Handmade wedding stationery by Smudge Design offers a beautiful range of unique contemporary handmade wedding invitations and stationery. All are individually and carefully made by hand with extra attention to detail.

Your wedding stationery is the first glimpse of your special day and can be used to reflect the colours or themes of your wedding. Each design is therefore offered in various colours that can co-ordinate with your colour scheme, maybe reflecting on the colour of your bridesmaids dresses or your flowers. There is no extra charge for tailor making a design to suit your colour scheme.

Complete Guide To The History Of Wedding Invitations

In the beginning..
Around 1447 a wedding would be announced by means of a town-crier. A man who would walk round the streets announcing the news of the day to the people of the town. So anyone who heard the news would become part of the celebration. The more noble people, who were more literate, begun the practice of written wedding invitations. They used monks who were skilled in the art of calligraphy to hand-craft their invitations. The wedding invitations often carried coat of arms, or personal crest, of the individual and were sometimes sealed with wax. Today, the use of a crest or seal is still a common choice in society for wedding invitations and a useful way of adding a touch of class.

The Present..
As technology has advanced so have wedding invitations and wedding stationery. At first, wedding invitations were still delivered by hand, due to the unreliable postal system. A ‘double envelope’ was sometimes used to protect the wedding invitation from damage en route to its recipient. During the last century, the emergence of the graphic design trade and the arts has led to millions of designs of wedding invitations and stationery in all different forms and colours, becoming available to everyone at an affordable price.