{recap} wedding invite - final product

let me preface this post by saying - a majority of the photos were taken by me... and i'm terrible at detail shots - so i apologize for the blurry, out of focus ones! =)

ok so here's the final product - this pic was actually shot by a friend at one of my bridal showers - thanks shayn - keep up the good work!

back to my photos again - here's the belly band my sis-in-law slaved away on - 2" by 12" creates this look - then i layered the 1"x 1" blue square (which has the gold gocco'd sand dollar) on top of the ivory 2"x 2" square to "close" the band off.

once you slide the belly band off - it reveals the inside of our pockets - lined with my favorite paisley paper - the invitation piece sits on the left (with gocco'd gold sand dollars again) - and all of the info cards and rsvp postcard are in the pocket to the right (again lined with my favorite paisley paper).

here's a shot of the ceremony & reception card... duh =)

direction card - again tying in our sand dollar motif 

here's the front of our rsvp postcard

and the back - it was really fun to get responses and song requests back from our guests!

finally after all the hard work, they're ready to be shipped out to all our wedding guests! i really loved the Louis Comfort Tiffany stamps we used - they worked well with our overall color scheme!

and here our invitations are immortalized by our wonderful photographer -

 MemoriesbyMichael.com

hope you enjoyed seeing some of what went into DIY'ing your own invitation suite, it's A LOT of hard work - but if you have help from family and friends you too can DIY your dream invitations! 

next up - i'll be deconstructing my inspiration board - showing you my inspiration photo and the real life wedding photo, it should be fun!

b

{recap} wedding invite workshop

well... to start off the wedding recaps, i think i should begin with our invites - since they did inspire a great deal of the details that stood out on our wedding day.

after designing and printing the invites - which were partially printed by a family friend, then the sandollar details were gocco'd by me - we had a family assembly party consisting of my parents, my brother and sis-in-law, myself and my hubby (then fiance). each person more of less to charge of a "station" ...

here's what we had to tackle that day:

-emboss address on all envelope flaps

-crease and close belly bands

-xyron paisley pocket liners & all invitation pieces

-adhesive main paisley liner and flap liner

-gocco all sandollar details

-adhesive invites into pocket folders

-insert all the detail cards into pockets

-apply postage stamps to rsvp postcards

... that was pretty much it! sounds easy right? well take a look at the process and you decide, but in my opinion this was a labor of love that took upwards of 10 hours to complete!

here are my bro and sis-in-law: he's embossing our envelope flaps 

and here lisa is using the sample belly band that's taped to the mat to line up the crease marks for each band

even my now hubs got involved - J worked the xyron machine to make the pocket folder lining into stickers, making them easier/quicker to stick the lining on. and that's me standing gocco'ing the sandollars!

mom and J watching me work the kinks outta lining the pocket folders

in the pic below - my nephew showing off something and if you look at my gocco screen you can see the various sizes of sandollars awaiting their turn to be gocco'd

mr. b .... in the zone - our family is full of perfectionist, especially him, so those embossed envelopes were perfectly squared thanks to the mat, some blue tape, and repeat - repeat - repeat

here you can see the grid my bro set up to use to emboss all the envelopes and in the next pic my mom testing it out

two perfectionist - my dad and bro - go figure, racing to see how many they could line in 10 minutes! boys operate so differently from women

taking a break to play a lil' wii bowling...

no longer is it light outside and the girls of course are still working on affixing the lining and the actual invite pieces to the pocketfolders 

later that night i continued lining pocket folders and backing the invites to the liner...

first i put in the part that sits behind the invite, then the flap had to be attached

i made sure to run my bone folder over all the liner to smooth it down and make sure there were no ripples

last up was to stick on each invitation piece which had previously been xxyron'd to create a stick backing so i could easily stick them all in to their own pocket folders.

next up i'll show you the final results of all the pieces assembled and ready to be sent out to our guests!

it's so hard to believe we were making these almost a year ago in May! wow!

