Jaime's Save the Dates

Jaime is another one you might see frequenting the blog this upcoming wedding season. She came to me about a month ago looking for someone to help her with not only her wedding invitations, but Save the Dates and even a little special extra for her lake side wedding ceremony.  She is so easy to work with and has such great style. I can't wait to reveal more of it to you over the next few months!

Jaime sent me a file of her inspiration pictures for her wedding. After taking a look at some of the pictures she sent me (which I've kept myself from sharing here even though they are so incredibly creative and beautiful...privacy issues, you know), I started to come up with a design that I felt fit her day. Luckily, she felt the same way. We had a few tweaks here and there and then we were all set.

I have to say that the picture her and her fiancé wanted to use for this Save the Date is the cutest thing. When we met together and they showed it to me, I remember just staring at it thinking it was adorable and then I realized that I hadn't spoken on account of the staring. Embarrassing, and yet they still decided to use me. :)

The Save the Dates are just a cute little 4x5 card:

We used three fonts (just call us crazy): Halo Handletter, Centabel Book, and Riddle. All are free, obviously. :)

You'll see more of Jaime and Dan in a few months when we really get going on their wedding invitations. I can't wait!

Can I just show one more thing to you though?

I was probably more excited than a wife should be to give a card to my husband this year for Valentine's Day. He's not necessarily a card person at all, but his wife loves her some paper products, so he will have to deal. :)

This was my inspiration. I saw this card on a website that I absolutely adore, Oh So Beautiful Paper.

If you're wondering...

I loved the "We Go Together Like..." thing, though it wouldn't have had any significance to keep Bob Ross and his happy little trees on there (no offense to any Bob Ross lovers out there).

So I started to think about couples that were somewhat significant to Luke and me, from a TV show we watch or a book we've both read or a song of theirs that we (maybe...) have rapped together. Then I put this little card together. I loved it and I'm happy to report that he did, too.

(Any HIMYM fans...I know, I know...Barney and Robin are not currently together. But it's SO going to happen.)

My favorite was at the bottom..."The horse in War Horse and his boy". The movie War Horse is in no way significant to us, except for the fact that we saw it together on Christmas day with family. For days after, I had to listen to Luke go on and on about how attached the boy was to the horse and how abnormal that was. So you know it had to go on the card. We both started cracking up when he read it. We're not super sappy, but if we can share a good laugh, we're happy.

Happy (slightly late) Valentine's Day!

Want to hear more about the value of custom invitations? Check out this post. 

Not Gonna Do It...

{All of these cards are now available at Vivian Elle's Etsy Shop. Click here to visit!}

I want so badly to blog about the projects I've been working on, but I have a strict policy (self imposed, of course) that I will not share anything that I haven't given the bride the chance to send out yet. So...I wait. I know I'll be able to post one next week, so get excited for that. :)

Until then, you know what I have to do.

Here are more Christmas cards...YAY!!!!!!!!!!

I have 20 designs so far...I try to do one every couple of days. Some days I have lots of time and some days not so much. Hopefully I can keep up with this speed and have quite a selection come October. I have no clue if anyone will even buy them...but they'll be there. And I guarantee that I will at least force my mom to buy from me. :)

Here are a few from this week. Thanks to Amy Sayre (again) for letting me use some of her photos and to my sister-in-laws, Ashley and Heather, who probably felt like they had no choice (their photos are from Mike Topham Photography and Lily Glass Photography).

It was really weird to put different names on people I actually know, but I felt like I needed to respect their privacy, even though I have probably said their names dozens of times on this blog, including the above paragraph.

Are those flowers not amazing?! This lovely couple had an up north wedding. Perfection.

For some reason, referring to my brother and sister-in-law as The Lloyds made me laugh.

I'm going to be in a wedding with the beautiful mom above! I haven't met her, but I like her already just based on her family photos, her letting me use them, and her Pinterest pictures. :)

My husband accused me of making these last names too generic. So I used a class list, changed the first letter of the name, and I had one original last name. :)

I know this blue isn't very Christmasy, but I thought it was pretty and different. I'll most likely offer these cards in three different colors each.

Still can't get enough of this little guy...

Coming up next week, some super cute Save the Dates!

Merry Christmas! Wait...no...

Abby's Shower Invites

OK, here's the deal. You'll be seeing quite a bit of Abby by the time I'm done with her wedding. Actually, it will be that way with the majority of my brides this year. I'm not only doing invitations, but lots of programs, menu cards, favor cards, place cards, thank you cards, table numbers, and even a seating chart or two. I love it because this allows us to carry the design of the invitation into other parts of the wedding day. It is a great way to tie everything together and I highly highly highly recommend it!

To start out my work with Abby, here are her shower invitations. We (I worked with her future mother-in-law on these) wanted them to be traditional and elegant. We also wanted them to give her guests a sense of what the wedding invitations would be like, while not totally ruining the surprise of the actual invitation. You'll find out in the weeks to come if we accomplished that task. :)

Font is Optimus Princeps. Free and a definite favorite. 

