Invitations

One of my very good friends from high school will be getting married in October of this year. As one of her bridesmaids I've been helping her with some of the planning and I took on the task of designing the invitations. I jumped at the opportunity to create something awesome and unique (perhaps a little too enthusiastically actually). The theme of the wedding is "Enchanted Forest" so my friend and I discussed giving the invitation and aged fairy tale feel without going overly feminine and Disney looking.

Around the same time I discovered this wonderful product:



A Pazzles Inspiration Creative Cutter! With this machine you can cut just about anything straight from your computer! It's designed for scrapbookers and hobbyists but the more I read about this machine, the more uses I saw for it. What I would give to have had one of these in art school!

Of course, it retails for about $600 off the shelf (a little expensive for my tastes) but after shopping around a little bit, I found a great deal on one on ebay.

My friend's invitations seemed like a great opportunity to see what this creative cutter was made of. I begin sketching forest inspired designs and we ordered the paper.

An unfortunate feature about the Pazzle is it is not made to work with a Mac, which was a big hurdle for me. After a lot of trial and error however, I was able to get a version of Windows to work on my Mac so that I can run the program for the creative cutter. It's a little time consuming to have to restart the computer in Windows every time I want to use the product, but it was worth it for the result.





It took a little time to cut out each invitation individually, and we had to enlist several other friends to help man the machine while we folded and cut the corresponding reception and RSVP cards, but it is still a miracle to me that we were able achieve this quality without shelling out lots of money to pay for custom die cuts or risking loosing a finger cutting out 150 of these with an xacto knife.

I'm looking forward to hearing how they are received after my friend sends them out.

Sewing crafts

So I'm VERY delayed in posting these, but I'm still very proud of the way they all turned out so I'm going to post them anyways. Last Christmas (yes, Christmas) I got very crafty with my presents for everyone (primarily out of a need to save money this year). First, I found this adorable stuffed bird pattern on Spool, downloaded that and converted my apartment into a bird factory over Thanksgiving weekend. Here are a few of the results:



I ended up making about 20 of these little guys. I added the little wire legs so that they would be able to stand-up on their own. A part of me still wants to make more, especially after I saw this BEAUTIFUL bird mobile idea on Design*Sponge, using the same bird pattern. However, while my crafty heart says "yes," my tired fingers say "no." At least for now.

I had already made birds for my coworkers for another occasion, so I had to come up with something new to give them for the holidays. For them I drew out a simple star pattern and then designed a monogram for each of their initials. Using my light table, I painted each of the monograms onto a nice muslin fabric and sewed them into ornaments. For a very impromptu project, I was very pleased with the results!



The good thing about them is they don't have to be just for Christmas. Several of my coworkers came back saying they were using them as door hangers so they could leave them out all year long.