1st Birthday Invitations

I know I am finally getting to Micah's birthday. 

I went back and forth trying to decide on a theme and then it hit me - It had to be an Oktoberfest. 

So here are the invites, party pictures will be tomorrow.  

Wedding Invitations

I drew up these invitations the other day for a bride but because of time constraints they won't be able to get them printed in time to use them. So I get to share them with you now! The bride is planning to do 1,000 paper cranes as her wedding theme - In case you don't know if you make 1,000 cranes you get a wish, how cool is that? She also included this Walt Disney Mulan Giclee as inspiration since she received it as a gift from her fiancée.

This is what I came up with:

And in other exciting news I am starting to offer my invitations for purchase in my Etsy Shop as PDF's for printing at home or you could send them in to a professional printer. So far I only have one option up in the shop but I going to be adding to it over the next few days and I will also be willing to take on custom orders.

Wedding Invites

I'm so excited to finally get to show these to you. This was my last graphics project before Micah was born.

I designed these custom wedding invites for the same young woman as the last posts shower invites. This is my first time creating wedding invitations (well other than my own) and I am so grateful to have been given the chance. Of course Savannah is one of the sweetest people so working on them with her was so fun it didn't even seem like work!

Her wedding colors are dark navy and light green, the wedding will have a little country flare to it.
She decided on a paisley design. I had so much fun collaborating with and drawing these for her!
As much as I love the paisley the map is probably my favorite part of the invite.
And last but not least a simple thank you note.
I am really hoping that once things settle more into a routine with Micah I will be able to get some of my invites up in the shop. I seem to be so slow with anything at the moment though who knows if it will ever happen!

Also I just wanted to say sorry that I am so slow with commenting on everyones blog- I am reading ...if I get the chance though most of the time I am commenting with one hand... which I have not mastered.

Shower Invites

Well that took longer than expected...

Here are the shower invites that I made for a lovely young lady (with mums help).

The envelopes are folded card stock sewn up the sides- super fun.
I'll show you her wedding invites shortly!

Thank you's

I have been all about trying new things lately!

My mum brought me a speed ball stamp carving kit last summer and I never got around to trying it out because I couldn't for the life of me make a decision on what to carve... ridiculous right? I mean it's not like I couldn't just buy more plastic (or whatever) to carve!

So when I got back from California and was trying to decide exactly how I wanted to do my thank you notes for the shower I decided to try making a stamp. It is SO MUCH FUN! I let Uber choose the animal I didn't try and make one up or anything I just had a bunch of graphics from the Internet and he chose the Walrus - which I love! Under it I put the babies initials MAC, though we still haven't picked a definite name for the baby we do know we will be sticking with Ubers initials. So hopefully this stamp will continue to be useful in the future!
I don't usually use stamps so after much indecision (yes I have a lot of this) I chose a chalk blue ink... I expected it to show up much darker

It actually is much more visible in person but for what ever reason I can not get it to photograph without disappearing into the back ground. Bummer... I'll just have to buy more colors!!

I am totally and completely in love with the stamp though. I can't wait to think up more things to carve!

Hopefully it won't take me a year this time!

back... finally

So I kind of disappeared for a while oops! I know it's a little late but I hope everyone had a good holiday weekend. Uber and I went down to Orlando for some shopping... nothing eventful.... actually I had a rather long shopping list for the trip and almost every store we hit had nothing I needed in stock...bummer... I will show you the one thing I did manage to get soon though. Then I proceeded to be sick all week long. Lovely huh? WELL Thursday I finally got busy again and I have quite a few projects going on now.
I managed to complete the invites for an upcoming baby shower. Which is being held at my house so you will likely be seeing more on it!

The mom to be is doing a butterfly/flower theme in the nursery and her colors are blue, yellow and brown with pops of red.

I had a lot of fun putting these together. I especially liked the different choices in color. No pink! In fact I am sure the blue envelopes will throw plenty of people off.

I printed the seals on mailing labels and punched them out.

I snuck in a little advertising on the back of the invites... whoot!

One small rant though.

***stop reading here if you aren't in the mood to hear me whine!!!***

I just have to put this out there. Joannes is evil. I dislike that store so completely and I spend so much money there it angers me. I hate supporting such a terrible organization. They have terrible customer services and EVERY single time I really need something they are out of it and have no idea when it might be in and won't notify you when they do get it. But they will tell me that a store an hour away has x number in stock if I want to drive there and get it. If you are a super store supplying thousands (literally) of people why would you only order out of stock cardstock twenty sheets at a time or carry only 6 packs of each envelope you stock? ARGH! Ok I am done now because I could go one for hours. In case you are wondering I found envelopes at Target of all places. For cheaper and plenty in stock. I love Target... and costco... well costco is a love hate thing... emphasis on love though. We were doing our weekly shopping on Saturday and they were trying to sell us on an upgraded membership with cash back incentives. They do this by showing you how much you spent in their store the previous year... I had asked them to never show me that amount again... lol

**end of ranting**

My favorite part of invites though is seeing them done and out the door... it's always a relief!

