Go on over to Preppy Wedding’s great blog for a fun giveaway: a $200 gift certificate to Bella Figura for whatever your heart desires. Letterpress wedding invitations, letterpress coasters, letterpress baby announcements, letterpress stationery, etc. etc. All you need to do is write a little about how you’ll tie one of our letterpress designs into your wedding (or your life!). The Preppy Wedding giveaway goes until Wednesday, February 18. Have fun and good luck!
Check out this great post on Weddingbee by Cyd, a Bella bride who visited our upstate New York letterpress shop recently to plan for her own wedding invitations. Looking for more glimpses of what goes on in a real letterpress print shop? Check out our cool letterpress music video featuring all that is good and beautiful about our presses, and also this other great video of our print shop, made by professional wedding videographer Luke Walker. And yes, we love visitors.
Continuing our letterpress calligraphy love fest…here are a few more calligraphy treats.
Black ink seems so right for calligraphy invitations – it’s the original letterpress ink from hundreds of years ago, and black has stayed in fashion ever since. This is the Classic Calligraphy design using the Spencerian calligraphy style, letterpress printed on our 2-ply cotton paper. Totally timeless. And notice how special each of the first letters of the bride’s and groom’s names are – I love how the “L” of the bride is intertwined already with the “P” of the groom.
We often do calligraphy invitations in one color — but wow, when you add a second color–and add that to a custom monogram in fact — what an effect! The butterfly monogram is sweet and sophisticated and uses the bride & groom’s first letters of their first names. More black ink — how can you go wrong there? — but the garden green ink ads a bit of fun. This is another variation on the Classic Calligraphy design, Spencerian style.
Stay tuned for a very cool calligraphy save the date — in green!
Incorporating calligraphy into your letterpress wedding invitations strikes us as one of the season’s best wedding trends. Actually, calligraphy has been a popular design element for, oh, several hundred (or thousand?) years, but we’ve been seeing calligraphy a whole lot in our favorite wedding invitations this year. Though script fonts are great, nothing – absolutely nothing! – compares with hand lettered calligraphy, where every single letter is a totally unique work of art. Bella Figura’s calligrapher is the amazingly talented Debi Zeinert, who has been making our letterpress brides so happy for years now.
So for the next few posts, we’ll focus on some really gorgeous calligraphy invitations. Let’s start with this Nonpareil invitation – it’s honestly one of the prettiest things we have ever seen! And what an inspired customization too (check out the Nonpareil original invitation here). It’s true, we’re letter junkies over here, but check out the calligraphy accents: look at that A! The M! Just lovely. Clients can choose from about 10 different styles of calligraphy, but this style (the Clermont style) feels perfect: modern, elegant, with a little bit of cool. Also note that both the reply information AND reception information is on the invitation itself – it’s eco (less paper!) and keeps cost down too (no reply card/envelope/reception card to worry about!). Colors are black & fuchsia – so perfect!
We think it’s smart to do the thank you note and coaster in 1 color, to keep costs down. If you’re trying to save money, keep the 2 color design for the invitation, and do the rest of the pieces in 1 color.
Learn more about letterpress calligraphy designs at Bella Figura, or about having your envelopes addressed by our calligrapher as well.
{The wedding of Elizabeth & Felicia // Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon Bay, California // Circolo 2 letterpress wedding invitation design in champagne and pewter}
Our client coordinator Andrea had the great pleasure of working with Elizabeth (Eaz) to help choose the perfect wedding invitation for her ultra luxurious event. At first, Eaz was a bit skeptical about working with us exclusively by email and phone, but we are so happy that they did! Upon receiving their letterpress samples, Eaz and Felicia opted for the fun Circolo 2 design printed in champagne and pewter. The invitations coordinated perfectly with the charger plates they used and helped influence incredibly beautiful and personal details throughout their wedding. The couple infused their day with meaningful details that make it one of our favorite Bella Figura weddings to date.
Eaz and Felicia incorporated so many lovely details. Among their favorites were the rocks they used as place cards that were hand-painted by Felicia’s best man. They provided pretty custom embroidered handkerchiefs for all the happy tears and opted for flamenco guitar music in lieu of traditional wedding music during their ceremony. They had matching custom Converse All Star sneakers to wear after the ceremony and had a fabulously fun videobooth at their reception so guests could leave them personal video messages. The pastry chef for their wedding handmade beautiful lighted star ice bowls to serve their sorbet intermezzo and, our personal favorite, the matching chargers and invitations!
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To further celebrate the Somersby design, here is a letterpress save the date in super sweet colors: daffodil & pewter. These shades of yellow and gray just joyfully sing about all that is good in summer to us. We’ve been hearing a lot about the beauty of gray lately too and you know what? Everyone raving about that color is absolutely right. Gray is sophisticated, warm, and perfect for letterpress invitations right now.
Excuse us if we gush about the colors of this letterpress wedding invitation (in the Somersby invitation design) but — we are in love with these colors! The inks are perfect and stylish and sophsticated shades of pink: papaya & fuchsia that play off each other and interact in this lovely way. And check out the reply card – mainly papaya, but with a line of fuchsia (wow!). Monochrome colors will be a hot wedding trend for 2009, we’re predicting. You choose a color, then choose shades of those colors, and then everything looks perfect together. Monochrome colors offer a clean, eye-pleasing look, and make choosing flowers, decor, and even bridesmaid dresses easier (choose any shade of pink, for instance!). Monochrome letterpress wedding invitations are (trust us) also very, very pretty. Enjoy!
Bella Figura has just become part of Style Me Pretty’s Little Black Book. Hooray! In SMP’s words, “The Little Black Book shows off the most innovative and chic wedding professionals on the planet” and we couldn’t agree more. It’s an excellent and very curated list of the best wedding vendors nationwide and internationally. Michelle, the gatekeeper for the Little Black Book, mentioned she receives over 300 emails a day, many from vendors requesting a spot in the LBB, so we’re just thrilled to be included in this important wedding resource.
Below is a photo montage we made for SMP, featuring some of our favorite letterpress things of late. (pictured, from top left going clockwise: Amici letterpress wedding invitation; our letterpress ink books included with sample orders; a custom international letterpress invitation; Festoon; the Estrella coaster; Deveril; Avant edge painting; the Fieno letterpress reply card; and in the center, us hard at work letterpress printing)
Check out this very cool video about….our letterpress print shop! The video comes from Luke Walker Photography, one of the best wedding photographers (and videographers it turns out too!) out there. We met Luke back in 2006, when he lived nearby in the Finger Lakes and (gorgeously and beautifully) photographed the weddings for two of our Bella couples. (You can see Luke’s photos from Megan & Matt’s Aurora, NY wedding here) Luke visited our print shop a little while ago with his video equipment in tow, and it was a true pleasure getting to chat with him over the afternoon. Thanks for making the trip out to Syracuse, Luke, to see Bella Figura! (Want to see more letterpress printing videos right now? Check this one out too….)
Snippet & Ink, one of our favorite wedding blogs, comes up with some of the most creative wedding inspiration out there. Kathryn’s color combinations are just to die for, and will inspire your wedding, your home, your sense of style, and your life. So we were thrilled when Snippet & Ink created this inspiration board below that features our Festoon letterpress wedding invitation. Visit Snippet & Ink to win a $350 gift certificate to Bella Figura (contest goes until Friday, January 30). You can also check out Snippet & Ink’s favorite Bella Figura designs here. Enjoy!
Here’s a sweet keepsake letterpress coaster that would fill any guest with joy. The design is from our Majorca letterpress wedding invitation suite. (see more photos of our letterpress coasters here)
Here are two more variations of our bestselling Deveril letterpress invitation design: an elegant letterpress save the date in navy, and a letterpress menu, tied with a ribbon & finished with a jewel (wow!). We love the Deveril design for a lot of reasons, but in part we love its historical and joyful nature, its sophistication, and its warm sweet energy all its own.
