Have we got something lovely up our sleeve for you today! We climbed right out of the box with this one and had an amazing bride giving us awesome direction… a vintage still life e-save the date. Oh we cannot wait to use some of these gorgeous details (the postage stamp!) on their wedding invitations!
Gorgeous couple, Annemi & Etienne got married at Nooitgedacht a few weeks back and we got to help Royal Blu (oh they did SUCH an amazing job with the decor and flowers!) pretty up with some stationery. Nikki Meyer captured it just perfectly!
Together with our brides and grooms, we are still not over airmail prettiness! Especially when we can team the simple postcard up with gorgeous hand made envelopes! Love love LOVE! (And cannot wait to get started on their invitation.. it’s going to be awesome! YAY!)
Ane & Llwelyn’s wedding invite was blogged and pinned all over the place, but wait till you see their picture perfect wedding! Gorgeously down to earth details in natural wood and kraft was beautifully captured by Picturemeandu and I just love how every little element is 100% THEM.
We adore the wedding favors, self-proclaimed tree-huggers Ane & Llwelyn gave their lucky guests. Oh, and spot the silkscreened menu packets! PLUS, did we mention how gorgeous these two people are?!?
We are so excited to share these super cute save the dates we recently did for Kerryn & Matt with you!
Annemari Ruthven took the gorgeous images and it was impossible to pick just one, so we used a variety instead. The photos were SO beautiful they were even featured on The Pretty Blog… and once you see them you will understand what a hard time we had in picking our faves! ;)
When we made Katy and Stephen’s save the date, we knew we had struck gold. These two are just.the.coolest most fun, easy-going, awesome to work with, creative and darling couple. How I WISHED I was living in Aus to stalk these two and hopefully become besties ;) Cause they rock! (Okay, not stalk… but you know what I mean…)
We had such a blast with their invitations: letterpressed kraft goodness, an illustrated love story and loads of fun bits, all tied together in a neat little twine bundle. YAY! Hope you love them too!
How lovely to design an invitation that reminds of old school love letters. Textured paper, subtle colours, the iconic airmail motif letterpressed on hand made envelopes… oh so much prettiness! We cannot wait to get started on the stationery for their vintage Red Ivory wedding!
First we got to create the awesomest silkscreened balloon save the dates (goodie, they used them in the portrait session!), then we designed one of our all time favorite wedding invitations and THEN we had the privilege of being involved in the stationery for the day. Oh man, the goodness of this wedding “starts in your toes makes you wrinkle your nose”. It’s that good! ;)
I have never seen a couple that makes cool look so effortless! Check how they are rocking those glasses in the confetti shots! ;) Love it!
Thank you Liza and Nico for being super stars and thank you Blackframe Photography for capturing their special day just perfectly. Check our more of their photos here
In my heart of hearts I believe what goes around, comes around. And the miracle of these photos by Christine Meintjies proves it!
Reading the story of how Christine and Abi thought that their beautiful wedding images were gone for good, after all Christine’s gear and backups were stolen from their her home (how sad and terrible!!) gives one goosebumps. But miracles do happen! YAY! Read the story here.
Abigail was a absolute darling to work with… and we were happy-dancing with her when her gorgeous wedding photos were miraculously recovered.
We created this fab electronic save the date for Francois & Antoinette’s spring day wedding soirée, last year. Just started on their wedding invitation and we are SO excited, it is going to be lovely! Antoinette has an incredible eye for pretty detail, striking colours and bold design (plus, we haven’t met her in person, but her emails make us feel totally warm and fuzzy inside - she’s a darling!)
Jeanine & Roan got married at the beautiful Rhebokskloof in Paarl and celebrated amongst hundreds of tulips. SO lovely!
Images by Finishing Touch.
Don’t you just love Nina & Michael’s dreamy, vintage wedding on Nina’s family farm in Velddrift? Close friend to Nina, Nicola Pretorius (yup, from The Pretty Blog) styled this gorgeous wedding and Christine Meintjes captured it just perfectly!
