Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Taffy comes from a very artistic family. He’s a painter and a product designer, and both of his brothers are talented graphic designers. We were thrilled when Mr. T’s older brother (and our best man) offered to design our save the dates and invitations.

But our good luck didn’t stop there!

He also offered to hand-print our save the dates and invitations, using the ever popular Gocco. As an artist and a Weddingbee reader, I know what a huge undertaking this is. I feel like we are getting good karma for all of the sewing that I have lovingly done for my friends’ weddings.

I started gathering inspiration for our save the date cards right away. I didn’t have too much planning going on, but these were three things we had decided on:

1. Our colors were going to be a shade of blue (which shade, I wasn’t quite sure), with black accents.
2. Our cake design- this was the first thing that Mr. T and I saw and fell in love with.
3. I was hoping to find bridesmaid dresses with a black sash or bow around the waist.

I also drew heavy inspiration from this cute (Mr. Taffy thinks it’s creepy) knick-knack that I bought at a thrift store a few years ago. It is a plastic hand in a vertical position that holds up the index finger. Around the index finger is a cute string tied in a bow, and it reads, “don’t forget” in script. You can clip little notes onto the finger.

Here are some other images with the same idea:

image source

image source

We decided that we wanted the string around the finger motif to be the main inspiration for Mr. T’s brother, and thought it was a great way to bring the black sash and dress bow accent into place.

Now we had one main source of inspiration for our save the dates to give Mr. Taffy’s brother, but we wanted to give him another source, and our cake graphic seemed to be the natural choice.

How we found the inspiration for our cake:

Right after we got engaged, Mr. T and I went to Barnes & Noble to look at wedding magazines. We both saw this cake from InStyle weddings, and immediately fell in love. It is so simple, and the graphic is so fun and cute! We knew that this would be the cake for us, even before we found a venue. I didn’t expect to find a lot of ideas straight out of the magazines, but this cake is a perfect fit for our style and color scheme!

Image scanned from In Style Weddings Spring issue, 2008

I couldn’t believe the resemblance that this cake had to a hand painted ring holder I had five years ago! I guess it was meant to be!

I emailed Mr. T’s brother images of our inspiration. He knew that we were shooting for a blue, black, and white color scheme.

A few weeks later, he sent us some files with his ideas.

We love it!!!

We are so incredibly grateful that he offered to design and print these for us. This summer we took a road trip to Minneapolis to see Mr. T’s brother, and while we were there we did some Taffy wedding stationary research. We took a trip to Paper Source to choose paper, and an art supply store to choose the Gocco ink he would use with the actual prints.

Did you have a hand in designing your save the dates?