Seven green ways to personalise your wedding day - Day 3

The Spring Equinox and Earth Day on April 22nd are getting closer day by day, so we thought it an appropriate time to highlight seven green ways to personalise your wedding day. On day three we suggest you:

SAVE ON PAPER
Save on paper by setting up a personal green wedding website which has every single bit of information about the wedding - the venue, transport, timeline, menu, wedding list details, accommodation, things to do in the area, and how to get there. Ask your guests to RSVP by email.

Make it really personal and find a designer from our list of incredibly talented stationary designers here and commission one to create your own eco-chic wedding stationery design, then have it hand printed on recycled paper.

Posted in Green Wedding Inspiration , Stationery & Invitations

Stationary scoop

If you're looking for some truly unique stationary for your eco friendly wedding, then look no further.

Seed.. is the brainchild of Tara Dennis, a talented designer who produces a beautifully hand screen printed range of stationary on recycled paper and card. Her attention to detail means that she even prints all the hand folded envelopes with patterns inside them and everything is finished off with a little sticker!

Tara's range is absolutely gorgeous and based on the natural environment but she is very willing to design and create a bespoke range of wedding stationary especially for you. Just contact her for details.

Tara also makes hand printed photo albums bound with ribbon, and will create one to match your chosen stationary design. Far better to commission a beautifully designed and printed hand made album to show off your green wedding photos than to have the same one as everyone else which has been shipped all the way from Australia!

Posted in Green Wedding Stationery & Invitations

Stress - by invitation only!

Posted by Vineeta & Tom - blogger bride & groom and eco entrepreneurs

This week Vineeta and I finally got around to organising our wedding invitations. I thought that this would be the one part of organising the wedding that would actually be fun. Having not been impressed by any standard invitations we had decided to make our own, and it started off great. We made a stone circle on the beach near where we are having our wedding and photographed it, then created a design on the computer.

But then we had to print them off. Wanting to minimise the environmental impact we looked for options. Commercial printing was basically out of the window, because the quantities were too small and every card was different, so it wouldn't be practical. So we'd have to print them at home, and that meant that we couldn't use vegetable based inks either. We did buy refilled cartridges from Cartridge World though.

Posted in Green Wedding Stationery & Invitations

National Tree Week

To mark National Tree Week, which starts tomorrow, and sticking to our tree theme,I thought it would be good to discuss stationery, one of the little details that, if multiplied by the number of weddings that will be held in 2008, (around 300,000 in the UK and close to 3 million in the US alone) can cause quite an impact on the environment.

Paper consumption could be considered one of the biggest environmental issues where weddings are concerned: Save the dates, invites, maps, place cards, party invites, orders of service, menus, thank you's and so on.

Emily at Eco Chic Weddings reckons that weddings could use up the equivalent of 500,000 trees a year or an area 11 times the size of Manhattan - I'd love to know where she got that stat!

Anyway, my plea to every green couple is to think twice about how you use your paper, at the least choose FSB certified, recycled paper or paper derived from another source like ellie poo or sheep poo (yes it really does exist!), make your own and embed seeds in it or go paperless and use the internet for all your web savvy guests.

If you're not the creative type then we have some wonderfully talented earth friendly partners whose stationery will make every heart sing.

Posted in Green Wedding Stationery & Invitations

New discoveries

Just over a week ago I visited the Designer Wedding Show in Battersea Park, London, in the hopes of discovering some indie gems who have earth friendly leanings and I wasn't disappointed. Tucked among the usual businesses were three inspiring newcomers offering top quality design and skills to eco chic couples.

Lottie Girling says she doesn't give a fig for today's trends and prefers to follow her own rules. Her handbags and corsages are truly to die for, created and handmade by Lottie herself using antique trimmings, collected buttons and 'a touch of magic'.

Matt and Kate Keeling of Katkin-Rose have combined their graphic and fashion backgrounds to produce a gorgeously designed range of wedding stationary which can all be printed on eco friendly papers using vegetable inks.

Emma Embery makes luxury wedding accessories which combine vintage fabrics with hand crafted embellishments. Emma launched her business because she felt there was a need for unique and original hand-crafted one-off pieces.

Not new but a must too was LPM Bohemia, a tent company with a difference whose friendly feeling yurts are made from oiled English oak, chestnut and ash harvested from local forests and covered with waxed cotton. All the wood is sustainably sourced.

Posted in Green Wedding Marquees & Tents , Shoes & Accessories , Stationery & Invitations