Featured on the Gotham Bride Guide!

Written by Sara on June 23, 2010 – 9:00 am -

Logo - Gotham Bride Guide

Big news, readers: our DIY wedding invitations were featured on the lovely Gotham Bride Guide!

Click here to read the full post; a big thank you to the folks over at Gotham Bride Guide for featuring us!

[Photo: Gotham Bride Guide]


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Posted in Budget Weddings, DIY, Our Wedding, Stationery, Weddings | No Comments »

Showcase Friday: Our DIY Wedding Invitations!

Written by Sara on June 4, 2010 – 9:00 am -

invitesGroup

Dear readers, I don’t even know where to begin with this post, except to say that Jordan and I are SO excited to share our DIY wedding invitations with you today! This post is rather lengthy, but for you budget-brides out there, I wanted to give you an extensive look into what it takes to DIY your own wedding invitation suite.

A note on our inspiration

It was quite a challenge to try and explain to Jordan (or anyone, really) what “vintage” means to me, and how exactly I envision us capturing that feel in our wedding invitations. So, I frequented many a web site, from Etsy to super awesome stationery sites to simple Google searches of random objects (mason jars, for instance).

Jordan and I began the design process with the idea that we would utilize Adobe Photo Shop brushes. Since little touches of birds, nature and aviary motifs will appear throughout our wedding, we felt it was important to include a bird in our wedding invitations. We found a Photo Shop brush of a tree, and we started working with that.

However, with each draft of the invitation, we began to hate the look and the feel of it more and more. It didn’t look elegant, it didn’t look lovely, and it didn’t look vintage. So, much to my chagrin (seriously, I was stressed!), we scrapped that idea and started over, a mere month-and-a-half before we wanted to start the printing process.

However, in re-conceptualizing our DIY wedding invitations, I remembered an art class that I took in middle school, where we carved images into a wood block, and then used that wood block to stamp with ink. (I’m sure this was a Mother’s or Father’s Day project from way back when.)

So, I started to try and tell Jordan about what I envisioned based on this look. Then I saw a few invitations around the web utilizing different fonts and a woodblock/boxed layout, and after brainstorming with Jordan, we downloaded a variety of fonts (which is over-simplifying the process – I was very picky about what fonts I wanted to use, and Jordan just would not let me go with Feel Script, no matter how badly I wanted to shell out the money for it – and he was right in the end…) and we  got to work bringing together all of our inspiration into one invitation suite.

A note on the design process

Jordan and I used Adobe Fireworks to design our invitations. Jordan is very familiar with this program, and I found it to be a rather intuitive program myself after playing with it for 20 minutes or so.

Since Jordan and I are living 45 miles apart right now, we designed our entire invitation suite on the weekends we were able to be together. For us, the process worked like this:

1. Sara tells Jordan in advance, “We need to work on this part of our invitation suite this weekend.”
2. Sara sends Jordan links of what she’s found that she likes (“I like this overall look, but with this wording and this graphic and this font.”)
3. Jordan comes home, sits on the couch and designs away, making sure Sara doesn’t look over his shoulder until the project is near completion (it drove him nuts!).
4. Sara edits, says what she’d like changed, and Jordan makes the changes.
5. When Sara and Jordan are both satisfied with the design, they PDF the file and send it to their right-hand person to print a proof.
6. After final proof approval, the document goes to the printer, and a few days later, the final product arrives at Sara’s house.

Multiply this by 5 pieces (there are 5 items in our invitation suite), and you have approximately 24 weekends (6 months!) of design work that we spent working to complete this invitation suite. It was definitely a labor of love; there’s no other way to describe it.

A note on invitation wording

invitesMain

It was important to Jordan and I that we acknowledge the contributions that our parents have made to our lives and to making our wedding happen, so we included them in our invitation wording. In determining the other parts of the wording for our invitation, we spent quite a bit of time (probably two weeks) changing words and tweaking the look of the invitation.

Here’s what we ended up with:

Sara’s parents and
Jordan’s parents
Invite you to celebrate the wedding of their children
Sara Jo and
Jordan Wayne
(Ceremony Details)
(When/Where)
Dinner, Dancing & Merriment to immediately follow
at the Washington Pavilion

A note on the details

First, I spent about 8 – 10 hours of time gluing little doilies (see above picture) inside both the mailing envelopes and the RSVP envelopes (a la Holly) – what a project (!!), but I’m SO happy with how well they turned out. (Everyone thought I was nuts, but I was having a great time!)

