Make-up post of awesome

So as I said before, I’ve been a posting slacker, so tonight, I make up for it! Two posts for you! Unless I get tired halfway through this and give up.

Everyone who was supposed to should have received their StDs (hehe) yesterday, so it is now safe for me to post about them!  So here goes 🙂

As I said in a previous post, we found the stamp to use and then were on a mission to figure out how to use it.  We looked around online and decided we like something like this (found on WeddingBee):

by Miss Hamster - click on link for source

We talked about doing our pictures or a picture of us on one side and our stamp opposite the picture, similar to what you see here.  Then on the back we would have the details – when, where, wedding website, etc.  Sounds good, right?

Then we get to PaperSource to pick out our supplies.  We have a sense of what we’re looking for, so this is the easy part, right? Yes, until I’m late and Turtle finds the basket of samples and gets a whole NEW idea.

And so, with just a stamp and a vague sense of colors we like (ahem, if we were to have colors. not that we have discussed this at length. *cough cough*), we perused the store, picked up some stuff, and headed home.

The ultimate design ended up being strips of pretty blue paper wrapped around the brown cards.  We stamped the blue paper and hand wrote details on the cards, with our wedding site URL on the back. Not too fancy, but fun and crafty, and gets the idea across!

Instructions are as follows:

Step one: Make a mess. Spread all potential supplies across workspace, even if you will not yet be using them.

Step two: CAREFULLY stamp the strips of paper your fiancee ripped by hand to specific measurements. What not to do includes dropping the stamp directly onto any supplies. Not that I did that. That anyone saw. Hm.

Step three: Stop taking pictures of the process and finish the darn STDs (hehe) already! Sorry no pictures of details. If you wanted them.

Step Four: Make sure all the cards say the right thing in the right places. Place in envelopes.

Step five: Cut out and affix pretty leaves to the back of envelopes. My sister gave me the leaf design cutter for my birthday and I was so excited to incorporate it!

Step six: Feel accomplished for a little while (at least an hour) before realizing that your wedding is only about 7 months away and this is a minor detail amongst all the planning. Eek! Readygo!

Save the Dates, or Fancee and Roughit Can Never Agree on Anything

When Fancee and I finally decided we were going to do this whole big wedding thing, the crafty possibilities were thrilling to me.  I spent a good chunk of time investigating different projects online, including, of course, invitations and Save the Dates (or STDs if you are cool enough to know the wedding lingo).  I should probably be done being amused that the first thing people generally send out about their monogomous, hopefully-forever relationship is called the same thing as a venereal diseases, but to be perfectly honest, I still giggle a little every time I reference STDs in a wedding context.

So we started where every crafty bride starts: Etsy. Here is some of what we were looking at:

Invite from ellothere - click on image for source

letterpress invite from unitistudio

blackbird press invite

invite from pistachiopress

everlastinginvites invite

Are you noticing a theme here?  Okay so we both like trees and birds, if you hadn’t noticed.  The issues we were running into were that they were a little too cutesy for our taste, or they were too expensive.  Or what I loved enough to spend the money on, Fancee just thought would be “kind of alright,” and what she was willing to spend the money on, I didn’t love enough.

And then we stumbled across something that stopped us both.  She looked at it and sort of cautiously said, “What do you think?”  My cautious reply: “I like it. Do you?”  I think it took us a minute or two to be honest about how much we liked it, and so we decided to get it! And that’s how we ended up with a wedding logo:

Wedding stamp! We are not Caitlin and Nathan, but this is what our stamp looks like...

We love it!  We used it for the first time to decorate for our engagement party, and now we’re using it for the save the dates (STDs, hehe).  It never occurred to me to look specifically for something we could use over and over, or even for a strong matching theme, but this seems to be working well for lots of things.  I love that we can use different colors with it, or cover up the date or tree if we don’t want those parts to show.

An example of our stamp decorating skills! This was one of the prizes at our engagement party.

Do you have some sort of theme for your wedding? Were you surprised by the choices that you and your partner ended up making together?