- Blog
- Bios
- Boards
- Classifieds
- DIY
- Gallery
- Vendor Reviews
- Shop Weddingbee
Weddingbee Blog
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.
Read more…
It seems to me that I have been lacking in posts about wedding crafts. This seems a bit odd. There sure are a ton of crafts on my to-do list. I have a house full of craft supplies. I even have a checklist (sadly unchecked) of crafts to get cracking on. One would think that I would be a wedding craft blogging machine with DIY tutorials coming out of my ears!
However, for the last couple of months these things have been neglected due to one craft—the mother of all wedding crafts—that has totally monopolized my craft-brain-bandwidth, rendering me incapable of thinking about any craft that was not this craft.
Ladies, I am talking about The Invitation! Mr. Aardvark (seriously, he was SUPER helpful) and I started back in August by looking online at paper and finally ordering some from Paper Source. Since then it has been slow and not-so-steady progress, but we are finally, really, actually done. All we have to do is drop them in the mail. (Hopefully before the rates go up on the 22nd.)
We have cut, corner-punched, glued, and folded. We have suffered paper cuts, burns and blisters. We have had mess-ups and re-dos and re-re-dos. But today, I can tell you, it was worth it.
Read more…
Greetings from the Snapdragon Sweat Shop! Many moons ago, I stated that the only DIY coming out of my house would be invitations. Well, turns out that invitations are more than enough to thoroughly overwhelm my to-do list. I know many of you share my pain.
From the get-go, Bossyboots and I had wanted a folk art, painted style to our invitations. We loved the look of gouache, as beautifully showcased by Anna Bond over at Rifle Paper. We briefly investigated going the Rifle route, but in the end, I decided I want to paint our invitations myself for a few reasons:
After 100,000 hours of painting, many cups of tea (and Shiner, let’s be honest), and more than one moment of utter defeat, I finally sent my invitation files off to a professional printer. After all the hard work I put into creating these invites, there was no way in hell I was going to fight with my at-home Dell printer, to boot. I am a tough cookie, but that would have just been too much!
We’ll be mailing our invitations this week, and I’ll post a full run-down once they’re on their way—until then, here’s a sneak peek!
I love me a good font. Seriously, I could sit for hours downloading fun fonts. Part of my job is to design real estate publications and flyers, Which means I get to have fun with fonts on a daily basis. Although, I usually need to stick to the practical fonts and don’t get to have fun with the really cool fonts. What calls for a really cool font? Why a wedding, of course!
Right now the only part of our invitation suite that I currently have is my possession is the envelopes. They were sent to me early so that I could work on getting them addressed. (I think my invitation designer figured out that I am a crazy lady and need SOMETHING to do while she is working on the rest of my invitations. God bless her.)
This means that before I can start addressing all of our envelopes, I need to find the greatest font of all time. I refuse to pay for fonts, so I do limit myself to the free ones. My goodness though, there are some amazing free fonts out there! Here are the three that I have narrowed down, and I need your help deciding which one to use.
Option 1:
Read more…
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.”
What is that awful sound? Oh yeah, time! It’s crunch time here for the Raccoons. We’ve been engaged for over a year now and have still managed to save a lot of things for what feels like the last ridiculous minute. Even in the midst of all the rushing, there were a few ideas I didn’t want to let go of. They’re the smaller things that most likely no one else will notice or care about—but I still do. The projects just had to be modified. Instead of waiting for a surge of creativity that probably would never strike and creating some original and mind blowing DIY, I went looking for tips and templates from others who were willing to share. Thank you so much other brides and bloggers! So, here are some of the little things that I’m so in love with and the people who were able to make them!
A sign for our favor table heavily influenced by Weddingbee’s shanny14
We did our homework and showed up at the clerk’s office over prepared toting every sort of ID imaginable. They pretty much just asked us if we were on drugs or married to anyone else. No sweat or surprises and $20 later, we have our certificate and 60 days to make it all official!
The copy that’s ours to keep leaves a little to be desired. It’s just a yellow sheet of printer paper they slapped an extra seal on. I don’t know where my expectations of awesomeness came from, but not being met it left me searching for a different certificate. A little something like this is more what I had in mind:
Read more…
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
I have officially mailed out our save the dates!
Which means people are actually invited to our wedding. That makes it seem pretty darn real, if you ask me! The process of collecting all the addresses was intensive, but I’m glad it’s finished. Now all I have to do is work on getting the invitations printed out!
I bought some fantastic paper on sale at Michaels. (It was half off!) It’s a nice ivory color with a little bit of texture and sparkle to it. The best part about it is that it makes the print job from my cheapo, crappy printer look very professional. I’m pretty darn pleased with how the invitation suite has turned out! I can’t wait to post it for everyone to see!!
For now I’ll just share my photos of the save the dates (since they’ve finally been mailed out!!!). Please don’t be offended by my cell-phone photos (or our blurred-out names). Normally I would be a good blogger and only share photos from my nice camera, but my camera lens recently broke so it’s out of commission for a little while.
The front of the “postcard style” save the date…
Personal photo
And again the front and the back (modeled after vintage postcards). I think the herb stamps were a pretty cute little addition, too.