Some crafting and an Etsy update

I finally posted some new things in the shop and I thought I would give you a peek here too. This is my newest growth folio with an owl theme (and MUSHROOMS!)... I am totally loving it. The owls were suggested by a friend who is interested in having a chart made, she was telling me how she is planning to decorate her daughters room (they are moving soon) and I loved the idea so I went ahead with it... and of course added a little more. Why didn't I think of doing owls sooner?! The chart is loosely based on the pottery barn kids Brooke bedding.
So while Mum was busy making me the skirt I was commissioned to decorate some onesies for Kara whose shower Mum missed because she was visiting me. I had such a blast with this I listed the designs in the shop.

This one by far is my favorite! I almost didn't let her take it ... but since I can make another I figured I would be nice!

This is ubers favorite and I also LOVE this one. They're barrel of monkeys!

A silhouette of a black-handed spider monkey...I know totally obvious right?

and lastly a rhino... wouldn't a very small one of these be SOOO cute as a house pet?

I just went and looked at all the onesies you guys made and they are SO cute... though I am confused by the octagon one?!? Anyone want to explain? What a lovely and thoughtful bunch of gifts! I love seeing baby showers with handmade items. The nursery is great!

The Invites

So here is the reveal for what I have been working on for the last week. I am SOOO excited about it! These are for a 50th wedding anniversary (it's the parents of the 25th anniversary invites I did last summer which I showed you in my very first post). She wanted hers to have pictures like her daughters did. I was planning on having these printed (I couldn't handle piecing that many together) so I started brainstorming and then I remembered that Jennifer had posted her daughters birthday invites last year, which were gorgeous. They are the accordion invite by Kodak and they were perfect for what I was wanting.

They had a very formal 40th party so she wanted to go casual for their 50th with a luau theme. I had a blast designing them. The graphics are all mine from scratch. I have a hibiscus in my back yard so I took a ton of pictures of the flowers and leafs and went from there.


I am still missing one picture from the back but I couldn't wait to show you.

Close up of the front. I looked at a picture of scroll work to help me make mine. So I guess that isn't completely from me but it's not an exact copy of anyone else's either.

Needless to say I got A LOT of use out of my Wacom tablet - it ROCKS by the way! I sketched out all of my flowers scanned them in and then turned them into the graphic below. Each piece was a separate file that I inserted arranged and then tied them all together to make them look like a plant.

I really like them. I was really worried that I wouldn't! I hopefully will be sending them to be printed by the end of the week I am just waiting on final approval of wording ... and that last picture. I will show you them again when I get them back from printing.

Oh wait I didn't mention that these are a total suprise for the mom. She thinks she knows what she is getting but she really doesn't. We had to be all sneaky to get the photos collected because she has been very involved in the planning and knows everything that is happening. The switch up and all the photos will be a surprise from her daughters. (I am a really good salesman...I REALLY didn't want to cut and piece these!!! ... not that I am charging for these they are friends)

Let me know what you guys think I am so nervous about these!

**please let me know if you see any grammar issues as long as it is before Friday after that please keep it to yourself I won't want to know at that point!!**

52 hour work week = no blogging

I have been SO ridiculously bust it's not even funny! Some how I am still managing to get my crafting done but since you can't see any of it quite yet I am going to show you something old.

I helped host a shower back in May and the Mom-to-be requested that I do the invites she wanted a brown and pink shower so of course I obliged... I like to not use envelopes if I dont have to.

This is it open
Now for the gift.... This is about the time I started experimenting with stenciling so I did up some Gerber onesies (organic and SO soft!) and added blanket stitching along the neck line.

Also made some bibs. Which I wasn't incredibly happy with...

And then I needed to wrap it so I embroidered a organizer (purchased at Michaels). The babies room was going to be a butterfly theme so I made up this pattern.

this was my first time embroidering (since I was probably 10) and I had no idea of the time that this would take. I think I spent two weeks straight on it, probably about 50ish hours...

New stuff is coming....

*warning actual crafting happening in this post*

I just finished these invites up tonight. They are my first commisioned invites so that is REALLY exciting!

It is going to be a Christmas wedding but this shower is in October. I dont know if you can see on but the white papers is pin-striped and the ribbon is Grosgrain... yum!

Sorry for the terrible pictures it's kinda night here.. but I wanted to show these off!

my very first post

This weekend was the 25th Anniversary of some of our friends I thought I would share the invites and party favors I put together. They were alot of fun to do. Her mom put me on a strict keep everything a secret order so I couldn't have any input from 'the bride' I got to go through the album and pick out my own favorites. I hope you like them!

Her mom wanted to do wrapped hershey bars for the party favors... did you know it's impossible to find the silver wrapped bars?!? They are all in plastic! So they actually had to wrap all of the bars in silver paper and then put the wrappers on... lots of work... but if you ever decide to do these I would seriously suggest doing the graphics yourself and having them printed at office max onto the glossy paper it was alot of fun and saved alot of money!

Well I spent all day playing on here trying to figure out how to do things. So now I really need to go get to work on some half finished projects!