Where Have I Been?

Excuse time! Muy muy busy!

We had our food tasting at the Disneyland hotel two weeks ago, everything was great. The food is good, the chicken is moist, the cake is, well lets just say my guests might find that they get a box of animal crackers while I try to finish off a three tier cake by myself.

Invitations went out this week! Took us a little bit of time to get them all out. Sensible fiance talked me into using standard postal format for the envelopes, which I thought would be hideous, but turned out to be very plain and stark in a cool way, that totally offset the crazy colorfulness that happens when you open the envelope.

Standard postal format? Apparently the post office got new scanners a year or so ago, and it want all caps, san-serif, large type, no punctuation whatsoever. Looks like this:

MR and MR FAKE NAME
123 FAKE ST
FAKEVILLE CA 12345-6789

Anybody who sends out large quantities of mail knows that if you don't follow the format, you get a lot of mail back. We wanted these to get to their recipients. We wanted them to get there fast. They did. Mailed on a Saturday evening from Long Beach California, arrived as far as tiny town Oklahoma on Monday afternoon. Awesome.

Also I bought a Cricut Expression machine. Love It. It cuts paper. Love it. It makes things like this. Out of cut paper pieces you glue together. I love it.


My friend says if you love it so much why don't you marry it? I just might.

Invitation Sweatshop

This weekend I got some friends together to assemble invites. I felt like a sweatshop entrepreneur! I changed the girls names to Socorro, Consuelo, and Pei-Ming. We called Mike the gringo factory owner.



Thanks to everyone's help most of the work is done, and all I have to do is add the ribbon to the outside, add the embellishment, velcro closure, make some labels and get these suckers in the mail.

Invitations Are Done!

Or at least the super final final sample is done. Now I just need to get my friends together assemble 65 of them! I know it sounds like a lot, but since I've actually already cut all the pieces all we have to is gluing. The invitation part is printed on pearlescent paper, so it has a little shine to it. I cut the cardstock for the inserts myself and printed the inserts on an inkjet printer. The folder and pink mat for the invitation came from Cards & Pockets.


I found the ribbon for the outside of the invites at Costco. They have a great selection of spring colors right now, and you can gat a 5o yard roll for only $6.99 at my local costco, that's a bargain. The hardest part for me to figure out was the embellishment for the front. Everything pre-made was so expensive, so I ended up buying three diffent shape-punches. A huge daisy, a smaller daisy, and a small mickey head. I used two large daisies and one small one and held the whole thing together with glue dots, and then used one large glue dot to attach the flower to the ribbon. The ribbon is held on using double-sided scrapbooking tape.


I made the inserts myself in illustrator, printed them up, and cut them. This is my favorite one of all.


I think people will be excited to get these in the mail, I know I would!

Dingbat's Agenda Giveaway

The people at Dingbat's Agenda have come up with a really great way to get me and other people to blog about them. They are having a giveaway for an entire free suite of invitations, and to enter all you have to do is blog about the giveaway. The invitations look great and would totally work with our madhatter theme, I can see flowers or lanterns working out really great, so here's to hoping I win!

Making Your Own Pocket Invitations

I first saw these folders with pockets on the side on an excursion to Paper Source, one of my favorite (if not slightly overpriced) craft stores. It really bothered me when I was in the store that I could not buy just a few pieces of the things that I wanted as a sample. The only way was to buy everything in packs of 10.

Fortunately a bride-to-be suggested that I check out the pocket cards at CardsandPockets.com. Their selection of different types of cards was not as vast as Paper Source (and that's not necessarily a bad thing, I subscribe to the philosophy that sometimes too many choices are a bad thing). One of the greatest things about cards and pockets was that I was able to buy a sample pack from them that included everything I needed to create a sample invitation. The sample I ordered arrived quickly and so did my final order.

We are going to be using the Signature size pocket folders in clover. The invitation matte will be in watermelon. We are printing up the center invitation part ourselves using a laserjet printer and using off-white linen cardstock. Cards and pockets also sells the insert cards, but I will be cutting them out myself using the same paper as the invitation page. I am cutting colored cardstock to mount the inserts on.




This is a mock-up of our invites. I will post pictures of the final when we get around to making them. The blue strip on the outside will be blue ribbon that we will use to tie the cards shut, and we will probably not be using any ornamentation on the outside. I'll post pictures of the invitation party I'm planning to throw to trick.... er.... ask my friends to help me assemble these.