Old Damask, New Damask

Recently I had the unfortunate revelation that the damask pattern I was going to use for all my wedding stationery wasn't good enough quality to print. :-( I don't know why I didn't think to check this before! I'll put it down to wedding excitement and over-enthusiasm, rather than sheer carelessness...

Unfortunately, after hunting high and low, day and night, on all sorts of websites, even ones where I'd have to pay through my nose for a picture, I didn't find anything I liked. This pattern is just too perfect!



However, I eventually got lucky on Project Wedding. I really enjoy this site; it's got forums, photos, vendor look-ups, planning bios, the works. Someone had sent out a plea for damask templates, in which I immediately joined (there was quite a wailing chorus of us in the end! Damask madness is taking over the world!) and this girl very kindly emailed me three massive files of damask patterns and tags. So now THIS is my new template:



I was going to use it as is, and put a white block in the middle of it for my text, thus creating a border, but I decided it looked too "leafy" and that it covered up too much of the pattern. So I decided to shrink the square teeny tiny, and use a row of them as a border instead. I also decided to stop using MS Word, which is the work of the devil, and take a leaf out of the book of Mrs Daffodil on Weddingbee, and use MS Powerpoint instead. I have to say it was a LOT easier! Here is a screenshot of my menu mock-up (ignore the silly food; I just needed something there to measure out the space):



Looks good, no? I'm quite excited, because if I put one of these at every place setting (instead of four per table as was my original plan) it will intensify the damask theme, and I might not need to tear my hair out anymore over the fact that I CANNOT find damask fabric for table runners - and the further possibility that if I did, it might not be budget-friendly anyway.

I'm also using this for the placecards, which will be attached to the favours (more on THAT story later; I'd rather wait until I'm in the process of making them, so that I can share photos), but on the placecards the damask stripes will be horizontal along the top and bottom. Let no one say I don't believe that variety is the spice of life!