Ajalon Printing & Design:: Vendor Feature

I received an email a few months ago from Trish Jackson of Ajalon Printing & Design about featuring their letterpress wedding invitations on my site. While I typically focus on local vendors, not all of my readers are local, and I know that I spent most of my time online when I was planning my wedding. Trish was kind enough to send me some samples to photograph and I picked my favorites to feature.

If you order by April 30th, 2010, you can get 100 invitations with blank envelopes and 100 RSVP postcards for $439 (We used RSVP postcards for our wedding invites and it cuts back on the postage for the RSVP and invite weight pretty significantly).

style Avani

Fleur Reception Card

Jessica Invitation

Rana 1

Anne RSVP card

Sindhu Thank You cards

Feel free to check out the rest of their designs on Ajalon's gallery. Some of my other favorites are the Laura, Jennifer, and Baroque. Ajalon is located in Santa Rosa, California, but are available online for everyone and at a really great price!

GIVEAWAY from Night Owl Paper Goods

Comment below for a chance to win this prize pack from Night Owl Paper Goods which includes an assortment of letterpress cards, postcards, and gift tags. The items are pictured below.

If you missed yesterday's feature about Night Owl Paper Goods, click here.

Please include your email address so that we will have a way to contact you if you win! I wish you owl luck!

Enter by Thursday, March 11th for a chance to win!


Boom! This just in from NOPG:: 

Night Owl Paper goods is running a 24-hour sale at jasmere.com starting at NOON ET TODAY that’s going to give you the opportunity to pick up a $50 coupon code for up to 70% off that you can use toward ANYTHING in the store, including custom and wedding items! It’s the perfect opportunity to save a bundle on your invitations and pick up some goodies and gifties at the same time! 


(It's basically like a deal where you buy a gift card for less than the value of the giftcard, and the more people that sign up, the cheaper it is for everyone! I'm game for that, and I'll be in possession of $50 worth of night owl paper goodies soon!)

And the really cool part is that the more people who buy, the more everyone saves, so spread the word!

Be sure to check it out at jasmere.com, starting at 12pm ET TODAY, March 4th! 

Night Owl Paper Goods:: Local Vendor feature:: Homewood, Owlabama

Night Owl Paper Goods is a letterpress company based out of Homewood, Owlabama, and they were gracious enough to humor me with an interview! They have a very cute whimsical collection complete with clever puns and  I bought some of their letterpressed Thank You cards a few months ago when I was finishing up wedding thank yous and they are absolutely gorgeous. Night Owl Paper Goods are also known for their wooden postcards and invitations, a really unique way to communicate with your friends!

 Night Owl Paper Goods' amazing designers, Jennifer and Alan. 

How did Night Owl Paper Goods find its origins here in Homewood, Owlababa? Why the owl?

The image of two owls on a limb is a self-portrait of sorts. While working together at a design firm and art gallery here in Birmingham, Jennifer and Alan daydreamed about starting their own stationery company. At first, they pursued our dream after hours, moonlighting for friends who needed invitations, logos and letterhead—any project they could print themselves. 

In 2004, they went out on a limb to start Night Owl Paper Goods. Six years later, the company is still thriving! With a passion for fine craftsmanship, detail and the environment, they're totally devoted to creating handmade letterpress cards and eco-chic wooden goodies in a style we like to call "modern yet folksy." 

Both Alan and Jennifer illustrate the entire line of greeting cards, journals, jotters and totes by intermixing their critter and pattern design styles. They're very fortunate to have created a company and product line that combines everything they love: design + printing + writing + paper + wood + nature + the environment + friends + family. What a hoot!

(I ordered the owl love you forever card for my hubby on vday and the thank yous on the right for my wedding! they're owl so lovely!)

What are your (or the designers') favorite places to gather inspiration for new designs?

A few of Alan’s favorite places to gather inspiration include Japanese gift/ bookstores, the cliffs in old Del Mar, CA and the Birmingham botanical gardens. One of his favorite blogs is http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/.

Jennifer gathers inspiration anywhere there are animals: her yard, the park, the zoo. She also challenges herself to dig through every catalogue she receives in the mail – no matter how junky – in search of inspiration from it because she believes that it made its way to her for a reason!

What is the process like for ordering a custom wedding invitation or save the date from Night Owl Paper Goods?

Once you’ve selected your design, you can simply place your order online! It’s just that easy! After placing your order online, you'll email the copy for your custom wedding invitations or save the dates to us at custom@nightowlpapergoods.com.  We will work with your copy to produce a wonderful custom invitation or save the date for you, and then we’ll send digital proofs of everything for you to review. Once we have your approval, it typically takes about 3-4 weeks for any finishing touches, printing and shipping. 

If I have my own design can I have Night Owl Paper Goods print it?

We can absolutely print your design on our wooden cards! You can view our custom card options and prices online in our Custom Cards category. Simply click on any of the items to view dimensions, options, costs, timelines, art submission guidelines and more. 

In the past few of weeks we’ve created numerous custom wedding save the dates, invitations and reply cards as well as several custom business cards and even thank you postcards using individuals’ unique and lovely designs! It’s magical to see someone else’s personal artwork come to life on wood!

So, say I'm a bride and I'm not feeling creative at all! I want to pick from pre-designed invitations! What are my options?

