Deliah + Marshall | Wedding
This year, on my 26th birthday, Hook and I shot our very first wedding together as A Couple Of Night Owls. What a day! I had so much fun and it really gave me the itch to shoot more weddings asap. You can check out our full post of Deliah + Marshall’s wedding at Matakana Country Park over on our A Couple Of Night Owls blog! Hope ya’ll love them as much as we do. 
If any of you are looking for a wedding photographer (Auckland, anywhere in New Zealand, anywhere in the world!) please get in touch with us! We have some bookings coming up next wedding season which I cannot wait for! Such awesome couples with amazing style! Woo!
A Couple Of Night Owls.
So… I’ve been bit low key on the blog for a while. But I have a good reason for it. A while back I mentioned that Hook and I were going to be doing wedding photography. Well, since then we have been working on our collaboration together and today, we finally got to reveal it to the world! We are … *drum roll please* … A Couple Of Night Owls!
We spent new years eve at home together brainstorming name ideas and doing business planning. We’re such partiers. Hehehe. The next 5 days were spent doing some serious planning for our first photoshoot together. And it couldn’t have gone more perfectly! Amanda and Jeremy were amazing to work with! Below are some of my favourite shots from the shoot but you can check out the full collection over on our A Couple Of Night Owls blog.
I’m SO happy that I get to work with Hook now and I wish we had started it sooner! He’s the best! <3
So please check out our website, Facebook and/or Twitter … and keep us in mind if you or someone you know is looking for photographer with our style!
Bright delight.
I would never be able to get married, purely because I wouldn’t be able to decide whether I wanted a more structured dress or a ruffled dress. No wonder brides get so stressed out. There are way too many amazing choices out there and you can’t have it all (well you could but your wedding would more than likely not look that great).
And those colours! Woah. I’m seeing more weddings on the blogs these days that have coloured dresses instead of the traditional white/champagne colours. I love it!
Images: Monique Lhuillier 2012 Resort Collection via The Wedding Chicks
Now doing wedding photography!
How’s everyone’s weekends going? The weather here in Auckland has been a bit up and down. Yesterday was really lovely, but today… rain. I was planning on doing a little photoshoot with my cousin today but the rain put a stop to that. Will have to wait till next weekend I guess.
My boyfriend and I have started to do wedding photography! I’m pretty excited about getting into this, combining two of my favourite things – weddings and photography! We’d really appreciate if you all could keep an ear out for anyone getting married who is in need of a wedding photographer, as well as anyone interested in engagement shoots or couple shoots. For now, until we get a new site and Facebook page going, you can check out some old photography (hasn’t been updated in a while) at www.captainhook.co.nz.
- This wedding invitation suite is simply stunning! Perfect for an outdoor garden wedding. I wish I had illustration skills like Anna’s from Rifle Paper Co.
- These downloadable ‘hello’ gift tags from Shimtokk are very cute! Great way to jazz up some simple gift wrapping.
- Any of my close friends will know what my drink of choice is and now it comes in a macaron flavour?! I will HAVE to try out this lemon, lime and bitters macaron recipe when I’m allowed to eat things again.
- Big fan of anything to do with washi tape, so finding new ways to use it is always fun! Check out this DIY washi tape flatware post. They’d be really cute for a small dinner party or picnic.
- Wishing my hair had nice waves in it so I could pull this 3 twists hairstyle off! Not quite sure it would work with my straight hair but I might give it a go.
- It’s Yellow Week over at Hello, Friend and they’ve been posting some great yellow inspiration for it. I particularly love the DIY gift wrap/packaging and the DIY jar decorating posts.
Hacked.
What an interesting past few days…
I spent all weekend and Monday night assembling wedding invitations. Trimming, double-sided taping, creasing, folding, circle cutting, envelope stuffing and packaging them all up so that they can travel all the way to Australia. Thank you to Carly for helping me with that! I posted them yesterday morning and I hope they arrive in perfect condition! Never can trust the couriers though. I just checked the tracking… they left New Zealand at 2.45am! 
