Wedding DIY's

Ok, finally I had time to take some shots of a couple of the wedding DIY yesterday morning. It seems that the only time when I'm not busy and still sane is right after I wake up in the morning, pre-breakfast. After I step out of the house, the madness begins.

Here are the tools that have been so helpful in the wedding paper-related stuff I had to create: (e.g. rotary cutter, cutter, scorer, scissors, adhesive tape, self-healing mat, etc).

First, let's talk about the wedding invites that took a lot of time and sweating over. The design is inspired by an invitation the bride saw in a wedding magazine. She wanted the same concept, so I made a (better) design around it (blow own horn here).

This is how the invite looks when closed:

The G is placed at the center of the flap and there's a swarovski crystal on the curvy flourish of the letter (bride's idea).

Front view:



A peek of the inside:









Two more crystals dot the flourish on the main invite.

The wedding colors are chocolate brown, rust and champagne. It's hard to get the rust shade just right on print because the printer "translates" the colors a bit differently from what's onscreen. Even the chocolate brown took three revisions, the first printing of the proofs came out too dark, almost black. The second try was too light. We finally hit bull's eye on the third try (the cardstock's original color was cream).

The bride wanted a lot of flourishes on the invites. Personally I would have gone down the classic path and kept it light and simple. But of course, what the bride wants, the bride gets!

I am so pleased when I heard of the positive feedback we received when the invites went out. For most of the guests, it was their first time to get an invite that was a) customized and not of the printing press cookie cutter mold and b) had no ribbons!

Now, the pressure was on to whip up an equally unique bridal shower invites. If the wedding invites were ribbon-less, now I wanted the shower invites to be envelope-less.

I googled and flickred, but couldn't find any unique ones online. What I found instead that lit up the bulb for me was one site that showed wedding programs using different patterns of the same color swatch. The wheels started to turn resulting to these:







I made three different designs that were consistent with the shower motif. I didn't want to strictly adhere to the wedding tri-colors and tweaked it instead to the brown, orange and blue families. I hate the matchy-matchy look, so I'm going easy on the colors and designs and want them to mix and match, go with the flow.

The three patterns will also be used on the party decor such as the cupcake holders, giveaways, shower guestbook, etc.

More pics:

Cutting them up


Measuring the parchment paper that will serve as the envelopes


I used a glue tape to adhere the main invite on to the parchment paper


Placing the main invite and the detail card inside


Ok please rotate your heads accordingly to see this pic because I stupidly forgot to rotate this one before uploading! This is the cover, a sort of pre-nup photo that I took of the couple (and edited heavily on Photoshop)


How it looks like when the parchment paper flap is closed with the tagline "Eat. Drink. Be Showered" on the front


Ribboned up






I made about 25 of these babies. The cutting took the longest and the "ribboning" was the trickiest part. I'm not so good with ribbons.

I made a high heel shoe illustration for this in honor of the bride's obsession with heels. So guests are asked to come wearing the highest pair of heels they own.

Each of the three designs sport a shoe of different colors. Each guest is assigned a room in the house and is requested to bring a gift that can be used in that room. The bride wanted stuff for three rooms- bedroom, dining room and kitchen. We wanted to be more economical and practical with the gifts (and not get about 20 lingeries!).

Now let's go to the wedding souvenirs. I used the small pillowbox template from Peppermint Creative and just used the monogram and flourishes that was on the wedding invites on the front.

Printing the templates (two fit nicely on one sheet of long-sized paper) on my Epson R230. I highly recommend this printer! I just love the quality of the prints.


Cut out


Scored on the inside


Folded


Ribboned


What it says at the back


We're making about 200 of these boxes, but the bride's co-workers have been nice enough to help us out.

Now I still have to work on the wedding signanges, table number, cards for the wishing tree, the wishing tree itself, giveaways for the shower and the decor, and the shower games. What games are played during bridal showers? The truth is, I have never been to a bridal shower before. It's just not a common tradition in the Philippine culture. All my friends who have gotten married never had a shower. And now my first time to go to a shower and I'm the one hosting it!

I need to breathe.

On the digiscrapping front, I'm nearly at the end of my two-month stint as guest designer for ZigZag Scraps. If you visit ZZS' blog here,  I'm on the designer spotlight for this week and there's a little Q&A with me there, as well as a freebie you can download which contains a small doodle set and a template I made in two versions.

This also marks the start of my brief break from designing digiscrap stuff. I do have one more kit that have been on the works for months now and which I hope to release early next month at STS. (A sneek peak is my new header!)

Like mentioned before, I'll still be blogging but it will mostly be about the wedding and my upcoming December vacation with my family, my soon-to-come second hand DSLR camera, and a new dog!

:-)