kraft paper, twine, and red ink...

the twine ensuresall the pieces stay put!

boone and I have been truly honored by our friends sally ad kristi, who asked us to officiate their wedding this spring. they are so in love, truly kind people, and dear friends of ours, so we and other folks also wanted to honor THEM with a fun engagement party before the wedding. it'll be a laid back BBQ in the Delta springtime, and guests are being asked to bring mason jars with a wish for the couple inside (then S &K will be able to use the mason jars for their centerpieces at the wedding).

the back and the front

anyway, my mom and i worked on designing and printing these together over my vacation last week and so i wanted to share our handiwork. what do you think?

the card for the wish!

hay, it's christmas card time...

hey friends...

having the weekend off has given me time to get some MUCH NEEDED holiday planning done, including starting to design the christmas postcard (see here for year 1 and year 2).

but, the thing is, i need your help. unfort. we haven't taken many good photos of the two of us this year, and can't really come up with anything great to use. the ONLY idea we've got is this, taken from an autumn trip to a corn maze and hayride.

so, to help me, i need to know if you think these are funny, or if you think they're lame. it's been a creativity-lite year so i really can't tell.
cast your votes below. (honestly, we may have other options after thanksgiving, but right now, this is all we've got. therefore, my dears, if it's only sort of lame, we may still send it, but if it's terrible and super lame, well, then, we'll do some serious re-thinking). THANK YOU, sweet friends.

LOTS to report!

so friends, we're finally IN Singapore! i'd be lying if i said it was a loooooong trip (we traveled for 26 hours or something crazy to get here.. and we landed in Tokyo for two hours so now we can say we've been to Japan) but it's totally worth it to be with our family on the other side of the world. we can definitely tell that we're RIGHT at the equator because it's HOT,also the smells are stronger here than anywhere else I've been, and we've been spending every waking minute with our four nieces or walking around the city, so i haven't had much time to blog, BUT i wanted to tell you that we're HERE! and it's WONDERFUL!
also...really quick i wanted to share my mom's calligraphy.. she did this for me since we're throwing one of my dearest, prettiest friends an engagement shower in July. Isn't this FANTASTIC?



i know.
anyway, ta-ta for now... we're off to the singapore bird park!

lovely lettering...

i've shown you my mom's incredible handiwork lots of times...the museum gala, my wedding, this year's birthday card, but now she's outdone herself. see this calligraphy? yeah, that's hers.

she's teamed up with erin at lucky luxe (it's erin's photo and invitation, btw) to address invitations and do other lovely projects... I'll post more samples of her work as they come, and if you're interested in hiring her or getting her calligraphy prices, email me!

wall papers...

a little more inspiration from everyday objects...


it turns out that sandra juto puts fun little things and pretty papers on her walls instead of hiding them away in drawers. love it.

i loooove a paper sale...

a sale! a sale!
swing by sycamore street press or their etsy shop before friday to check out their FAB out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new sale. i may make a few purchases with my Christmas money!


also on a related note, erin the fab girl who did our wedding invitations just quit her day job and is designing invites and stationary full time. she launched Lucky Luxe's new website recently... take a second to swoop by there to see her creations. (i saw some calling cards she made for her honey and am desperate for my own set!)

procrastination via christmas cards...

i'm s'posed to be working on my final paper and writing cover letters, but i took a break to work on our christmas postcards. here are the two finalists:




but we picked the second one. uuughhhh...i'm feeling a little bit of buyer's remorse.
oh well, at least we'll have cards to send since there's no way we'll have time to make chocolate bark. how are you keeping in touch with your nearest and dearest this holiday season?

btw, i don't know what the quality will be like, but PrintsMadeEasy gave us a GREAT deal (100 postcards for $20 and free shipping with code FREESHIP09) and says they'll be here by December 13th.

decking the halls...

love love love these decorations!
the teacher in me is reminded of sentence strips and bulletin board border. :) sigh.. those were the days.

you're invited!

well, i'm sure you would have been if we hadn't kept it to a very small ceremony and reception... anyway, here is the composite of the invites that erin at lucky luxe designed for us.
i wanted something really simple and classic...we must have gone through five or six designs before we went with one of the more basic ones and used just a touch of kraft paper. i LOVED it. i don't have a photo of the actual invitation or the calligraphy, but i'll see if i can round one up..

our programs...

so we made our own programs... it was kind of a giant ordeal and huge hassle since we stupidly waited until the week before to print them and put them together and then the office max copy machines ate tons of the only green paper we had and kept printing the wrong things. BUT, finally, we were finished and i think they turned out pretty well.




my favorite part was the quote on the back from where the wild things are that read "And now, cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!" this was supposed to signify the beginning of the party, but apparently some people thought it was an innuendo. (can't you just see my cheeks turning bright red at the thought of it...ack! eeek! yikes!) oh well.

the deets...

so my mom is really probably the most creative and capable person in the whole world.

i think i told y'all about all the incredible things that she made for our wedding and how special it was to me, but here are some bonafide photos of all her personal details.

for her first trick, my mom made this veil for me the reception! we were worried that her cathedral length train would get muddy and trip everybody up (especially me) so she just whipped this one up after seeing a much more expensive version of it in a bridal boutique.
not everyone can even cut toole straight, much less make a handmade veil out of feathers and silk flower petals!



next, my mom and i took aluminum flower buckets and attached green ribbon around them so they would hang "just so" on the backs of the ceremony chairs. since we were planning to be outside, we knew wouldn't need much to decorate the space (hello... nature?) but we wanted something. these looked simple and still really pretty when the florist filled them with gardenias and rosemary from a neighbor's yard, and a little baby's breath. they smelled just like magic and it was so easy.