Yesterday I went to write this post only to find a big warning pop up saying that i had malicious content on my site! Booooooo. I got hacked. 
Luckily my boyfriend is pretty much the best. He instantly took my site down, found the hacked bits, fixed them all and got it back up and running that evening. The best. <3
Now it’s Wednesday night and I’m about to get cracking on a little mini project to help my friend out. Should be fun. And I’m SUPER looking forward to Friday as it’s day one of We Can Create! Couldn’t be more excited! I pretty much live for this two day event every year. Can’t wait to see Sara Blake‘s exhibition and the Foxes indie market!
Might be a little quiet on here for a few days… If you’re lucky you will get a weekend links post on Sunday. Hehehe.
My first feature!
I woke up this morning to find that my passport wedding invitation had it’s very own feature post on Paper Crave!
Check out the post here!
So so so happy! I’ve had such fantastic feedback about my invitation and couldn’t be more pleased. I cannot wait to do more fun wedding invitation designs to follow this one up!
Miche and Steve say ‘I do’.
Check out the amazing stop motion movie of my co-worker Michelle and her new hubby Steve’s wedding day. So super cute!
The passport wedding invitation that I designed for them (you can see the full post about the invitation here) features at the start of the movie. It’s doing a fun little dance. Hehe.
Michelle looked absolutely stunning and her dress was gorgeous! She got it made so that the bottom half came off and it turned into a sweet cocktail version of her wedding dress. AWESOME!
My friends Si and Soph of Bayly & Moore did the fantastic photography. They are the kings/queens of stop motion. You should check them out. If you’re getting married in New Zealand you should definitely consider them for your wedding photography, they’re the best!
Cannot wait to see the photos from their special day!
P.S. The song playing on this video is Love Love Love by Avalanche City
Enjoy your journey.
Just wanted to show you all the sticker labels, table seating chart and place cards I created for Michelle’s travel themed wedding. You can check out the invitation I designed here.
To go with the travel theme, the place cards were made to look like luggage tags that matched the rest of the wedding suite. Each table was named a specific event or place they had been to during their travels together, so guests ended up with a destination like ‘Ibiza, Spain’ or ‘Rugby Sevens, Wellington’.
The names and destinations were printed onto the labels in teal, in the same font used for the ‘Enjoy your journey’ message.
Michelle’s mother made some little cookies for the wedding favours so Michelle got some of those sealable clear plastic bags. Each bag contained two cookies and I designed a sticker label to wrap around it.
The favours were meant to be sort of like the little packet of peanuts you get on a flight, so the message ‘Enjoy your journey’ was added to the labels.
The table seating chart was made to look like an arrivals board at an airport which was kind of fun!
Can’t wait to see the final photos that Bayly & Moore took on the day!
A beach bach wedding invitation.
I’ve finally managed to keep a blog post goal! I promised to have a wedding invite post up this weekend and here it is! …Even if it is an hour till it’s Monday…. Slowly getting the hang of this blogging business hehe.
So, shortly after Michelle (the bride who I did the passport wedding invitation for) had sent out her invitations, she started getting some great feedback. Everyone seemed to really love them and she asked me if I wanted more wedding invitation design jobs. I jumped at the chance, as I want to bulk up my portfolio.
Michelle’s bridesmaid, Stacey, was getting married extremely soon and wanted a simple invitation made up asap. The wedding venue was their family bach, so naturally the theme became the beach.
The green and silver colour palette was chosen because Stacey’s dress was to be silver and the bach is painted green. I complimented them with blue tint version of the green and a navy blue. Yummy!
I found a silver card in Gordon Harris which worked perfectly with the green. When the green was printed over the silver it had a really gorgeous sheen to it. I paired that up with a matching silver envelope and silver washi tape to close it up (the washi tape turned out to be the exact same silver too!).
I used a pair of starfish as the main feature of the design, as they will be having starfish and shells on/around their wedding cake and as decorations.
The back of the invitation I kept silver and it carried the accommodation and gift information, as well as a location map that I created. I used a little starfish to mark the spot of the venue.
