Winter Wedding Inspiration Board

Ideas for a Beautiful and Magical Winter Wedding. 

Add a sprinkle of snowflakes, fluffy furs and warm cocktails by the fire. Shimmering white gowns and icy blue accessories. Want these beautiful things? Check out the winter wonderland here.

Invitations - How to DIY caligriphy on dark envelopes

image from calligraphybycami.com

So I had a slight dilemma. My Wedding colors are Navy and Hot Pink / fuchsia. I could go with the cheap option and do white #10 envelopes with Navy writing. That would be oh-so easy. I'd just feed my envelopes right on through my printer with my pretty calligraphy font of choice. But if you know me, you know I can't do anything the easy way. I wanted navy blue envelopes...it doesn't get much darker than that. So the question remained. How do you get beautifully caligraphered handwriting on a dark blue envelope?

Option 1: Find a calligrapher to write out all my invitations in a white or silver ink and pay about $2/ envelope. So times that by 150 people + all the return envelopes and you have a $600 cost. Yikes!

Option 2: Take up calligraphy classes. Very pricey and time consuming...

Option 3: Labels - yuck. Talk about cheesy and cheap looking.

However there is a solution. You can have your beautiful calligraphy and make people think you paid lots of moolah for handwritten envelopes. How is this possible you ask... tracing.

I know what you're thinking. How can you trace on dark? A light box won't shine through. Ahhh, but you must think differently. I used my printer to print the invitations in black ink on my navy envelopes. Then trace in your pen color of choice.

Here is the envelope with the black printed on blue

My next dilemma, which is something you can't really see right now is the pen. I purchased a silver gel pen that is supposedly fine tip (0.7mm). Well, it's not fine enough for what I'm doing. After purchasing the gel pen, I thought I'd try another option. I then bought a Pen-touch 1.0mm fine point marker in silver. Immediately when I opened it I thought, "who is the jerk calling this thing fine point?". So now I'm on a journey to find the perfect gel pen/marker. I don't care if it writes in silver or white, just that it's thin enough for this application. My next option is that I will try to print a test envelope in my beautiful font bold, rather than regular. Hopefully that will give some leeway in the teeny scrollwork of the font.

If you're asking where to find a lovely font, there are plenty of wonderful fonts out there. Scour dafont.com or where I found mine, fontstock.net. They're free for personal use! There are so many to choose from you're sure to find something you like.  Below is a combo of Beautiful ES & Beautiful Caps ES swash for my caps.  I got them  here.

My trial with the gel pen.  It didn't flow nicely and gave me spots where I needed to go over the text several times

Frustrated in trying to find a perfect pen, I ran across this link which should help me in my pen search.  It's a comparison video of gel pens and gives me hope.  I think I'll be able to find my perfect pen after all.  I'll keep going with the search and let you know how it goes and what works for me.

DIY Sailboat Save the Dates

It took a few revisions and a lot of creativity to get to my final result (left), my cute little sailboats.  This post is all about my process of how I got there and how you can do something similarly cute for your invitations or your save the dates!

Looking for something a little different for my save the dates, I had designed quite a few different  "looks" going on.

The first two were quite simple.  My theme for my wedding is the compass rose, given that this is a nautical wedding by the ocean. 

So, I started with this design(below) , then I deviated to something similarly nautical, which was the ship wheel.

After taking polls everyone seemed to like the ship wheel due to the fact that it was easier for those with poor eyesight to read the text inside the wheel.

As much as I like these little save the dates, I still felt like I wanted something more memorable than this.  I happened to find this post for DIY save the date boats from broadway paper.

As much as I liked these little boats, I ran into a couple of problems.
1.) where the heck do you find lollipop sticks?
2.) I wanted it to be more "boat-looking" than what was pictured

I also noticed an issue when it came time for printing, which I easily solved.

Here are my little boats and how I did them by modification of the DIY project.

What you'll need:

• 9x12 construction paper (heavyweight)
• 8" bamboo skewers (I found a bag of 100 for $1.99 at Stop and Shop)
• A printer that can adjust to 9"x12" printing
• a x-acto knife

Instructions

1. On your computer create two triangles from a square that is 4" x 3.75".
2. Copy this shape until you have 6 squares or 12 triangles on your page (this will fit nicely on a 9x12 sheet but you will lose two squares if you are using a 8 1/2 x 11 standard sheet of paper) - this will be your sail.
3. Create a new sheet and again make a square that is 4" x 3.75".  Cut off the top and bottom corners and you should be left with a 6 sided hexagon.
4.  Divide the hexagon in two by placing a cut line horizontally through the shape - this should make two boats.
5. Repeat the hexagon throughout the page so you get 6 hexagons per page or 12 boats.  If you can only print on 8 1/2 x 11 you'll probably only be able to fit at most 10 boats.
6. Print and cut out your sails and boats.
7. Sails require 4 slices from the x-acto.  Two on the top (in photo above the anchor)  and two below (next to the web address in the photo).  Start "sewing" the skewer from the back of the sail as to not hide the text on the front of the sail.
8. The boat portion only requires 3 slices from the x-acto.  The first I placed above the writing "formal invitation to follow".  The next two are on the base of the boat.
9. Trim the wood skewers to the desired length when done.

Tip:  Make sure you slice your cuts long and not close to the edge.  The first one I did was too small and it ripped open the top of the sail!