Orders of Service

My Great Aunt died (at the grand age of almost 94) on the 12th, plunging us into frantic funeral planning. She was in a lot of pain, and we were very sorry to see her go, but some people didn't seem to appreciate her qualities as maybe they should (she had her faults, but don't we all?) so I wanted to make sure she had a nice Order of Service to send her off in style. She actually had two services (a funeral and a memorial service) but we used the same cover for both, only changing the information inside.

Previously I have done photo collages of important items for orders of service, but as all such important items were in Moora about 100 miles away, this was out of the question. Also, as we were not going to a professional printer, I couldn't arrange for printing right to the edge of the cover, which would have spoiled the effect somewhat. 

Aunty Phyl loved flowers of all kinds, so I went to the Victorian Language of Flowers for inspiration, as no one could really tell me a specific favourite flower, and made a border for use on the booklets:

This contains the following:

Michaelmas Daisies – farewell

Harebells – grief

Green Locust Tree – affection beyond the grave

Osmunda – dreams

Persimmon – "bury me among nature's beauties"

Red Poppy – consolation

White Poppy – sleep, my antidote 

Weeping Willow – mourning 

I did a very rough version in Photoshop to start with, so I could work out roughly where everything should go, then a clean sketch on paper, which I inked and coloured digitally in Adobe Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3. I was inspired by Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers, and added a faint halftone pattern to the whole thing to subtly suggest older printing methods and add a bit of texture:

Once the border was done I inserted photographs into it. A large, fairy recent (taken at her 90th birthday, but I didn't have access to anything taken more recently) photo for the front, and a smaller photo from the 1930s for the back. The font is Melany Lane. 

I added some swirls (from the Melany Lane Ornaments font) to fill up empty space on the front. We got them printed at Officeworks, but unfortunately not all of the swirls ended up printing and those that did were much more subtle (although not quite as subtle as appears from this photo =P)

I also did the interior of the booklet, using Adobe Indesign CS6. The inside cover contained a dot-point timeline of her life, and we managed to fit the whole order of service onto the front and back of an A4 page (so four booklet pages) and even had some room left over for a little decoration. For this purpose I did a linework hyacinth ('constancy', but also a flower she was very fond of):

I coloured this digitally for use on the Thank You cards:

I printed these (two per A4 page) myself, and used a punch to get the round corners.