We just love the doilie-themed stationery!
I don’t often feature our more classic designs, but this clean, beautiful design filled to the brim with pretty makes me want to jump up and down! Thank you Siskha & Jan-Linde for letting us create this for you!
We created this vintage save the date for Elsabe & Christiaan’s farm wedding (they are getting married on Elsabe’s family farm in the Nuy Valley… isn’t it sweet!?). Inspired by our ticket format invitations that has been so popular, we created these gorgeously rustic invitations. Still not over kraft paper!
Decadent swirls and flourishes in mint and gold set against a faint chevron and finished off with a touch of sparkle! Oh we love it!
I have been wanting to blog, Lynette and Kobus’ AMAZING wedding for quite some time now. Yesterday it was featured on Ruffled and I just decided to jump on the celebratory band wagon and show you all how cool it was!
You might remember their cooler-than-cool save the date and their kicking-it-old-school post card invitation that they were brave enough to pop in the post as is. AND you will also remember how I couldn’t stop blabbering on how awesome these two people are. Well, have a look at their wedding – filled to the brim with joy and love, creativity, laughter, relaxed style, friends and family. What is not to love? Creating their wedding stationery couldn’t be more fun!
Photos by dream team welovepictures
Now you might remember Tracey and Andrew’s save the date from here… it was so much fun taking this design even further to create a beautiful wedding invitation with a downloadable magazine style information booklet. We just know this wedding (in Elgin, our favourite!!) is going to be a stunner!
Oh wowee, our favourite things all rolled up into one delightful package: hand illustrated patterns, hand fonts and letterpress! YAY! We loved working with our friend Gerhard from This Pencil to come up with this beautiful invitation for the fab couple Bonnie and Antonie!
Architect + Nature Lover = super awesome woodsy wedding and we got to play, experiment and have some fun on this invitation. Ane is also one of those amazing clients that pushed us right out the box, and we love her for that. In short, we LOVED working on this invitation! Oh, and it is even prettier in person!
Jeepers, this invite is LONG overdue! ;) We have been pretty busy which only means we have stacks of new things we can’t wait to share! First up is Bianca & Rikus’ festive invitation! All that bunting, hearts and swirlyness just makes you want to take your shoes off and have a party, doesn’t it?!
Every now and then I get a request from a client who knows exactly what they want - Chantel & Rigard was such a couple and I LOVED their ideas. They spotted this and knew they wanted to base their design on this gorgeous concept. It is especially cute, since Rigard is a photographer (and just check how AMAZING the images he took of their invitations turned out! WOWZERS!)
Oh my goodness, few things beat white silkscreen on kraft! We were delighted to be able to create this save the date for the lovely Katy and her lucky fiance. With save the dates this awesome, we cannot wait to get started on the invitations!
Nina and Nicholas totally love owls and so do we (admittedly we know way less about these feathery friends than they do though) so we had great fun creating this cute wedding invitation for their special day! Isn’t it fun?
Abigail & James have such incredible taste and style; simple elegance. So we kept to a clean letterpress wedding invitation and added sketches to the map to give their guests flying in from abroad a taste of what to expect with this Allee Bleue wedding.
I have mentioned the wonderful Monique before when we did her save the date - gosh, do I love working with her! She has such style and sophistication but there is also plenty of room for romance and fun. I cannot wait to see how this wedding at Kleinevalleij turn out!
It is with oodles and oodles of excitement that I write this little post - my brother and perfect-match-girlfriend got engaged! I am not sure if he went down on one knee (hie hie) but he proposed in a trailer at the AWESOME Old Mac Daddy in Elgin holding out this card we made ;) AWWWWW
I have known Hanje for most of my life, so you can imagine the delight when she phoned me up to design her and Jaco’s wedding invite!
While Hanje wanted something simple and down to earth, she still wanted to add a touch of bright, happy colour which would be echoed in the lovely bright floral arrangements she had planned. These envelope liners did just that! And a cost effective way to pretty up any old envelope!