I then stamped our return address on each of these envelopes, proceeded to freak out when the ink I used wouldn’t dry, and then our envelopes were miraculously saved by a can of hairspray. Moving on…(I just can’t talk about those darn envelopes anymore!)

Next, once everything was printed, we glued the invitation matte directly to the pocketfold, and then glued the wedding invitation on top of the matte, to create a layered look (again, see above picture).

map

I knew that I wanted our invitation suite to have a few components to it. While the majority of our guests are from South Dakota (and are rather localized to Sioux Falls, where the wedding will be held), I still wanted to provide guests with a map to help them navigate their way to each location. Thanks to a wonderful classmate of mine, we had a lovely hand-drawn map to showcase to our guests. We placed the map on its end in the right-side pocket of the pocketfold.

rsvp

For our RSVP card, we wanted to make sure that our guests knew to expect an offbeat, relaxed wedding from the moment they received their invitation. So, we utilized the following check box system, as seen on A $2000 Wedding:

- Gladly Attend
- Regretfully Decline
- Regretfully Attend
- Enthusiastically Decline
- I’m in the wedding, so I have to come
- Other ____________________________

dance

Since Jordan and I are coordinating the music for the wedding dance ourselves, we also wanted feedback from our guests to see what would get them out on the dance floor. Our “Request a Song” card was so much fun to design, and Jordan even made the record player graphic himself!

These two cards were tied together with the RSVP envelope using baker’s twine, which is a special type of yarn that blends two colors (our’s was yellow and white) together. This little package was then placed in the pocketfold in front of the wedding map.

A note on the construction and presentation of the invite

I owe a lot to the lovely Holly at Nothing But Bonfires for introducing us to a company without which our invitations would have lacked cohesion: Cards & Pockets. We ordered nearly everything for our DIY invites from Cards & Pockets … from the pocketfolds in which each piece of our invitation suite was placed to the envelopes that carried our invitations to their destination, we found Cards & Pockets to be the best value for our money. And the quality of the materials? Couldn’t have asked for a better product or better customer service along the way. [No, this is not a sponsored/paid post; I just love the company!]

A note on printing

Jordan and I feel extremely blessed to have had the help and support of one of my father’s business colleagues throughout the DIY invitation design and printing process. From our first initial idea to our final proof, having a person to walk us through the process, telling us what worked and what didn’t, was absolutely invaluable.

While I understand that what’s right for us might not be right for everyone, I would encourage readers who are looking to DIY their own invitations to get them printed by a professional (but local!) printing company. All we supplied was the paper (we chose a partially recycled natural ivory linen cardstock), and the printers and our right-hand person handled the printing and the cutting gratis (yes, we were extremely lucky).

A note on the materials used

Materials:

From Cards & Pockets:

- Perfetto pocketfolds in “Smoke” (We ordered a sample of one, loved it, and then ordered 90 for our invitations)
- 5.75 inch square invitation mattes in “Lemonade” (Again, we ordered a color swatch, then ordered 90 mattes for our invitations)
- 90 6.5 inch square envelopes in “Lemonade” (to hold the invitation; we scrapped the inner envelope, because I think it’s wasteful and frivolous (no offense))
- 90 RSVP envelopes in “Lemonade” (while we initally thought about designing postcards, I loved these little envelopes, so we went with them)

From Etsy:

- Customized stickers from Maxim Creative Invites on Etsy (we ordered two different designs of stickers, one which we used to close the pocketfold and the other which we used to close the envelope)
- Yellow baker’s twine from Whisker Graphics on Etsy (we used this adorable twine to tie a bow around our RSVP package)
- Return address stamp from Love to Create Stamps on Etsy (we used this stamp as a return address and as the “deliver to” address on our RSVP envelopes)

From around town:

- Partially recycled natural ivory linen cardstock (we printed everything on this stock; we probably utilized 250-300 sheets for invitations for our entire guest list)
- Doilies + glue sticks + glue lines + ink pads from Michael’s craft store
- $0.61 cent wedding cake stamp, plus 2 $0.10 cent clock/nautical stamps, per invite, purchased at our local post office (I really wanted stamps with one of our engagement photos on it, but I couldn’t justify the cost)
- $0.44 cent “Love” stamp for our RSVP cards; we chose the stamp with the King and Queen on it!

A note on final cost

After calculating cost for everything ordered, including postage, it seems that the cost for each invitation suite was $3.74.