now, the my favorite detail...
my mom made us a Quaker wedding certificate! really... she wrote it with her own two hands, and another friend who's also an artist painted a border of morning glories for it. if you don't know what it is here's the rundown: since Quakers don't have ministers, every member of a congregation acts as a witness to the couple's vows. by having our friends and family sign this, we implicitly expressed that they matter to us and that the support of a community is important for a marriage.


that's all for today, but i've got a few more details to share... if you get bored with wedding stuff, don't worry. i'll get back to posting other random thoughts and inspiration really soon!

happy weekend!

oh!

oh...oh... what a lucky little girl!


from betsy dunlap.

final product: favors

instead of blogging, THIS is what i've been doing with my time:

well, this and a ZILLION other things. (public service announement: friends, don't wait until the last minute to make your programs. seriously. don't do it. even if you have as wonderful a friend i as do who designed them and lets you call her all hours of the night for several days while she formats everything to your exact specifications, things will still go awry. the copy machine will DEFINITELY break down and you won't be able to find heavy weight legal size paper anywhere in the tri-state area and you'll end up wanting to tear your hair out.) But this post isn't about programs.

it's about the favors.... teeny weeny homemade pralines.

we stamped the bags and made the itty bitty parchment paper inserts in plenty of time, but when the day we'd set aside to make the pralines was too humid, a friend and neighbor (and culinary expert) jumped in and made them for us. she is a saint and i am forever in her debt.

anyway, i'm beyond pleased with the way they came out and am amazed and touched by people's generosity and kindness this week. i am incredibly blessed with wonderful family and friends.

Does your honey need stationary?

problem: your honey hates the idea of personalized stationary and would be happy using plain old notebook paper but has offered to write half of the thank you notes. you're pretty sure that all of your family's friends might get their panties in a bunch about it if he/she did.

solution: buy him/her an embosser with a plate that has his/her name or initials on it. this way, he/she gets a cool machine/toy, you save BUNCHES of money because the embosser can personalize an unlimited amount of blank notecards, you can change the paper color anytime, AND you can get your own plate with your initials and use it too! it's a win/win/win situation.

the good news is that paper source has just what you need for $70 plus whatever the cost of cards are.

putting your personal stamp on the wedding...

i'm of the opinion that a wedding does need to reflect the personality and interests of the groom and bride, but that sometimes people get a little carried away with "personal touches" and "details" and that often these "details" are what fuels the wedding industrial complex and makes people spend WAYYYY more money than they should or even want to for one day.

so... stamps.

My family and i talked about having personalized stamps with a piece of my grandmother's artwork printed. she and i were really close and all of my family has missed her since her death a few years ago. stamps of her artwork on the invitations seems like a great way to remember her. We got this idea from a friend who used her fiance's artwork on their wedding invitations... it was wonderful, so we thought we'd try to do the same thing.

here's the way they'd turn out:


the thing is, the cost of this little "detail" is more than double what regular stamps cost. we haven't decided about this yet, but if we don't do it, I'll probably have some made anyway for me and my family... what are your thoughts? is this detail excessive or acceptable?

also, if you want your own stamps go pictureit or photostamps.

origami peace cranes as a wedding detail...

one of my favorite professors is a youth and peacebuilding activist. at her marriage ceremony, she folded hundreds of origami peace cranes and hung them from the ceiling of the church. I don't know if boone and i want to have anything hanging at our ceremony, but since we're both interested in peacebuilding and conflict transformation and love to work with children and youth i'd REALLY like to incorporate peace cranes into the decorations somehow.


right now i'm thinking of putting them in people's chairs at the ceremony and placing them in the floral arrangements (which may or may not be potted plants.. tbd) and if these ideas don't work, then we could hang them from the trees, i guess.

Probably the idea i like the most is having our guestbook be origami peace cranes made by our guests and then signed and put in a basket. wouldn't that be wonderful to have our own garland made by the people at the reception?!?
then we can include this poem with it to share our desire to work toward peace:

The paper crane
Fold the crane with love
Each crease that you stroke
Think about the world around you
Fold the crane with love
Each fold that you touch
Feel about the world around you
Fold a paper crane with love

By Michiko Pumpian

what i wonder is, would people actually make the cranes?

hmmm.... i'll let you know what we decide.

wish grad students needed business cards...

knife from, Jaseisace, dailypoetics flickr, funnel

i'm pretty lucky... ;)

I LOVE paper goods. LOVE them... but who doesn't?
I also love letterpress... you know, the deep kind that feels so great when you run your fingers over it?

I was pretty sure I wasn't going to have these kinds of invitations though, since we're being responsible with money and can't trim the reception guestlist to under 250 (eeeeek! i know!)
anyway, this makes letterpress invitations a HUGE luxury.. not to mention the fact that we are committed to using as many local vendors from my Mississippi town as possible.

This was why the discovery of Lucky Luxe Couture was the one of the most fabulous finds in the all of our wedding planning. Not only is erin local (for me!), but she's also fabulous, creative, willing to hear out all of my ideas, and really reasonable! i thankfully jumped on her bandwagon right before she got overwhelmed with other folks clamoring for her services. (i know.. i'm so lucky!)

anyway, i'm not going to share erin's ideas for our invitations with you until they get printed, mailed out and folks get them (and I hope she doesn't either) but here are some of her other FAB designs...

hugs and kisses

i don't usually like pink polka dots, but i DO like fun fonts and letterpress cards. i want to send these from paper source on valentine's day to all my sweet friends, so i'll just have to get over my polka dot aversion.

tooting my own horn (just a little)

guys, guess what?!?
i walked into anthropologie the other day and saw these...



remember way back when i made a post about them and how cool, fab, and eco-friendly they were?
i thought so.
well, apparently they really were cool, otherwise anthropologie wouldn't have had anything to do with them. let's just say i felt good about myself and leave it at that. ;)