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Bees, it has been WAY too long since I have completed a DIY project. Between starting a new job and the holidays (yes, I realize it has been almost a month since Christmas but I am still recovering from all of the festivities), my craft cabinet went a freakishly long time without being busted into! But no need to worry—the disturbing drought came to an end this past weekend.
In an effort to dip my toes back into the DIY pool instead of cannon-balling, I decided to take on a smaller project that I could likely complete with a quick turn around. The project that fit the bill: table numbers!
During one of my antiquing escapades, I came across vintage flashcards with basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems on them.I knew these were perfect for us because I have a nerdy love for doing basic math in my head, and Mr. D has a nerdy love for giving me math problems to do in my head and seeing how quickly I can do them (you don’t have to tell me, I know we’re cool). When I got home, I finished off my collection with an Etsy purchase of very similar cards.
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| Vintage Flashcards by paintedpony99 on Etsy |
I shared with you all in my last blog that I designed my rehearsal dinner invitations in Adobe Illustrator and ordered them through Vistaprint. I felt comfortable using Vistaprint since we’re just having a rehearsal BBQ and the invitations don’t need to be super fancy. Plus, I had used them for my Save-The-Dates, and I was impressed with the quality of the paper, for the price.
We went from this design:
To this printed product (plus I rounded the corners):
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Having my Lil Sis/MOH home for the holidays was a real blessing for wedding planning, especially in the invitations and “paper stuff” departments. Just hours after she landed in Puerto Rico (at 2:00 AM), she pulled me into her room to show me the work she had done on the wedding invitations.
From the inspiration pictures I had sent her, she came up with these two variations for general shape/concept.
*Design 1 / *Design 2
I was instantly smitten with Design 1, so on her handy dandy laptop Lil Sis/MOH starting designing away the rest of the invite. She added the wording I had decided on, tweaked the colors a bit, and searched for hours for the perfect fonts.
The next morning when I woke up she showed me the product of her hard work.
I left off my Illustrator tutorial with showing you all how to make a background and edit vector shapes that you can find online. I know that this is all “heavy” learning—but I promise, if you stick to it, it becomes easier and you eventually get the hang of it.
Now, starting up where we left off… we had just finished the background, and placed the squiggly background image on top of it.
Featured on Weddingbee
All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
One year ago I started my first DIY project. (Just DIY it! Sorry, can’t help myself.) Since that time I have completed, redone, and thrown out many more. In my extra bedroom right now I have boxes and stacks of all my wedding projects. My projects are starting to overtake my home. The other day I walked into the room and tripped over a bag of moss. Because that’s totally normal, right?
On another note, remember how I mentioned our color scheme is sage green and blush pink?
I had to stop and ask myself the other day, WHY is it that the only sage color that I currently have throughout the wedding is the bridesmaids’ dresses? I have no idea what happened. I think I originally tried to force myself into a particular color scheme, then at some point I just said screw it and went with what I thought looked best.
I am anticipating walking into the wedding and seeing all of my projects, design, and hard work displayed beautifully together for the first time.
All right, now that Bossyboots’ and my wedding invitations are in our guests’ hot little hands, it’s time do some revealing around here!
Creating these invitations was a heckuvalotta work, but I’m happy with them. Of course, there are endless ways I see that I could have designed them in different ways, but at a certain point, you have to step back and send those dang files to the printer!
Let’s get to it… you may recognize a few elements that have evolved out of my original wedding invitation design. I’ve learned how to use Illustrator since 2009, and I have to say designing in Adobe is much easier than MacGyvering in Word!
The entire suite was bundled in a belly band… this is what our guests saw when they pulled the invitation out of the envelope:
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
So, my wedding dress needed a belt - a very sparkly belt. Really, it would be impossible for the belt I wore to be too sparkly. Rhinestones… crystals… beading… I’ll take it all! The downside of course, is that sparkly bridal belts retail for between $100-$300 and up. Mmmmm no. I felt certain that I could do this myself and save quite a lot of cash.
So I Googled “sequin appliques” and gathered my materials…
Firstly, I laid out all my sparkly appliques upon my satiny sash to figure out how many I needed (measure your waist first and leave room for the bow or fastener!):
I previously shared that I was never really shoe obsessed before getting engaged. The lust for designer heels that Carrie Bradshaw seemed to usher into the mainstream never really hit me. I like shoes and I have plenty of them, but only after getting engaged did I really start poring over footwear options.
My suspicion is that during the early days of our planning, our “to-do” list seemed long and I was intimidated. Shoes were something I could handle. Shoes didn’t require signing contracts or vendor meetings. So I went shopping.
Remember the $8 pair of shoes I found at the J. Crew Warehouse Sale in Richmond? I was pretty proud of my deal, but the more I looked at the shoes, the more I wished the flower embellishments at the toe weren’t so worn and rumpled from being thrown in a big box with dozens of other pairs of shoes at the sale.
Photo by Miss Mink
One Saturday morning, I decided to poke around and see if I could fix the flowers.
