump out and scare people. One year our neighbor built a life-size coffin and played Dracula for years. Our shed became a mausoleum. The garden became a graveyard. One year a friend of my father’s dressed as a fencer and stood on top of our picnic table swashing his sword and laughing like a crazy man. To this day he remains the scariest in our cast of characters.
Mary and Bobby are planning a happy and homespun wedding on Mary’s family’s farm in a charming little town in Texas. Mary commissioned Betsy Dunlap to handletter the entire wedding invitation, RSVP, return address, as well as a few words for the map. Betsy’s lettering is perfect for this rustic barn wedding - organic and relaxed with loads of charm!
I am really excited & super proud to present my 2010 limited edition letterpress calendar. It has been a few months in the making, and I am so pleased at the final product. I am so happy I took the leap and decided to letterpress the entire calendar.
I recently had the great privilege to work with Caroline, the talented owner and designer of Paloma’s Nest. Caroline strives to create modern heirlooms that will be cherished for generations, most notably her ring bearer bowl. Each piece is hand cut, free form, with no pattern, giving each piece its own variation in the size, shape, and layout of the text. I love that you can see her hand in each piece, making each one unique. Though she works with clay and I work with paper, I believe we have a very similar aesthetic and artistic process, which is one of the many reasons why I am so drawn to her work. That and I just love her work!
Caroline worked with Creative Shift Design for the design of her new business cards, which came out so lovely! Caroline wanted the impression on the cards to mimic the look of her stamped ceramic work, so I letterpress printed them on super-thick 220 lb. 100% cotton paper in fluorescent white. I hand-fed each of the 1,000 cards through my press three times – once for the nest and eggs, which is a deep blind-deboss {no ink}, second for the website in gold ink, and third for the remainder of the text in black ink.
Continuing with the "theme" of a new take on a previous design, I recently designed and printed these hydrangea wedding invitations for a lovely couple living in Ireland. I did a similar design over a year ago in sea-inspired blues and greens for a childhood friend.
I loved printing in pink and gray; it is so flirty and feminine. Many couples {my fiance and I included} go for more gender neutral colors, but sometimes an all-out floral-filled, swashed and swooped, pink-fest is necessary. I have always been under the impression that hydrangeas are a summer flower growing in the yards of cute cottages on the beaches in Maine and Cape Cod. However, autumn is when some of the most beautiful hydrangeas are in season, including antique hydrangea .
Happy Fall! I love this time of year. These invitations were a new take on some previous invitations. I find I often do not take photographs of designs I have already done, because I feel like I am repeating content, however, with different color combinations & additional pieces, the suites end up looking quite different.
This couple had a small wedding at a private home on Lake Tahoe this past summer. With gerber daisies as the main flower at the wedding, they became the main feature for the wedding invitation in a vibrant yellow ink contrasted with chocolate brown and olive green.
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Sarah Parrott, Rhode Island
Vendor: Invitation Designer
Website: Parrott Design Studio
About Me: I am the designer & printer behind Parrott Design Studio, specializing in custom letterpress and screen printed wedding and event invitations, stationery, and paper goods. With a background in non-profit marketing & art history, I began the studio in 2006 in my small apartment in Providence, RI. Since then I have moved to a studio built my fiancé, acquired a Golding Jobber letterpress, & have been happily printing ever since. I grew up in Portland, Maine, and I have always had an affinity for the ocean, mountains, birds, gardening, & the simple life. When I am not printing, I can be found somewhere outside with my fiancé & playful pup.