They had lovely boarding pass save the dates (click here to have a peek!), so it was completely fitting that their wedding invite would be a passport booklet filled with beautiful photos and of course all the information guests would need for this vintage affair in Porterville.
Lehani has the most creative ideas and I cannot wait to see images of their big day!
Images of Lehani, D.J. and the totally adorable Lila, taken by Daniel J Photography
We unashamedly proclaimed our love for cool-kid-couple, Lynette and Kobus, in this post. But now we have one better - not only did we get to design in a beautiful colour palette, use awesome old school fonts and decorate with happy bunting, we also got to collaborate with dream team, welovepictures! And didn’t they just capture a perfect moment with these two love birds?
Love the postcard design that was dropped into lucky postboxes as is. No need for envelopes or added fuss - simple does it!
Man, do I have a treat for you today! ;) I know we say it often, but WOHOO-bouncy-bouncy-YAY did we LOVE working on this wedding invitation for Cacey & Jimmy!
We loved illustrating their story from proposal (while on a hectic trail run!) to their travels, their pre-wedding honeymoon through South East Asia up until the actual wedding ceremony which will be held in the magical Hogsback. And the colour palette is just perfect, isn’t it?
We get a lot of great requests, pretty colour palettes and exciting ideas. We are lucky that way. ;) But WOWZERS this one was fun! A little aqua, dirty rose and melt in your mouth, butter yellow for a garden wedding in Holland.
We loved working on this one and we LOVED how it turned out. Thank you Jennifer for giving us free rein, and for Arjan who only just sniggered a little bit, but let Jennifer be, when she wanted to have her invitation made in another hemisphere!
Tracey is one of those clients that fill my heart with energy and love for what I get to do everyday. Her excited manner, keen eye for design and lovely ideas made working for her and Andrew an absolute pleasure.
What could be nicer than getting a brief for an e-save the date in duck egg blue, accompanied by the beautiful words of e.e. cummings? ;) This is how it turned out:
Seven Swans goes vintage with these postcard wedding invitations for Christiaan & Debrie. We added in all her favourite elements - birds, swirls, proteas and of course that lovely lovely blue! Isn’t the belly band just the cutest?
Wow, we cannot stop the blog posts from rolling in - we really have been quite busy creating lovely invitations for the upcoming wedding season! And we are so excited about all the different formats, colours, fonts, styles and themes!
We created these boarding pass Save the Dates for Lehani and D.J.s wedding in Porterville. Cannot wait to share the rest of their stationery set with you, but you will have to watch this space!
I met Jessica and Bonga in a coffee shop, spending quite some time on how they met, where the wedding will be held and how they are imagining this new year’s wedding and the Zulu reception 3 days later. We didn’t really have an idea of what we were going to do to at once represent them as a couple, tell their story and relate to their guests flying in from all over the world (and we mean ALL over!).
So we looked through some examples… it took just one look at Tara and Jaco’s wedding invitation, and they were in love! The bright colours set against the bare kraft paper makes for a deliciously eye-catching combo! We cut tabs on either side of the sleeve to reveal where guests should get information regarding the wedding day and where they can read more about Jessi and Bonga’a AMAZING love story. Oh and we even added a cute luggage tag for guests flying in.
We loved creating this card and we loved being part of telling your story!
Proteas, vintage pink and teal - YAY! We loved working on this invitation and the fact that we could add a few fun elements to the card to create an invitation fit for this informal feast to be held in Villiersdorp. Thank you Paula and Stefan for giving me so much creative freedom (oh and for letting me design in my most favourite colour palette!)
We LOVE our job. Yes I know that sounds icky and phoney… but it’s a simple fact: we absolutely. love. it. We get to pour hours of creative energy into making things pretty, playing with colours and fonts, elegant swirls and delightful patterns. But there is more. We get to meet the most amazing clients.