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After our misadventures in wood burning, Mr. Warbs stepped up to stain the box. We originally ordered the unfinished box online knowing that we would eventually stain it. We went to Home Depot to pick out a nice rustic looking color, a drop cloth and some paint brushes. While the box’s lid was being worked on by BM Tata’s dad, Mr. Warbs went to work on the rest of the box. Staining is pretty easy to do, but if you’re going to stain wood here’s a tip to make it easier on yourself: sand the wood first! It helps the wood absorb the stain better. Totally a foreign concept to me, but apparently everyone’s part of a secret club that knows about things like this!
Anyway, we neglected to do that and it gave Mr. Warbs a bit of trouble to get the wood dark enough. The first couple coats of stain seemed to roll off the wood like water. I think he must have used four or more coats in order to get the box dark enough. When we got the lid back, (which BM Tata’s dad had sanded) it only needed one coat of stain. If we had added another it would have been a completely different color than the rest of the box.
After giving the box a couple of days to dry we were happy with the finished color!
Check out these great projects hive members have uploaded to Weddingbee’s DIY section! Click on the title of each project for tutorials.
If your project is featured in DIY Friday, you’re eligible for a special Weddingbee badge for your blog or website! See instructions on how to grab the badge here!
Paper Mason Jar Save the Dates by jennymofenny81
When I find a great fabric, I want to use it everywhere! I know I have good company…there’s a fabric called Chiang Mai Dragon by Schumacher that took the design blogging world by storm last year. People were finding ways to incorporate the design into everything. Someone even painted an entire wall to mimic the design.
I’m as crazy for the Robert Allen fabric called Vintage Plumes I’m using for wedding projects. Since I don’t think the kind folks at Pippin Hill Farm would be down with painting their space just for me, I’m looking for different ways to bring the pattern and its colors into our wedding. I already created table number frames using the fabric and I decided that our escort card board could showcase a big piece of it. I was inspired by a board I came across while trying to find a template for another project on the Martha Stewart website.
Without a die cutting machine, I went online to find paper I could run through my printer that had perforated tags on it. I found one website that had what I wanted after much searching and placed an order. About a month later, Avery came out with the same product and it’s probably at every office supply store in the country. Oh well. Next, I had to create the board.
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Or, “How I asked my grrrls to be my bridesmaidz.” I knew I wanted to send them something crafty and cutesy in the mail because I’d filed away all sorts of ideas when I was but a girlfriend (before I was someone’s fian-SAY).
Image via Once Wed / Project created by Anna Bond of Rifle Design
The Wednesday before the wedding, MOB, my sister, and I executed a last-minute favor project.
Long before the days of Pinterest, I ran across an idea for a fortune cookie wedding favor. I liked the symbolism of receiving a fortune at the start of a new year. I saved the idea in one of my umpteen wedding spreadsheets and moved on. Fast forward to when I actually needed to reference it and it was nowhere to be found. I tried to search for it again but never quite found the right post. Oh well—time to wing it!
MOB called her local Chinese restaurant and I stopped in to pick up a box of 200 fortune cookies for $16. I bought some Baker’s chocolate from the grocery store and treat bags from Jo-Ann and we were ready to roll.
Ever since my Vistaprint STD post, I have been getting lots of messages from hive members asking me how I used Adobe Illustrator to design my invitations. Learning how to use Adobe Illustrator was NOT easy, mostly because I taught myself. I learned how to use it for work to make figures for academic publications, but the same skill-set works for wedding stationery design.
Now, first things first: Adobe Illustrator is expensive. It comes in a package called “Creative Suite 5″ (or CS5 for short). It includes things like Photoshop and InDesign as well. Right now, it is listed on the Adobe website for $1299 USD. Yikes. I purchased my CS5 Design Standard for around $200 at the University I attend, with an education discount. If you’re in the market to purchase CS5, try to use this discount. It literally saves you hundreds of dollars. But: the website does offer a free 30 day trial. So: if you can teach yourself how to use Illustrator and design your invitations in under 30 days - you can avoid purchasing it.
The most important thing to understand about Illustrator is that it is a vector-based design program.
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Just because we aren’t doing the bouquet/garter toss, certainly doesn’t mean I don’t want my thigh to be looking pretty on our wedding day. In fact, part of the reason I didn’t want to do a garter toss is because I’m quite in love with the circle of lace I’ve set aside for my thigh. My thighs are far from my best feature so this really is my only chance to dress it up with something feminine, pretty and sexy.
I wasn’t really looking for garters; I hadn’t even really thought about if I would wear a garter. I was just browsing the web one day and this picture made me stop dead in my tracks:
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| Image from Etsy Listing/All About Chic by Antiya |
I loved the style—the more artsy take on the garter. I liked that it wasn’t delicate tulle, but a more bold design. At $33, the price is actually quite reasonable, but I decided I would make mine…I mean it’s just lace, some fabric and beads, right? Actually, yes, I was right.
A long, long time ago I stumbled upon this fabric flower tutorial and have been diligently making fabric flowers for a few other elements in the wedding.
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