We certainly do offer a variety of lovely wedding invitations, as well as save the dates, reply cards, place cards and more! You can view all of our selections and information in our Wedding Suites category. Peacock Blue Zinnia is the most popular!

my favorite wedding invitation styles: Blue Zinnia, circles and stems, and flowering dogwood

Now, if you see another pre-existing design in another area of our site that strikes your fancy, please let us know. We can absolutely use it to create beautiful custom invitations, reply cards, thank you cards, save the dates, jotters, gift cards, etc. When you're ready to order, you can simply select the blank wood card that you prefer from our Custom Cards category and let us know what text and existing design you'd like us to use in the "customer notes" section during check-out. If there's a layout of an existing invitation that you like, please feel free to send us a link or image as an example.

And if you don't see exactly what you're looking for, please let us know! We're continuously expanding our wedding selection, so we love to hear from our clients what they most would like to see! And besides, you never know what our designers might have up their sleeves! 

Please note that samples of our pre-designed wedding invitations are available for purchase on our Wedding Samples page. Samples are great because they give you a good feel for the dimensions and texture of the cards and also serves as a "practice card" when you're ready to start addressing your invitations. Simply indicate the quantity that you’d like and let us know in the "customer notes" section which designs you'd like to receive!

All images courtesy Night Owl Paper Goods.

Even though the company prints locally, they are available nationwide (I was super excited to see NOPG cards on a recent trip to San Francisco)! Stay up to date on the happenings at Night Owl Paper Goods by becoming a fan on facebook or following them on twitter!

Thank you so much to the staff for making this feature (and tomorrow's giveaway) possible!

Head over tomorrow for the chance to win a GIVEAWAY with a prize pack from Night Owl Paper Goods!

Letterpressed Invitations!

I realized I haven't posted pictures of our invitations yet! And I wasn't even paranoid about wedding crashers. Anywho, I really wanted letterpress invitations more than anything else and it was my big splurge. But really, not that bad. I used someone local, Jenny Barry from Press Charming, and I brought in some art nouveau books I'd bought to try and figure out a design. Jenny sent me back so many possibilities and this is what we finally decided on!



We got a 5x7 invitation with a postcard size reply card (saved on postage for the envelope and the reply! One regular 44 cent stamp was enough for the invitation (we liked the king & queen so that worked out) and we used polar bear postcard stamps for the postcards (not my favorite but we didn't really have an option and the colors didn't clash).



One annoyance with the reply cards was the post office. Their machines consistently tore off parts of the card on its journey to us, I'm guessing because of the paper used. It was pretty thick but you might need to ask for an especially hard or thick paper to avoid this if you choose letterpressed postcards. Oh, and I didn't hand cancel the invites because it would've been an extra 20 cents each, I couldn't do it myself, and the 20 cents would have to be added as extra postage. No thanks.



The reply card says

__Let us eat cake

(We'll be there)

no. Attending ___

__Off with our heads! (We can't make it!)

I didn't hear any complaints and we definitely had a few people that were tickled by it. When Garrett's mom was planning the Friday night BBQ her friends mentioned having a tagline of "let us eat BBQ".



The envelope liners. They really made the invitation in my opinion, since they added some color and pizzaz, but they were a little bit of a pain to print. Note to all who undertake such a thing: make sure you have a printer that lets you replace the ink colors indvidually. Otherwise you will end up with a bunch of ink cartridges with just magenta and cyan ink left in them, a thinner wallet, and a frowny face. Jenny was so helpful though, she designed the page and cut them for me, I just had to print and place in the envelopes. I used one of those mini adhesive dispensers (works much better than a gluestick and you get in a rhythm so it's easy).

I wish I had a picture of the addressing, but I did it myself with an ink pen (I thought about using a calligraphy pen but I liked the look of the script I chose with a pen better) and it's probably better not to let you see what I was willing to send out.



The invitation itself was a double whammy. We waited a while to order the invitations (and I'm so glad we were able to get them in time to send out 6 weeks in advance!) and so by that time we knew we'd be getting married in San Francisco and wanted to include it so that people wouldn't feel slighted or think they just weren't invited to the wedding. So, it reads:

Together with their families

Kelly Scott Merrill

and

Garrett Barton Cummings

Joyfully announce their marriage

Thursday, August 13, 2009

San Francisco, California

Please Join them to celebrate

Saturday, October 3, 2009

7:00 PM

The Summit Club

Birmingham, Alabama

Cocktail Attire

Plenty of people asked about cocktail attire because apparently it's different in everyone's mind but Garrett and I were wearing a wedding dress and suit, our mothers were wearing standard mother of the bride dresses, and my bridesmaids were in knee length silky wrap dresses. So I felt like something you would wear to a cocktail party would suffice. We didn't want people to be formal or in jeans, and I didn't see anyone inappropriately dressed. So we win. Oh, and usually you announce separately but we wanted to save money and time and breaking the rules is more fun. And it was such a tiny way to break the rules.

So, I couldn't be more pleased. We got custom, not too expensive (I think it was 3.75 for each invitation?) letterpress invitations and they were lovely! Jenny even let me crank a few because I have a not so secret crush on letterpresses.

How did you decide on your invitations?