I am finally getting around to blogging, I have been wanting to do this for a while. I thought I would start off with one of my favorite projects, the process was really fun and the end result is too.
Pierre and I got engaged in May of 2008 and got married in April 2010, so since we had a while to plan we decided we could dedicate ourselves to making our own save the dates - not only was this going to save us money (right?!), we could make one card with both french and english (which is sort of hard to find). In the end, this honestly didn't save us much money but we had a lot of fun making these.
In all of my projects I am usually just waiting for the creativity to strike, either that or to find the "inspiration" that I can work a whole concept around. In this case, our save-the-dates were inspired not from an object, but a store: Paper Source was my best friend during this process! We live in Maryland, so the best options for us at the time were Georgetown or Annapolis, and yes....we are those people who will drive further if it means avoiding the parking/chaos of DC traffic. We ventured to Annapolis many weekends, two years later there is a Paper Source down the road from us in Bethesda but we had many more adventures and have many more memories from our Annapolis trips.
We knew we wanted a simple, clean design - perhaps a little vintage. I fell in love with the "brown paper bag" color at Paper Source and went with their square envelope and square folded card. The color we picked for the card no longer exists at Paper Source (which we discovered while attempting to purchase the same color for our wedding invitation supplies - another fun adventure to tell later), but it is a very pale pink. I also fell in love with a typewriter font available on HP computers called Batik, we were using Pierre's computer from his Architecture school days for this process since he has PhotoShop.
We chose the wording (making sure to have Pierre's mom spellcheck the french) and designed the layout on PhotoShop. We used 8.5x11 luxe cream paper (We not only saved money on paper cost by doing this, but on printing as well since this is usually charged on a per sheet basis) and laid out each section using grid lines. We found a printer who agreed to use our PDF and used a print method called thermography so the wording would be embossed and become more typewriter like. I asked for advice on the cutting process and the printer said he could use his weighted cutter and would have each section individually wrapped when we picked everything up (he only charged us an additional $10 for this).
We made our save-the-dates whimsical with our paper envelope liners and picked a photo for the front. Pierre and I both enjoy photography and so made it even more "us" by adding in the photo corners. Now for the photos:
 |
| new paper scissors for this project! |
 |
| I loved how the photo corners laid out with glue dots looked like a sea of fishies |
 |
| we complete this entire process on my sewing desk in my bedroom at the time - at my parent's house |
 |
| tape guidelines helped us uniformly lay out each piece |
 |
| King and Queen of heart stamps - the square envelopes required extra postage |
I will add another photo tomorrow with our final product, I somehow didn't take one at the time and I need to charge my camera battery :)
No comments:
Post a Comment