Falling in Love

More wedding designing to share with my followers! My BFF Sonja and her wonderful hubby AJ tied the knot at the beginning of the month. Their wedding was beautiful and decadent and fun and romantic.

As a gift for this great couple I offered to do their entire wedding suite. Sonja knew from the start that she wanted to embrace a fall color palette and play around with fall leaves. I actually blogged months ago about the watercolors I was doing in prep for the invites here. Overall Sonja and AJ were the ideal clients. They knew what they wanted in terms of design direction and they (pay attention here people) trusted me as a professional to do what I do best; design! (Love them for that).

The result was a beautiful suite that represented them and their special day. Detail below:

Hand painted watercolor was digitally manipulated to create a plethora of falling leaves.

Translucent vellum was tied over the fiber laden, natural color, cardstock for the invites. (AJ had tied all of the invites together by hand, hows that for a pro-active husband ladies?!)

The entire suite consisted of front and back printed save the dates, vellum and cardstock invitations tied with fall colored raffia, folded RSVPs and thanks you's consisting of the single falling heart leaf from the Save the Date.

Inexpensive and rustic feeling kraft envelopes were the perfect package to deliver to the invitees.

Joanne and Matt - Button Wedding

So if any of you ever follow my blog you know it is usually a random assortment of some of my sketches and doodles these days. However, the work outside of my blog posting has been devoted to an assortment of design work, illustrations, web design and identity.

This summer I had the pleasure of creating two separate wedding invitation suites for two people I am very close to; my sister and my BFF. Both of these projects were a blast to do and it was the best gift I could give to both of them for their special days.

Today I wanted to highlight the work I did for my sister Joanne and her husband Matt. Their wedding was held at a beautiful private park in Carpinteria, CA. My sister, an avid sewer and quilter, decided to incorporate a button theme to her big day. The end result was a hand illustrated and hand lettered suite.

The Save the Date was the jumping point for the rest of the suite. It set an overall tone in terms of illustration style and lettering, but actually contained a more complex color palette. Paper liners were created for the envelopes in a purple striped paper and we hand glued to all of the envelopes by my sister.

The invitation itself consisted of a gated fold card kept shut by a button band. The wedding date was hidden on the back side of the invite for a fun surprise. RSVP cards emulated the same button banner from the invite band for a consitent feel that wasn't cookie cutter throughout the suite.

Custom return address labels were also printed and used throughout the entire suite.

The end result was a casual and unique suite that helped shape the wedding details:
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Love's Road Map

I can say that without a doubt that I love Valentine's day. I know many people out there, single or taken, absolutely despise the holiday (or whatever you want to call it). But I myself see nothing wrong to devoting a day to chocolates and wine and sweet hand written notes. I am also an artsy-crafter type, so that may have something to do with my appreciation of the day. Valentines day doesn't have to be about falling into the grasp of the evil card companies and their idea of sucking money out of your pocket, it can be about taking the time to tell someone you're thinking of them and for me, that includes crafting cards with lots of cute and pink and heart shaped dealy-boppers (official crafting term).

This year my creative little sister came home from college for a month and did lots of thrift shopping. On her exploits she found some discarded maps and gave them to me to play with. So I did.

My friend Holly happened to be over for dinner when I busted out the craft supplies and here are the results: