Here is another great version of the Deveril letterpress wedding invitation— this time in classic black ink with gold edge painting (the edge painting made all of us here swoon….just perfect!). Black ink, by the way, shows no signs of losing its elegance or popularity for this wedding season. Enjoy these photos of winter sunlight!
Southern Weddings magazine calls our letterpress signature cocktail recipe coasters a “must have for your big day and the happily ever after.” They go on to say, “These beautiful letterpressed coasters would surely be the talk of your cocktail hour with fun drink recipes included on each beautiful piece.”
The Deveril letterpress wedding invitation has been one of true loves ever since we first printed the sample – it’s a customer favorite too, and we love seeing how clients customize the design. For the next few days, we’ll highlight some cool variations of the classic Deveril invitation design. We’ll start with a really fun idea – printing each piece in an invitation suite using a different color ink – the invite in navy, the reply card in garden, the reception card in fuchsia. It’s such a great twist on the usual 1-color letterpress invitation – fun, festive, but still really elegant.
Watch our letterpress wedding invitation Duet be printed on Bella Figura’s cool antique Heidelberg Windmill letterpresses in this just-released video — filmed, edited, and produced by us. Of course, the usual printing process of wedding invitations takes all day — or takes days, depending on the size of an invitation suite. But thanks to some fancy editing, this movie runs just over three minutes. Next up: our 2 hour letterpress feature-length film? Our artisan 10 hour mini-series? We’ll keep you posted.
The wedding of Patricia & Richard // in Pollenzo, Bra, Italy (a very small town in Piemonte Italy and home to the Slow Food University) // Empire letterpress wedding invitation in emerald green
Our client coordinator Andrea handled the coordination of the save the dates, invitations, and reception pieces for this gorgeous destination wedding. Andrea writes: “Patricia has been one of my biggest joys here at Bella Figura. Since our first contact, each morning I looked forward to sharing snippets of Italian in our emails and learning more about her beautiful wedding in Pollenzo, Italy. Her proposal story is one that I have shared and shared again (I’m sure other Bella staff could retell it better than me at this point) and upon seeing photos of her wedding I teared up. There is no more rewarding feeling than to grow fond of someone while helping them during one of their happiest times, and then finally seeing who they are and getting to peek at such a marvelous day. Words simply cannot express the joy that working here brings.” We talked with Patricia more about her incredible celebration….
What was your inspiration for your wedding?
Rick and I are both of Italian heritage. During the years that we dated, we sometimes talked about a ‘little wedding’ in a hilltop town in Italy somewhere. We traveled together to Milan and Torino, visiting the Lakes Region and Piemonte and fell in love with the region, the food and wine and most importantly the people. We knew it would be a memorable trip for our family and dearest friends.
We’ve been a big fan of Frolic’s blog for awhile — beautiful and dreamy photography and lots of inspiration for weddings & life & design. So we were blown away when we heard that Chelsea, Frolic’s editor, is starting to donate 5% of their sponsor fees to charity. Way to go!!! Imagine if all small (and large) businesses did the same….how could the world not get better? (Photos above, spotted by Frolic: on the left, a Gabrielle Revere photograph from Bust magazine, inspired by Twin Peaks. On the right, photo by Cherry Blossom Girl). (By the way, check out Frolic’s sweet post about Bella Figura’s new site, and see Frolic’s favorite BF invitation designs here)
The first issue of Southern Weddings just hit the news stands and, wow, is it a gorgeous magazine. We were so excited that our recipe letterpress coasters are featured as one of Southern Weddings fabulous finds (“must have’s for your big day and the happily ever after”). Southern Weddings writes, “These beautiful letterpressed coasters would surely be the talk of your cocktail hour with fun drink recipes included on each beautiful piece.” You can make these coasters double-sided by including the bride’s & groom’s names and the date on the reverse side. What a cool keepsake…
Here are a few other photographs of our favorite letterpress coasters. Have fun dreaming!
We’ve always loved letterpress wedding invitations in 1 color — elegant & sophisticated and, if the ink is right on, it’s just perfect. And the good news, if you’re on a budget: 1-color letterpress is always less expensive than 2-color designs (and keep in mind you can print the invitation in 2 colors, and the accessory pieces in 1 color). Almost all of our 2-color wedding invitation designs can be printed in just 1 ink, but here are our some of our favorite 2009 letterpress invitations featuring just one perfect single color.
1-color designs pictured below, starting in upper right hand corner, going clockwise: Marais // Cartoccio // Urbanity // New Calligraphy // Birds // Sevilla
It’s official, our 2009 website is here! We’ve overhauled everything on our website and also improved many of our policies and customizations. We will usher in 2009 with a quicker turnaround time, new color-accurate liners, new self-sealing pocketfolds, better pricing on letterpress printing, and (best of all) over forty new letterpress invitation designs!
We hope that you like all the changes, and welcome any feedback you might have. Go ahead and leave comments on this blog post if you have any thoughts, and please let us know if you discover any problems while browsing our site.
The fun doesn’t stop here, either: we have more improvements coming to the website by Spring, 2009, most notably the ability to place and track your custom printing orders online. At this very moment, are your precious letterpress invitations on a printing press or their edges being hand-painted? You’ll never be left guessing again!
So thanks for visiting, we hope you love the new site, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts. Happy holidays!
Every day our Bella Figura clients are inspirations to us. They have good tastes in invitations, of course, but they also have amazing talents at planning fabulous weddings. So with our new web site, we wanted to start profiling some of the best weddings of our clients. We’re just thrilled that our first Bella Figura real wedding is this lovely couple, Allan & Brian, with a really spectacular wedding. When we saw photographs from their celebration at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, all of us here were just floored by the creativity of everything about the wedding. Allan & Brian choose the Circolo 2 design in cardinal and pewter, and their invitation really captured the spirit of their wedding. And then Allan sent us some amazing writing about the wedding too, the importance of the ceremony, and his thoughts about love that described, for us, what weddings are really about.
What was your inspiration for the wedding?
The arts are very important to us, which is one important reason why we chose Disney Concert Hall as the venue. We also both have an affinity for the music and styles of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. We wanted an event that was stylish and elegant but also fun. We opted for a black tie-optional champagne cocktail event. We love art deco style, so we wanted something inspired by that sensibility. But because the concert hall is so modern, we didn’t want a slavish re-creation of art deco. Instead, we wanted a fusion which was a challenge to pull off, but ended up working really well.
Tell us about the proposal.
It would be great if there were a story with lightning bolts or roses or bended knee in the moonlight. However, after 18 years together there was no such moment. Actually, we were quite surprised when the California Supreme Court handed down a decision allowing same-sex marriage in the state. Beginning that evening, friends and family started calling to ask, “So, are you going to do it?” We were both surprised to discover that we had repressed how much we wanted to get married — how important it was to have an event that included the people who mattered most to us. And so after a few days of weighing the options (such as a small ceremony at the county clerk office) we decided we wanted a real wedding. And, with Proposition 8 on the November ballot, we felt we had a brief window in which we could confidently plan something.
We love traditional rectangular letterpress invitations, of course, but we’re predicting a twist on the traditional: square and horizontal wedding invitations. Both sizes feel very fresh and stylish to us right now.
square designs pictured below, starting in the upper right, going clockwise // Festoon // Amici // Ella // Irving
horizontal designs pictured below, starting in the upper right, going clockwise // Silhouette // Mimosa // Ericka // Onalisse
What’s going to be hot in the letterpress wedding invitation world for 2009? Well, we looked into our crystal letterpresses and our first prediction is…
Edge painting. What is it? Originally reserved for the finest hand-bound books, edge painting has a rich history in the letterpress world. For centuries, master book binders would gild the edges of books with gold–or paint an actual illustration on the edge of the book’s pages–to show just how precious a particular book was. We’ve put a modern spin on this practice by hand painting the edge of our invitations with our Bella inks. You’ll see the color on the outside edge of the piece, but not on the front or back of the paper. Because the cotton paper we print on is so thick, edge painting can be a great way to highlight a color in your invitation set,or add an entirely new ink. (read more about edge painting wedding invitations here)
designs pictured below, starting in the upper right, going clockwise // Avant with cardinal edging // Festoon with pool edging // Urbanity with silver edging // Irving with fuchsia edging // New Calligraphy with cardinal edging // Birds with navy edging