Stacey sourced some bunny tail grass – such a classic NZ beach feature – and attached them to the invite with a bow of raffia. Looked really great!
It all came together quite quickly but I’m really pleased with how it turned out. I think the green colour on the silver card is what made it for me! Hope you all like it!
Wedding invitation obsessed!
Most people that know me are well aware that I am obsessed with weddings and invitations. So naturally I really wanted to have a go at designing a wedding invitation myself.
My co-worker Michelle is getting married within the next two weeks and at the end of last year I bugged her into letting me design her one. They already had a bit of an idea of the theme they wanted; their journey. After a few discussions it was decided to let their travels be part of the inspiration, so the invitation was to be a passport to their wedding.
Michelle’s favourite colour is teal, so the colour theme for the wedding was to revolve around teals and turquoises. She found this amazing teal card in a scrapbook store, that had a line grain texture on one side, which turned out to be perfect for the cover of the passport.
The story of how Michelle and Steve got together is a sort of on-going joke with their friends… When they first got together, Steve wowed Michelle with his vast knowledge of mangroves. Yes. Mangroves. They wanted to have a mangrove design somehow incorporated into the invitation, since that is where their journey began, so I designed a circular stamp style motif that contained Michelle’s mangrove design to go on the front of the passport where the coat of arms usually goes.
We really struggled to find a nice teal envelope to match the card on the cover of the invitation, so I designed a custom envelope that we could make up ourselves, that way we could print the addresses and sender details directly onto the envelope fairly easily.
Michelle used a victorian style floral pattern on their engagement party email invites, which I’ve used as a pattern on the inside of the envelope. I found the closest teal I could get to match the card cover and then used a darker teal to print the pattern over top.
Just to make the envelope a little more interesting, using the circular motif, we made little stickers to seal the envelopes (saved us having to double sided tape everything!).
The Fiskars circle cutter is a godsend!
So getting to the inside of the passport…
I used that same floral pattern on the inside of the cover and as a very light background in the headings of each page.
The first page of a passport is always in a landscape format but I decided not to go with that format, due to the amount of info to go on this page. I wanted to retain the whole photo idea, so Michelle took some fantastic photos of her and Steve which I set up in a photobooth style.
They look adorable!
One of the more important (and fun!) parts of the invite was The Journey spread. Michelle and Steve put together a whole bunch of stats about their 10 years together including the number of parisian snails consumed, hours spent in gumboots at music festivals and first romantic date movie they saw together.
They’ve visited 17 countries in their travels together, wow! That deserved it’s own little map to show those countries that they’ve been to and a little heart to show where they are now.
Since they are getting married on Waiheke Island, a location map was definitely needed. The guests have to ferry from Auckland to the island and either bus or taxi to the wedding venue. Also shown on the map that I designed are the locations of the beach and the venue for the brunch the following day. I used little icons to depict each place.
(There was also a spread containing all of the extra information which I haven’t shown here, but it contained info about children at the wedding, gifts, accommodation suggestions, the brunch, transport and the ferry timetable.)
I designed the RSVP card to look like a boarding pass (to compliment the passport!) and instead of having it as a loose card that went with the invite, we decided to keep it intact with the booklet. Having just bought a perforator cutter, this decision was the best of them all.
The back of the RSVP card had the light floral patter on it, with the return address to Michelle and Steve and an area for a stamp. It was super easy to just tear down the perforation, tick the appropriate boxes, pop a stamp on it and chuck it back in the post. Loved it!
There was a fair bit of info to fit onto the card as they needed to know if people needed transport and would attend the brunch the following day and that sort of thing, but it all worked really well.
I designed a teal barcode, since all boarding passes have those, and made the flight number Michelle and Steve’s initials and wedding date, MS260211.
The final result looked amazing. I was really pleased with how it turned out and Michelle and Steve loved it. Since it’s been sent out they’ve had heaps of compliments on it, which is fantastic to hear!
So, I hope you all like it! Such a big invitation for my first wedding invitation design job but it turned out exactly how I imagined it would be. So so so pleased!
