#BBAREALBRIDE UPDATE: HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN PERSONALISED WEDDING INVITATIONS WITH ZAZZLE

It’s been 9 months since we last spoke with our real bride reporter Sophie King, best known as the founder of gals favourite hair accessory Crown & Glory. With just a few months to go until ‘W-DAY’, Sophie and her OH Gareth have been busy searching for a venue, choosing dresses, picking food choices – and then some. It has been an exciting time for the two of them and we are thrilled to have played a small part in it, as you might remember Sophie was the winner of a competition we held last year hosted by Zazzle. As part of the competition, Sophie was able to create her wedding stationery for the big day, so today we have asked her to share a peek at the final creations and tell us a little bit more about the design process.

I can’t believe it’s only 5 months to go before our wedding – so much has happened since we last spoke! We’ve done food tasting, dress picking (!), entertainment booking and vow writing, but as so much of it has been kept secret, we couldn’t WAIT to get out invites out to our friends and family so they could see exactly what we’ve been beavering away on for the last 9 months! I used Zazzle again and this time went completely bespoke – I designed the invites myself, armed with a new font suite and a few paid graphic elements that I got from another site.

As a wedding guest, one of my favourite parts is receiving the invitation. I love seeing how much thought and personality people put into their invites, keeping it pinned up in my kitchen as a reminder of the fun times ahead every time I head to the fridge. I always knew we wanted to do something special for ours – it’s our first opportunity to really set the scene for our guests – and as we’ve always described our wedding as a ‘weekend-long festival vibe’, knew they had to be inspired by music festival posters!

We decided to really go for the festival feel and themed each day ‘The Warm Up, The Headliner and The Afterparty’, with a poster style invite and ticket stye RSVP card complete with tear-off tab! The ‘poster’ has all the information on the back, given names of ‘the lineup’ and ‘admission’ to continue the festival feel. We used the RSVP to not only collect the important info of who will be attending, but also dietary requirements and a song choice for the dance floor. We’re already giggling at the thought of our guests dancing to some of them!

I had such fun designing these and uploading and ordering from Zazzle was so easy! I used the matte 12.7cm x 17.8cm invite card for the ‘poster’ and the matte 12.7 x 8.9cm invite card for the ticket. Both were printed on ‘laid’ paper which has a really lovely luxurious feel. To create the tear-off tab we used a rotary perforator and a ruler.

Our phones haven’t stopped buzzing with excitement since we sent out the invites – one friend even said ‘with all due respect to everyone who’s gotten married recently, these are the best damn invites I’ve ever seen!’ It’s so lovely that our friends and family are sharing our excitement of our impending nuptials, all thanks to our Zazzle invites!