From the moment I met them, I knew that Ansone and Klaas was another couple who make me come alive with what I get to do every day. Daring and different… but simple, striking and true. We just loved creating this calligraphy invitation. It is at once elegant yet rustic, modern yet vintage… and the heart is just oh so romantic, isn’t it?
Seven Swans is excited to be part of a brand new wedding stationery portal, Invitation Gallery! Here you can browse through dozens of different styles, choose and customise your own wedding stationery without even leaving your home! A beautiful stationery set is now just a few clicks away!
We have designed a couple of lovely sets and more is still to come as we, together with Canvas Stationery Boutique, BlackCoco Designs, Mstudio, Creatus Design and Mister and Misses share the floor to make pretty stationery just another quick thing to tick off your to do list!
Some of our favourite designs yet are featured, so do go take a peep!
Today I realised that we never ever blogged about our very own Swan Wedding invitations! Jeepers!
Well, I adored the Letterpress Co’s loving touch with to die for letterpress work and handmade envelopes. To save a bit on expenses we printed the additional inserts with our local digital printers and prettied up the front of the envelopes with custom labels. Read more about the design process on our Real Life Bride feature with Cap Classique.
Kelly and Ryan had a clear idea of what they wanted for their email wedding invitation and sent me THE PRETTIEST examples of what they had in mind. Spoonfuls of soft pastels in huge helpings of bold and exciting fonts - oh we just loved working on this invitation with them.
Hope you love it too!
We. LOVE. Letterpress! So when Gitanjali Maharaj, Creative Director of The Letterpress Co send us a message for another letterpress job, we literally jump out of our seats. Especially when we get to play around with pretty fonts and elegant patterns in traditional colour palettes such as this one.
Nothing beats a good love story! And Eira and Ismail has a cute story of Varsity crush, growing up and discovering it’s true love. Now it’s finally time for their happily ever after and we had loads of fun creating this simple yet striking love booklet in a frenzy of bright colours.
Thanks to Eira and Ismail for allowing us to be part of their special day - we cannot wait to start with the rest of your stationery goodies!
You remember Mari-Leen and Johan’s super stylish lasercut wedding invitations? Well, the wedding was even more beautiful, with lovely vintage pretties by Leipzig and amazing photography by Cari.
We kept the day-of stationery simple, as Mari-Leen got gorgeous lasercut underplates and photoframes that could do no other than steal all the attention. But we had fun by creating special bridal flags for the kids on the farm, made a massive welcome board at the entrance and with Mari-Leen’s stylish eye for detail, the seating chart was a beauty. Every guest received their own menu with their name and a little thank you note at the top and tucked neatly away into a napkin.
They did a stunning job and Mari-Leen looked gorgeous (Johan was also oh-so-handsome in his dark suit!). View the wedding here.
Even we didn’t know a project could run THIS smooth! Monique has a great sense of style, but what makes her super special is how well she can communicate an idea. WOW - we didn’t even meet, but she sent us 1 email, her wording and a reference. We gave her 2 options, we made 1 change and voila!!
We love the use of bold stripes and retro fonts - it gives it that sense of vintage but still it’s modern, clean and sophisticated.
Thanks you, Monique. What a pleasure working with you! xx
Man, am I excited to be posting this save the date. Take two ridiculously cool people, mad amounts of love, an awesome wedding venue (Strandkombuis in Yzerfontein) and then add in bunting, hearts, the white washed colours of the Weskus, a band poster look (gone old school), and you get this!
TADAAAA! ;)
(need I even say how much we loved working on this project?)
Leana & Sebastian has quite a romantic love story: Leana traveled all the way from Shanghai to Los Angeles to Boston to England to meet the love of her life, Sebastian, who traveled from South Africa to England to meet the girl of his dreams. Serendipity! Oh yes!
