Bad, bad, blogger.

Yeah I know. You don't care about my lame excuses anyway, so let me just post some (not so) recent projects and get on with it!

December was Henry's 1st birthday (dang this year went by fast!!!), and so we commemorate this momentous occasion with a party! Gives me an excuse to make cool invites too! A while back I had seen a tutorial somewhere on how to make your own scratch off tickets. Didn't know I would need to know this at the time, but I stashed the idea in my lid for future cards/invites/fun stuff. Seeing as we, ahem—I mean I

*I*—decided that we were going with the Robot/Space theme, what could be better than a glittery metallic invite? Nothing!!!

I used an image that my fantastic, photographer sister-in-law Linda had taken of one of Henry's robots as a starting point, found the moon background on Thinkstock, printed them all off on some fancy Stardream metallic paper using the trusty Xerox Phaser, and got down to cutting and glittering! Underneath the "space dust" is the message to the invitee with details of the party. 

The invites were sent out with metal type souvenir coins with the date stamped on them that I created at a local arcade (*EDIT*, I should mention it was Marvin's Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills. Go check that place out!) that has a vintage metal type machine. I would LOVE to have one of these machines! Check this site out that I came across! THIS GUY is keeping metal type alive and will send you a personalized coin for a donation, how righteous is that? Very! 

I found some really cool silver glitter gift bags at a party supply store and filled them with spacey/robot prizes for our guests. Everything turned out really well, the kids were so excited to receive the sparkly good bags and invites were a big hit—one little friend asked her mom "Is it REALLY space dust?!".  Awwww!!!!!! Six year olds rock!

Creating the scratch off is super easy! You'll need: Acrylic paint, contact paper, dish soap, brush, container for mixing. Glitter optional.

**1**
Take your choice of acrylic paint (I used metallic silver) and mix with regular old dish soap in about a 1:1 ratio. (I recommend something unscented...I picked some cheap stuff up at the dollar store and it stunk to high heaven).

**2**
Mix paint/soap together and paint an area of the contact paper. You can do this one of two ways, either cut out your shapes out of the contact paper and stick them on your card first, then paint them OR do what I found to be easier, which was paint a big piece of contact paper, then cut the shapes after. In my mind, it would be easier and cleaner then painting on the invites themselves. Less room to mess up since there was no painting 'in the lines'.

**3**
Sprinkle copious amounts of glitter on the wet paint and let dry. After everything is completely dry, cut your shapes out (mine was the square to cover the invite details) and stick it to your card.

VOILA! You have some fancy personalized scratch offs! Be forewarned, you will have glitter on EVERYTHING...so I suggest doing this in an area where you don't mind it getting a little sparkly. Luckily for me, Henry's birthday is right before Christmas, so I just figured it was a little more holiday sparkle added to the house!

Here is a link to the original source and a step by step, including photos, of how it all works. Valentines day is coming up...glitter on people, glitter on.

Reception Invite

Hard to believe it's been over half a year since our reception. Dang...time flies!! I've been meaning to do a post about our invitation for our wedding reception for months. A few things have been keeping me busy like, house hunting/buying/moving/renovating, having a baby, going back to work...and the business of everyday life that seems to get in the way of what you originally set out to do. But, things are settling down a little bit more now. Going back to work has put the routine back into my life that was completely lost on maternity leave. I miss being home with my baby, but being here means that I have the luxury of checking email or posting on this blog—things that go on the back burner when I return to Hamco at the end of a workday. So, once again, I am going to try and post with some regularity to this little blog o' mine.

So back to the invite.

My husband and I eloped in June, 2010. We chose the tiki gardens of the historic Mai Kai in Ft. Lauderdale. It had everything we wanted. A cool destination, historic significance, unique setting and built in entertainment, plus a-MAZING cocktails (of course, I couldn't enjoy having recently discovering I was pregnant)! I don't remember this, but apparently the last (and only) time I was there, I told my travel pals that I wanted to get married there. Premonition? Maybe. It was perfection. Eloping has a small guest list. A couple of our closest friends joined us as our Best Man and Matron of Honor, but that was it. No family, no other friends...just the four of us.

So we wanted to have a reception when we returned. We chose another historic location for our reception, Cliff Bell's Jazz Club in Detroit.

Since the two venues had very little in common, I wanted an invite that sort of tied the feeling of the Mai Kai and our tiki wedding in with our brunch. Using the Mai Kai mug as my inspiration, I created a barrel shaped invite. I had found a terrific local photographer on Craigslist, who's work seemed to elude to her ability to capture the events exactly the way I wanted (and she did an amazing job! www.daniellerphotography.com), so I incorporated her image and a few other Mai Kai, beachy, tiki items into the design. Once again, I relied on my trusty (ahem) die-cutter to contour cut the barrel shape. I added tiki drink stirrers to every invite so that they would look like a cocktail when folded with the stirrer sticking out. I used regular bright white Hammermill 100 lb. cardstock for the invites and chose French Dur-o-tone paper for the envelopes and ran everything through the Xerox Phaser 7750 (god I love those printers!).

Originally I chose French Parchtone in Natural for the invites, but due to the ink coverage on the laser printer, the paper was completely obscured under the printing, so instead I used that paper to make a guest book and thank you tags for the deserts/parting gift. Everything had a nice, aged and rustic look to it, which was exactly what I had wanted. The hawaiian and tiki clip art are downloads from French.com as well. Gotta love French!

I was super happy with the results of the invite and the party. Next time I'll use a padded envelope, as a few of the stirrers suffered the wrath of the automated machinery at the post office. Guests were super impressed by their invites and the souvenir stirrer added a little novelty.

Slackin' on the blog already...I know

Last week I put together an invite for a co-worker/friends son's graduation party. It's her oldest child, so first graduation and she's really excited about the party. I wanted to come up with something clever and fun to announce the event. I also wanted something really simple to that we could use paper and printers that we had on hand and customize it to incorporate his school colors.

And no, her son is not named Ella...I've changed the information to respect her privacy. Any of you who know me will get a kick out of the thought of Ella actually graduating. Technically, she's almost old enough, but I don't think she has the brain capacity or language skills to pass kindergarden—she's my cat!

Ta da! (I really need to work on my photography skills. My pictures are the worst!)

So, once again, I put the die cutter to the test! First, I cut the scroll and holes on some nice, bright white, recycled 80lb cover stock. We ran the invites through the laser printer. Quick and easy! The 2010 charms were an ebay score and we were so happy to see they were the perfect size. We found some nice metallic red envelopes to coordinate with the red bow and put it all together. She's so happy with the result and I can't wait to hear what kind of response she gets!