Recap: DIY Cocktail Napkins

after mastering my beloved gocco machine, i decided that i was going to take on making my personalized cocktail napkins for our wedding. i went to IKEA of all places to buy my napkins since they were having a blow out sale on these, i snatched them up for uber-cheap. i bought them in navy and white - and at that time i had planned on just repeating the pattern i used on the blue.

well needless to say, i got a little creative/ambitious and thought i'd incorporate our paisley pattern from our invitations on the white napkins... and i was really happy with the way they turned out. below is a candid from one of my bridesmaids, the napkins were sitting on the cake table... note to future brides: if you take on DIY projects, give a list to you photographer, i blew it on that, and therefore didn't end up with many photos of my DIY details.

the navy napkins had our sand dollar

Blair & Justus

August 2, 2008

all in metallic gold ink

below is a close up of our sand dollar image

above is our cake with the napkins next to it

here's a close up of the paisley napkins

and finally a shot from the design process: gocco'ing napkins means - very little counter space!

give me some time and you'll be able to view some client's custom cocktail napkins that i'll be posting on my company blog for an upcoming wedding... go to JoiedeVieJewelry.blogspot.com.

Cheers!

prior to being engaged i always thought it would be cute to have our toasting glasses 

say "Mr. on his & Mrs. on mine".... a very trival detail i was concerned with huh? 

shows where my pre wedding planning priorities were!

(invitations by dawn)

but all i could really come up with were flutes that looked like those pictured above.

but they just weren't the "look" i was going for... i wanted something with more of an heirloom-ish quality (is that even a word?)

then thanks to my parents, we were given our toasting glasses, etched with our wedding date on them, along with these adorable tees from a time when we were adorable little children! =)

here's a picture of us opening our gifts at our engagement party.

here's a picture of a flute up close, i didn't have one of us actually toasting with them... go figure!

now this still did not remedy my desire to do the cutesy Mr. & Mrs. for the glasses.

then..... i was stalking my photog's previous weddings and out it jumped!

i don't know if you can tell what it is, but it's a simple card stock tag with colored ribbons at the base of the stem.  so... woo hoo, i get my Mr. & Mrs. wishes!

i bet this minor detail with drive my fiance nuts, but i love surprise small details at weddings. i think it's really cool to see how thought out every little element is.

what great lengths are you willing to and are going to to personalize your weddings small (yet noticeable) details?

incorporating your alma mater?

a recent trend in weddings is the tie in of the bride and groom's alma mater.

being a grad of USC, i have some friends who've tied in the Spirit of Troy marching band to their reception, their music selections, and special wedding day dedications.

here is a pic of the happy couple giving the fight on, these pics shot by our wedding photographer 

Memories by Michael

below: here's another way to include your alma mater... this wedding shot by photographer Stacy Kane, tied in their alma mater with a U of M groom's cake in the shape of Wolverine football helmet!

i'm sure when the FI and i discuss this matter, he will want to do some sort of a tribute to USC!

the question is how and what will we do to accomplish this?...

do you plan on giving you and your fiancé's alma maters a special place in your wedding? or do you think those good ol' college days should be a thing of the past?

my inspiration board

so it's not nearly as professional as most of the ones i've seen on Snippet & Ink or the bee's make on Weddingbee, but hey i made it, and didn't have to use Photoshop to get it done! so Ha!!

obviously we are using a very nautical color scheme which includes navy, marine/indigo blue, off white, and bright purple here and there.

if you don't have photo shop but do have a mac, you can make one like i did! (i would think the same goes for a pc just use power point). 

• open up keynote (mac's power point program)
• drag and drop all photos
• arrange them according to size and shape
• make sure all your edges line up ( you can insert a "chart" and remove all but the outline lines)
• you can resize all pictures once they had been dropped onto the slide.
• open "Grab" program ( this program is great for ripping pics that are apart of flash slideshows on websites!) shhhhh!
• go up to the "capture" tab and pick "selection"
• then as if you were cropping the inspiration board, outline the whole image with the grab pointer
• and voila! a new window will pop up and you can "save as" 
• Note: Grab only saves images in the TIFF format, so you will need to save it then reopen in "Preview" and take "save as" again and change the format to JPEG.
• once you've made it a JPEG you can upload the image to the internet (most online uploaders don't accept the TIFF format, but always use JPEG format!

good luck creating your very own inspiration board... let me know if those directions confuse you/ don't work, i'd be happy to help!