Here’s the breakdown:

Pocketfolds: $0.98 per invitation
Invitation Mattes: $0.18 per invitation
Natural Ivory Linen Cardstock: $8.00 per ream, $0.09 per invitation
Mailing Envelopes: $0.17 per invitation
RSVP Envelopes: $0.12 per invitation
Stickers: $0.47 per invitation
Address stamp: $0.08 per invitation (includes RSVP envelope)
Doilies: $0.14 per invitation (includes RSVP envelope)
Glue/Glue Lines/Double-stick Tape: $0.22 per invitation (includes all construction)
Baker’s Twine: $0.04 per invitation
Postage: $0.81 per invitation
Postage: $0.44 per RSVP card

TOTAL: $3.74 per invitation

What do you think of our DIY wedding invitations?

[All photos taken by my soon-to-be father-in-law, Steve!]


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Posted in Budget Weddings, DIY, Eco-Chic, Inspiration & Insight, Music & Entertainment, Our Wedding, Stationery, Vintage Beauties | 7 Comments »

101 in 1001: A Rough Month…

Written by Sara on June 1, 2010 – 10:35 am -

Hello readers! First of all, I apologize for the blogging drought…I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed with wedding planning (and life changes!) lately, and this blog has sadly been quite far down on my to-do list. I promise, though, the wait was worth it: on Friday, I plan to showcase our DIY wedding invitations, which were sent out to our guests last week! Be sure to tune in for that.

Today, however, I am prepared to give you all an update on my (lack of) progress toward my 101 in 1001 goals project.

Here are the goals I wanted to accomplish for May:

- Make or bake at least one Rachael Ray recipe.

- Try beets…again.

- Learn how to drive a stick shift/manual vehicle.

- Go bowling…and actually try to bowl well.

And here’s the one (yes, one) that I actually completed:

- Learn how to drive a stick shift/manual vehicle.

While my guy has tried to teach me how to drive a manual car before (his lovely old Jeep Wrangler!), he now has a new manual car (yay for Jettas!), so we spent a few hours together driving around a parking lot, and then hitting the main road!

I did rather well (I swear, the Jetta is easier to drive than the Jeep EVER was!), but once I had to take a detour (lame-o South Dakota construction!), I got scared as the car inched up (and then down!) a rather steep hill. Needless to say, that was the end of my driving experience that day.

I really sucked at completing my other goals, so I’m going to leave those on tap for June.

How are you doing on your life goals? Do you have a bucket list?


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Green Friday: Twisted Limb Paperworks

Written by Sara on April 9, 2010 – 9:00 am -

I was introduced to Twisted Limb Paperworks (TLP) by another blogger, and I have to say, I was stunned to read just how environmentally-conscious TLP is! Here’s a few quick facts from their web site:

- No additional dyes are used to tint the paper. Colors are obtained directly from the materials being recycled.

- Our paper is embellished with ferns, flowers, and raffia flecks. We organically grow and ethically harvest from our woods a portion of the ferns going into our papers. We will begin organically growing at least a portion of the flowers going into our papers in 2009.

- Stems from the dried flowers that go into your paper are either used to bind our twig guest books or they are composted.

- Water used in the paper making process is recycled from the studio’s dehumidifiers and air conditioner whenever possible to conserve this essential resource. We recycle approximately 2700 gallons of water each year.

- Envelopes, reply cards, and cardstock invitations are 100% recycled.

- Envelopes, reply cards, cardstock invitations and 70%cellulose/30%PCW recycled vellum are all processed without chlorine. Some are also manufactured carbon neutral.

- We print out invitation drafts, e-mail requests, etc. on scrap paper, using both sides to a piece of paper (This conserves approximately 290 pounds of paper every year.) before recycling it back into your invitations and stationery. Any paper that we can’t recycle into new products gets recycled with Monroe County Solid Waste Management District. We recycle approximately 1250 pounds of paper this way annually.

- 100% of the cardboard, glass, aluminum, and plastic used at our facility is also recycled with Monroe County Solid Waste Management District.

- Our catalogs, business cards, and customer thank you notes are stitched with organic cotton thread.

- We pack your order with recycled shredded paper.

Click here to access Twisted Limb Paperworks’ web site!

[Note: This is NOT a sponsored post.]


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Our Wedding: DIY Projects Update!

Written by Sara on February 2, 2010 – 9:00 am -

Happy Tuesday, readers! I hope today is happy for you – Tuesdays are usually happy for me: any day is better than Monday in my book!

With approximately five months until the wedding, I wanted to give you all a glimpse into what I’ve accomplished these past few weeks. I’ve hit the wedding planning hard, and I’m very proud of what projects I’ve started and finished! Many thanks to my wonderful friends and family for their help, as well as my future husband – I couldn’t do any of this without you!