Since this destination wedding celebrates their unique love story, the places they have lived in, their different cultures and the friends flying in from all around the globe, we created a wedding invitation which reflects just that. Although fun and slightly tongue-in-cheek, the elegant cream paper stock, fancy fonts and soft colours ensures that the invite remains sophisticated and romantic. We added little extras like the Chinese Lantern ‘stamps’ on the RSVP postcard as a reference to Leana’s heritage and airmail inspired envelope stickers. LOVE the endresult and hope you do too!
When Vanessa de Villiers called in our help with a baby shower she was organising, we literally jumped for joy, because Vanessa creates the most beautiful, creative and lovely kiddies parties… like… ever. Just see here!
We created a email invitation (which meant no rushing around to personally deliver the cards) and the “day of” stationery consisting of tags, labels and stickers were all printed at home by Vanessa herself. Saving big time on additional printing. She also took all the lovely photos and we couldn’t help but share. Well done on a lovely job (the details are just phenomenal)!
Contact Vanessa here, if you need her styling genius for a party, or would love to have her photograph your special day!
Photographer Vanessa de Villiers
Planner and Stylist Vanessa de Villiers
All Stationery Seven Swans
Cupcakes Nelle Cakes
Table linen and Bunting Christine Meintjes
Bird Sugar Bowls Secret Diary
Candy Bar Jars Malita Jouberg Catering
We created this pretty save the date for Christelle en Andre’s wedding announcement. We love proteas and Cape Fynbos too, so it was a joy working with these colours and shapes, not even to mention these lovely fonts!
You could have caught me air punching after Louw contacted me with her awesome wedding invite request. Recycled cardboard CD covers with tatoo style bird and banner. How cool!!??
Wow! What a pleasure working with this couple! Right from the word go, I knew the end result of Tershia and Darius’ wedding invitations would be stunning. Oh and I am so glad my gut feeling was right!
We created an awesome 2 colour letterpress invitation (taking little snippets from other Seven Swans stationery Tershia liked), lovingly printed by The Letterpress Co and accompanied by handcrafted tissue-lined envelopes. To save on costs the additional components were printed digitally and all tied up with a belly band announcing “you are invited”! We LOVE it!
What a pleasure it has been to work with Mari-Leen on these sophisticated wedding invitations, for their vintage pink and taupe wedding on her father’s farm in De Doorns. Mari-Leen has great style and a keen eye for detail - perfect for some lasercutting loveliness! We love the subtle touch of vintage!
Yesterday’s DIY was inspired by a fun birthday party held for a very lucky boy. You see, last year a cute little email popped into my inbox from Vanessa de Villiers. She was busy planning a dinosaur party for her 3 year old son and needed some help with the stationery - how fun!?!? Of course we would help! What can be cooler than spending your morning drawing up dinosaurs clinching bunting in their teeth?
We made an electronic email invitation to save on cost and created a few different labels which Vanessa could easily print at home. She attached these to straws, cocktail bottles (for the grown ups!) and even had a label attached to her desert-in-a-jar. We just LOVE these photos, mommy-cum-photographer, Vanessa took of the day!
We just loved Tara’s initial email telling us about her fun and relaxed wedding. Think, vintage Alice in Wonderland type wedding dress, a thrift store tie for Jaco, bursts of colour in the beautiful Wilderness area and uncomplicated details such as airplants and succulents. So we created this simple and super cost effective invitation that still has all the KAPOW factor to perfectly reflect Tara & Jaco’s special day. Hope you like it as much as we do!
We have been working on the cutest wedding invitation for Izelle & Dirk who is getting married in February at the beautiful Lynton Hall in Pennington on the south coast.
Since Izelle comes from Durban, she wanted the invitation to reflect all the south coast hotspots, almost like an activity guide for her guests who are mostly flying up from the Cape to attend. Her palette is natural, yet elegant, printed on recycled paperstock and tied together with custom made twill tape. I just love how the big tree as main element subtly refers to the awesome surroundings and ceremony venue.
This is one wedding filled to the brim with lovingly put together details. We love it!
