emruth in color

I've been working on a pretty awesome invite that I decided I needed to play with in color.

It'll get to emruth.com at some point, but I'm still working on rvsp and receptions cards and I may never get there if I just keep designing more color palettes...

Lots of work!

Hi all!

My etsy store has been steadily growing over the last few months, and I've finally finished and posted all the matching thank you cards and programs/menus/table numbers/name cards for each of my wedding invitation designs! 11 complete sets of printable wedding paper paraphernalia are now yours for the browsing.

I'm excited to go back to the drawing board and start some new designs and maybe expand past weddings to other stationary. We'll see what the summer brings!

Check out emruth.com for the whole shebang, here are just a few of my favorites!

A&T full set here

D&M full set here

M&A full set here

S&W full set here

I&L full set here

E&L full set here

R&C full set here

O&L full set here

L&R full set here

A new etsy!

Well, the same etsy, just prettier and with new things.

I'm so excited to finally have my wedding invitations up and running. It's just the beginning and I have a lot of work to do yet, but it's really fun and I'm happy to be sharing that process with you.

Oh, and I have a new blog banner too.

AND! I have a clean studio. After filling at least 4 garbage bags full of all sorts of stuff I never needed.

Living and working in the same space can be a challenge, but it works!

emruth.com

A new year, a new project!

Hello all!

I’ve got a super exciting new project coming soon! Several months ago I started working on a line of wedding invitation templates and they’re just about ready to launch on my etsy.

I love letterpress printing, foil embossing, die cuts and fancy folding probably more than than next guy, but not everyone can afford to do that. And certainly no one NEEDS to do that. In a country where the average wedding cost is $25,000, we need some options that are elegant, beautifully designed, and completely affordable.

My goal is to provide a low cost option that is beautifully designed and really easy to customize to any wedding. They are all grayscale designs - which adapt to just about any color palette, and make the printing costs essentially nothing. I’ve worked hard to make the text and graphics integrated and strong enough to stand on their own without any fussing, but color and texture can be added with paper, lace, ribbons, bows or any number of things this wonderfully DIY crazy world can come up with!

Over the last couple of years, I have had the privilege of designing wedding invitations for some family and friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. I totally fell in love with the process and the product. Basically, I love making pretty things, and what could be a better excuse to make pretty things than a wedding?

Being able to hold an actual crafted object or printed piece of paper is a wonderful feeling of accomplishment - you worked hard, and look! here’s a finished thing to prove it.  Wedding invitations have that feeling for me. They are small projects, but they result in a perfect stack of beautiful printed cards that actually mean a lot to someone. They announce a new beginning in the lives of two people and mark a celebration to be shared with family and friends. I think there is something wonderful and lasting about that!

So here are a few of my designs with some of my crafting ideas - look for them soon on my about to be updated etsy store!   emruth.com

all the best in this exciting new year!

e

A Garden Wedding

Jon and Christine's wedding took place at the Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago's semi secret botanical paradise. They were a really fun couple to work with, we had a lot of back forth with great suggestions from both sides. We collaborated on something that neither one of us would have come up with on our own, and ended up with beautiful invitations that everyone is super happy with!

Invite detail - hand drawn type

Invite

RSVP (super pretty Luxe Cream paper from PaperSource)

Lovely!
Expect to see these flowers again. And the vines - in a different project.

A Farm Wedding

This was for a wedding at farm that housed (among other things) a kookaburra and a bobcat. They got a little shout out on the rsvp, because who else gets to claim that? I was super excited when the bride and groom asked me to design these, they were very open to ideas and we have similar styles so I got to go a little crazy and design a wedding invitation suite entirely with hand drawn custom type. LOVE.

How awesome are those vintage stamps??
 I can't take credit for that one, but i have the guy's name if you're interested!

Cannot get over this lovely combination of color and texture!

calendar card/rsvp info

invitation

dessert rsvp

type detail

A Texas Wedding

It's time to get documenting that pile of wedding invites growing on my desk. The first one: Thomas and Katie's lovely rustic texas wedding on a budget. Simple, elegant typography and a few hand drawn details printed on Paper Source's chartreuse paper with paper bag envelopes. The RSVP was a website printed on the back. Total printing and trimming costs for 100 invites? $11. win!

I had a lot of fun with these, and I love that printing in gray scale makes printing costs so much cheaper. I strongly believe that you can have a beautiful, personal and well designed wedding for a lot less then average $25,000 that americans spend on weddings. It's a crazy industry, and I love that the DIY etsy crowd is helping make it affordable, way prettier, more personal, and helping independent crafters. seriously, what could be better!

ampersand and corner details drawn with my wacom tablet.

my apologies. and hand drawn typography.

Hello friends!

It has been WAY too long since we last chatted. (Sorry Aunt Ruth!) Believe it or not, this has been a productive summer for me, and I do have things to show for it. I'll finally be sharing those with you over the next few posts. I have a few new projects that I'm really excited about too, so stay tuned!

To start, here is a save the date for a wedding coming up in december. They sent me the photobooth pictures and gave me free range in the design department. I had so much fun working on them! I'm in love with the pictures, the couple took them 10 years apart, and they look fantastic in both.

So here it is:

front

back

Everything (other than the photos) is hand drawn. It's a combination of wacom drawing, and paper and pencil drawing - scanned and cleaned up. I'm really happy with them, and I'm glad I had such great material to work with! Their invitations are up next on the to-do list, and I'm excited to see where they go!

A few more images before I head out- I like to make my friends pretty typography things for their birthdays, and then take pictures.

Thanks for your patience you guys, I'll be better at keeping you up to date on my making adventures in the coming months!

Lauren & Bruce: Wedding Invitations

Lauren and Bruce, dear friends from college who are living in chicago and responsible for maintaining my sanity, were married on October 21st in the beautiful and sunny Boston, MA. They were kind enough to ask me to design their invitations and programs, and I'm so happy I could be part of making their day perfectly Lauren & Bruce!  The ceremony took place in a quintessential new england chapel, and the reception was at a cozy country club with a fantastic vintage vibe.


They're just so freaking cute, it was impossible to pick one picture. So I picked 2. (props to aguyandagirlphotography.com)

Now for the invitations. Although I didn't screen print these ones, they were just about as time consuming. But 100% worth it! We matched the feel of their wedding with a little art nouveau, some vintage lace and a a gorgeous off white butcher paper from the French Paper Company.

RSVP card

reception/map card,  front and back

And the program:

I love that you can see the texture of the paper in this shot, it really was lovely!

Congrats Lauren and Bruce! You're pretty great.

1000 paper cranes

(Aren't they cute?)

My wedding gift for Claire and Gary is finally done and delivered, and I thought I'd share. 

The japanese tradition says that folding 1000 paper cranes for a couple on their wedding day is wishing them 1000 years of happiness and prosperity.  My obsessive paper-folding tedium-loving self thought this sounded like a great plan, and a few months of continuous paper folding later, I achieved a very large pile of pretty white birds.

1000 paper cranes

I had them all folded in time for the wedding, but I was a little too last minute in figuring out how to display them, so that part didn't happen until later. It's a good thing I have a wonderful woodworking father who was more than happy to assist!

Museum glass, curved edges, tricky spacers, pretty wood.  It's the perfect addition! The inside dimension  is 10"x10"x1.5", and 1000 cranes fit inside. They're pretty tiny!

The cranes are now hanging in the VanBehm apartment, and I hope they serve as a daily physical reminder of all the prayers and well wishes offered on the part of their family and friends who have been (and will continue) supporting and cheering them on!