- I’ve lined envelopes for our Save the Date cards and for the invitations for my bachelorette party (which will most likely be in June).
- I’ve made invitations for my bachelorette party, which I’ll be showcasing for you all tomorrow!
- Our Save the Date cards are nearly complete; I am VERY happy with the finished product, and I can’t wait to show the fruits of our efforts to you all next week!
- We’ve downloaded templates for our rehearsal dinner invitations and for our gift opening invitations; all we need are the details, and they’ll be ready to print!
- I’ve made little “favors” of sorts for our wedding; I’m anxious to show these to you near the end of February!
- We’ve taken profile photos of our entire wedding party, and I’m almost ready to talk with Jordan about what I’m concepting for our wedding ceremony programs.
- I’ve purchased large rectangles of styrofoam, which I will adorn with moss and turn into monograms that will hang by ribbon on the church doors!
- I’ve purchased two large bags of fabric pom poms; I am currently researching making DIY paper cones full of pom poms that our ushers will pass out to guests after our ceremony. I love these little pom poms!
- I purchased my flower fascinator from Etsy, and I can’t wait until it arrives!
- I purchased lace trim to use when making my throw-away garter.
- I’m in the beginning stages of making a few special items for my bridesmaids, including a very exciting purchase of gifts from Etsy! No more for now, can’t take the chance that I’d ruin the surprise!
- I’m in talks with a wonderful Etsy artist about making dresses for our flower girls; I’m a few decisions away from nailing down exactly what we’re looking for!
- My mother and I made a trip to a few area fabric stores last week, and I think we’ve found the fabric that we’ll use to make napkins for our wedding reception. I can’t wait to get this fabric purchased and get started on making these eco-friendly goodies!
- I have added a base coat of cream paint to 15 wooden letter “G’s” (these will be part of our centerpieces); they look great, and I can’t wait to add more treatments to these letters!
- J and I have FINALLY nailed down a design for our wedding invitations; now, all we need to do is add the text to the invitation, and then we can begin working on the supplemental materials for our invitations!

Whew! Looking at this list, I feel SO proud of all of the work we’ve started and finished.

What projects are YOU currently working on for your wedding?


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Our Wedding: DIY Progress

Written by Sara on December 15, 2009 – 9:00 am -

Good morning, readers! I thought I’d give you all a taste of what DIY wedding projects I’ve been working on these past few weeks.

  1. Task Numero Uno for the past few weeks was to finish our Save the Date cards. I showed you the finalized product in an earlier post, and we just got proofs back from my father’s company last week. After a few more tweeks, we’ll be ready to print!
  2. I’ve also collected about 10 letter ‘G’s’ for our centerpieces at our reception. While I had hoped to have these letters crackle painted by now, I have been rather busy with work. Hopefully we’ll get these letters painted yet this month! I also need to get 3-4 more letters; I’ve bought out Hobby Lobby’s stock each time I’m there, so hopefully next time they’ll have enough!
  3. On another trip to Hobby Lobby, I purchased two notepads full of decorative paper. I plan to use this paper for my bachelorette party invitations as well as to adorn the inside flap of the envelopes we’ll be sending our Save the Date cards and our wedding invitations in. I also went to Michael’s Crafts and found little white doilies to adorn the inside flap of envelopes, too. So many choices!
  4. I also purchased four ivory flower pins that my mother and I are going to attempt to dye grey – these are for my bridesmaids to wear in their hair on our big day! We plan to purchase the dye soon, along with some test fabric.
  5. For our engagement shoot, we brought along hearts on sticks and mustaches on sticks, two DIY projects that were super easy and (I hope) turned out cute in our pictures! I’ll have a DIY project for you tomorrow, where I show you how to make them.
  6. I also purchased little bookmark-sized papers for our wishing tree, which will be at our reception space. I plan to dye these papers in tea, round the corners of them with my super awesome corner rounder punch, and use a hole punch to poke holes in them and tie a string of twine through them. I hope to put a stamp of some sort on the paper, too, but I have yet to find one I like that’s small enough.

That’s where I am so far in my DIY project list; here are my goals for December/January:

  1. Print the Save the Dates, adorn them with vellum paper and buttons and GET THEM OUT THE DOOR!
  2. Get started on designing our wedding invitations (I have the entire design concepted and the font chosen – all that I have to do is get J started on them!)
  3. Purchase fabric to make napkins for the wedding (my Mom is researching what type/weight of fabric is customary for cloth napkins); begin to sew napkins
  4. Order miniature flags (plain canvas) and stamps/iron-on templates for send-off flags
  5. Begin concepting wedding program ideas (I’m thinking of making fan programs)

Have a great Tuesday!


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