Just before Thanksgiving, I mailed our save the date envelopes to the woman who was going to address them. I had just come off of a string of business trips and my busy season at work had started. My original intention was to learn calligraphy myself, but there didn’t seem to be enough time in the day for practicing, let alone actually writing out all the addresses of our guests. This was a project I had to outsource. Luckily, I had put the addresses of our friends and family into a spreadsheet last year when we sent out Christmas cards. I merged the addresses into the correct format, printed the document out, and our package was ready to go.
I edited my address list a little bit / Photo by Miss Mink
I found our calligrapher, Jasmine Lee, through Weddingbee. Mrs. Peach has a friend who worked with her a while back and was very happy. The comments on Mrs. Peach’s blog post were all positive, too. We loved that she was able to use a modern style on our Save the Dates. Our design doesn’t really call for a super traditional font.
Praise the Lord, we have a date!
Now we just have to hope that Mr. Opossum’s nephew makes his appearance on or before his due date so that his brother and sister-in-law can come to the wedding (with the adorable new bundle of joy in tow, of course)!
So I’ve got the dress, the day, and the location set. I’m waiting to hear back from a photographer that I love. The next big projects are the flowers and catering.
And I’m almost finished with the invitations (that I designed myself). I think they look pretty darn good (but I’m probably biased). Ha. I am going to share a piece of the invite…because I don’t want any guests to see them before they get them in the mail. I made save the dates to go with them. Those will be printed and sent out ASAP. I was completely against the idea of save the dates at first, but my aunt said it was better to let people know since the wedding is going to be so soon!
A small portion of the save the date
Here’s part 2 of the hive’s annual holiday card swap! Check out the creativeness below!
dallasbride2012 used paint samples to make trees! Genius!:
This holiday season, Mr. Mole and I are going to visit my family in Wisconsin. We are really looking forward to this vacation because it gives us a chance to spend time and celebrate with our loved ones. We look forward to exchanging presents, eating lots of my mom’s delicious Christmas cookies, and lounging around in new fleece pajamas (a family tradition).
Because our wedding will be less than 6 weeks away, our trip to Wisconsin is also going to be filled with a lot of wedding-related activities. Mr. Mole and I will be attending our co-ed shower, which will be thrown by two of my aunts. We received the invitation — which rivals our wedding invitations, for sure — last month, and we are so excited.
Sage and coral invitations with a (hard to photograph) vellum overlay
Also in Wisconsin, we will be assembling our party favors, another project involving our moo mini-cards and Divine Twine.
Read more…
If you missed anything, here are links to Part I, Part II, and Part III.
As you saw, we had five top choices from our engagement session for the photo on our save the date…so which one did we choose?
They’re HEREEEEEE. Seriously, when I picked up this bag I was giddy with excitement.
In the bag was the final product. Drum roll, please…
Hope you’re having a wonderful holiday season, hive! It’s time to reveal the results of this year’s Weddingbee holiday card swap! Check out the great creativity of some of our amazing hive members below!
CarolinaCola included a handmade bee ornament in her cards:
Cara:
Read more…
I am absolutely in love with all things letterpress. Cards, gift tags, posters, save the dates, wedding invitations…I love it all. As I told you all previously, I wanted to purchase letterpress STDs, but my wallet just couldn’t take the hit. I had been doing a lot of research about letterpress, and even found a professor at the university I go to who taught me the basics of hand-setting type and showed me how to use a letterpress machine.
But alas, his press wasn’t set up to work with photopolymer plates and would cost me around $500 to outfit it with the necessary parts. So, I moved on to at-home DIY-style letterpress. Specifically, the L-Letterpress Tool by Lifestyle Crafts. I was really, really nervous that this wouldn’t work out. It seemed like all the reviews were either extremely positive or extremely negative. So…I took a chance and caved to the paper-lover’s voice inside of my head saying “Just do it…”
I purchased the kit from Amazon for a lot less than was advertised on the Lifestyle website. I also picked up some extra square cards and envelopes, and an extra six-inch Speedball brayer. I found this review of the L-letterpress by Boxcar Press awhile back, so I knew that I would need the extra supplies to make sure I used this tool to its full potential. The Amazon shipment took a little longer than I hoped, around 20 business days, but this is normal for shipments to Canada.
I really wanted to try this thing out before I spent another $200 on photopolymer plates and expensive cotton paper to make our invitations (and before I took a huge risk ruining the invitations). So I decided I would make a smaller photopolymer plate through the Boxcar Press platemaking service, and use this opportunity to make my “Will you be my bridesmaid?” crafts.
…handwriting.
As I mentioned, we received our save-the-date envelopes early so that I could get working on the calligraphy for the envelopes. My main artistic skill has always been my penmanship—since I was a kid (sorry—no long lost samples of my journals to insert here). And to answer one of the most asked questions—no, I did not attend a Catholic school.
I thought it would be fun to do the calligraphy for our paper products but, somewhat more importantly, I thought our friends and family would expect it. Seriously—for those who know me well, if I had paid for calligraphy it would have been…I’d argue…disappointing. Even Mr. Turkey took it for granted.
So, to start, I looked online to get style inspiration. Like our paper products, I was going to go more modern with the save-the-date calligraphy and more classic for our invitations. I saw a lot of fabulous work on the web—so many talented people!!
Besides the bright color, I liked the extension of the letters. / Image via The Social Life of Paper
| Visit our sister sites | eHarmony Online Dating |
eHarmony Advice Dating Advice |
Project Wedding Wedding Songs |
JustMommies Pregnancy Calendar |
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | 30 | 31 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
