Handmade Moving Announcements

Sunday confessional: My DIY invitations failed. Completely and utterly failed. I spent months designing a suite that I loved (featuring the prettiest little birds on each insert), bought paper, talked to printers… then bam! Out of nowhere, we find out that nobody could print on the paper we bought (oh, about $100 worth). And the PDF of the invites was incompatible. And there was a border on them that nobody could print. It was too late to change it because my laptop crashed and the entire template was on there. And so on…It kept going like this until I eventually wanted to poke my own eyes out.

We love giving updated uses to simple techniques, and these splatter-painted notecards from Rebekah J. Murray fit the bill!

Escort cards are one of the first things your guests will see as they enter the reception, so why not create something unique and memorable for when your friends and family arrive? We absolutely love these escort cards with their natural botanical touches like cotton, seeded eucalyptus, lavender, and silver brunia, and are thrilled to welcome Suzy Rohan of Lily Red Studio to share the how-to!

This post is sponsored by Scratch Weddings, the fabulous team of marquee-level DJs turning weddings into dance parties nationwide!

Happy Monday everyone! We hope you are having a great start to your week, and to make a sunny Monday just a smidge brighter, we have a beautiful free printable save the date from The Lovely Dept. to share!  The beautiful watercolor wreath is a lovely touch for any spring or summer wedding, and I just adore the light and airy green and yellow color palette.

If you are anything like me, you are a procrastinator!  Well, guess what?  We’re in luck!  Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we have adorable printable Valentines from Lauren from Palm Papers and a precious love shoot from Catie Ronquillo Photography!  Ashley and Dmitry have been married for almost a year, and this sweet shoot was perfect way to celebrate their first Valentines Day as a married couple!

I have the cutest DIY tutorial to share with you today!  My friends Kelly Marie from Fleur and Suzy from Lily Red Studio are stopping by to share a fabulous DIY billy ball escort card box how-to with us.  Designed by Tiffany of Chicago’s Soiree Events, this sweet display is so easy and cute, and easily adaptable to any event!

This morning’s Pancakes & Honey Breakfast shoot featured several handmade wedding projects, and the team of Suzy from Lily Red Studio, Kelly Marie from Fleur, and Jaclyn Simpson Photography have been kind enough to share their DIY secrets with us! They created several projects – click on the links below to jump to the instructions for your favorite:

As I previously posted, our invitations went out last month and we have been receiving a steady stream of RSVP cards. As I was going through the pictures of the assembly process, it makes it look easy. Trust me, it was very intense and not the easiest invitations I have put together! (This is my fifth set of invites designing and assembling) If only I had pictures of the week long prepwork before this day (and yes, it was the entire day!). In the week or so before finishing the invites, my mom stamped the wax seals, I cut and folded strips of paper, printed all the items, struggled with the printer and getting letterpress paper to go through it (I just loved the texture of that paper though!) and mounting the invite to the blue shimmer paper and then to the gold enclosures. Oh yes, and then remounting everything with super glue to be sure it would stay. I think there was something about the dry Arizona air that made the photo mounting squares not work so well this go-around.

I am so excited to finally be sharing picture of our wedding invitations with all of you. They went out a couple weeks ago and we have already received over 20 RSVP cards! I designed, printed and assembled them myself and my fiance drew the flower flourish at the top. My mom, moh and junior bridesmaid all helped with the assembly (which took an entire week!). These are the most intense invitations I have ever made and both Mike and I are so proud of them.

I fancy myself a fairly crafty person, but I’m also a fairly busy person, so I didn’t figure on incorporating a lot of DIY projects into my wedding preparations. Making table numbers and creating a guest book in Blurb with our engagement photos were definitely the easiest things I did myself. But the bigger projects I took on – our save-the-dates, invitations and favors – saved us a lot of money and went a long way toward personalizing our big day, which is what DIY is all about, isn’t it?

Understatement of the year: I feel like I spent a lot of time planning this wedding. But the end result? A day filled not only with people that we love but details that I loved as well!

Our invitations are officially out and RSVPs have already started coming in! My mom, bridesmaid Julie, and I created the whole thing by ourselves so it was definitely a labor of love. Here’s a look at the final package!

I’m not sure why, but I adore wedding programs. Perhaps it’s because I’m a paper lover at heart, or maybe because you guys get SO creative with them? I spotted these DIY tri-fold programs from Harrison and Elizabeth’s wedding on La Belle Bride and thought they were too pretty not to share.  I love the rich colors and the mix of papers and fonts!

Designing my own invitations was undoubtedly the most daunting and time-consuming DIY activity thus far.  Prior to assuming the responsibility myself, I perused hundreds of invitation templates, online and in-person, searching for the following criteria: simple, concise, personal, one-page (green), my colors (kraft-paper-brown and silver), travel-themed, rich, and affordable.  During that time, I found a lot of what I was looking for–but not in the same invitation suite.  So I saved all my inspiration; internally dug up the knowledge I learned at a 2-day Photoshop training two years ago; and spent four months analyzing, agonizing and eventually, designing my own invitations. That being said, seeing them printed and sent is so satisfying, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Pretty paper melts my heart!  I love the juxtaposition of the materials that Shannon of In The Now used to created these boxed wedding invitations – the wood and lace are perfect together, the Western touches of the graphics are positively adorable, and don’t even get me started on how much I love the “stitching” and cut edges on the printed layer.  Too cute, right?

I sent out the last save the date this morning!

So as I mentioned, I decided it would be fun to make our entire lot of save the dates, invitations and anything else involving paper and our wedding. Why you ask?  Looking back I’m not really sure, but it was an experience! I don’t have any special training or real artistic ability, I just have a mother who was always extremely crafty and have always been striving to be like that.

Remember how I found the CK monogram in that book of vintage monograms?

A few years ago, I took a letterpress class at the San Francisco Center for the Book (lovely center, I recommend it to anyone in the SF Bay Area!) and that’s when I fully realized why letterpress costs the ka-ching! amount that it does. It took me nine hours on one Saturday to make one thank you card design, one envelope design with my address, and print over two hundred copies. And this wasn’t some complicated design, it had a bird and “Thank You” written on it. My eyes were basically cross-eyed by the time I got out of there, and my hands and clothes were totally filthy from playing with ink. Letterpress is labor intensive and crazy detail-oriented, and I bow down to all the masters of it!