The White Snow card stock and the Majestic envelopes (official Envelopments names :)) are so beautiful together. I love this combination and love that I've been able to work so closely with Abby on so many different pieces for her wedding!

And here's a little bonus fact. In the end of all of this, we'll be related! She will be my dad's cousin's son's wife. So...maybe my third cousin once removed? Yes, we'll go with that. :)

A few more Christmas cards

{All of these cards are now available at Vivian Elle's Etsy Shop. Click here to visit!}

OK, I'm going to just have to show a few more Christmas cards and call this my weekly blog post. It has been one of those weeks where you think "oh, good, it's almost Friday" and then you realize it's 8:30 on Monday evening. It's seemed forever long because we've packed a lot in.

You see, my husband and I are house hunting. Apparently, this is quite a time consuming activity. Pair the house hunting with engagement season being in full swing and I just feel a little more tired than usual. A little too tired to really blog about anything other than me being...well, tired (and a few Christmas cards, of course).

But I will say this - in the midst of this craziness, it's been the designing, the printing, the assembling, the stuffing, and the meetings with brides (or their wonderful moms) that have been completely therapeutic. I'm truly doing something I love and I can honestly say I'm working with some of the greatest brides right now.

Having said that, here are some more Christmas cards that will be added to Vivian Elle's Christmas Collection 2012. :) I need to let you know that the forever talented and kind Amy Sayre (of Amy Sayre Photography) wrote to her clients to ask if I could use their photos for my collection of cards. This is one gracious little family who said that I could. Get ready for one cute little guy.

And with those, I'll sign off. I'm fairly certain that this blog can't handle any more cuteness today. :)

Christmas Cards!

{All of these cards are now available at Vivian Elle's Etsy Shop. Click here to visit!}

I know, I know.

It's January. If you're anything like me, you feel that Christmas should be done. Completely over with. You get a little annoyed when you see that people still have their lights up. You turn the channel when a commercial with anything Christmas-related comes on anytime after December 26 (yes, I saw one, and it angered me).

*Note - I did receive a belated Christmas gift in the mail today, which I had absolutely no problem with.

But even though I have some harsh feelings against Christmas after December 26, I have to say that this blog post is not so much about Christmas as it is about achieving my goals for 2012. So, in that spirit, it's my first post about some Christmas card designs. Yay!

If you remember correctly, one of my goals in 2012 is to get some Christmas designs up on my website. Well, I started this past week and after I did one, I immediately was so motivated that I did two more. And then two more after that.

So here are the first five Christmas cards in the Vivian Elle Christmas Collection. I'm really hoping to get at least one a week done and show a couple each month on the blog. The plan is to have these up on my website by August so that any folks who are interested can purchase some Christmas cards from Vivian Elle Invitations.

*Another note - I do not know any of these people. I just felt like being honest about this. You, too, can own these photos if you go to IStockPhoto.com.

How cute is that family?

That one's my favorite...I love the green and grey. And how adorable are those two little sledders? You'll see them again here soon (hey, I wasn't going to buy too many photos, you know?).

So that's it - the beginning to Vivian Elle's Christmas Collection. I've had so much fun putting these together and can't wait to do more. Next thing you know it'll be July and I'll be humming Christmas music to myself (which, btw, I was totally doing while I was making these).

Mel's Housewarming Party Invites

This is a sad post.

Sad, because it could be my last post about my dear, wonderful customer, Melissa.

(Side note: not that she's made a statement saying she will never use me again...it's just that it is the final project that I've been working on for her lately.)

Let's recap. I first did a shower invite for Melissa and then a baptism invitation for that same sweet little boy. You can see those here and here. Then Melissa (or Mel as I sometimes like to throw out when I'm feeling crazy) and her family moved. I did some "We've Moved!" postcards for her that you can see here.

But Mel isn't the kind of girl that is going to just move and then do nothing about it. Based only on her fabulous Pinterest pics, I knew she had a lot in store for this new house and she would obviously want to share that with their friends and family. So a housewarming party was a necessity.

Mel decided to have it right after the holidays so we didn't go with a Christmas-y theme, but we decided to still make it winter-y (ironically, winter has yet to show up very much in Michigan this year). Here's what we came up with.

I just loved the silver and the light blue together. And the snow flakes. And the Hiatus and Birmingham fonts (Birmingham is my new favorite...and it's free).

All in all, a nice farewell to Mel...my most loyal customer in 2011. ;)

But before I officially put away all 2011 projects, there's just a few more that I wanted to share. As much as possible, I tried to incorporate paper products into my presents/decor over the Christmas season. So here are a few little snippets of things that were really fun to make, and hopefully made some special people happy.

1. A birthday gift for the best friend.
2. A fun countdown for the BFFs who will be making their trek to Michigan to visit me in March.
3. A little bookmark for the ladies in my book club.
4. My take on a modern Advent Calendar inside a glass dome for my husband and me.

So there you have it. I'm done posting invitations from 2011 and next week begins a new year of projects and a lot more to show. Each wedding will not only include invitations, but a lot of fun extras, like programs, menu cards, place cards, thank you cards, and some seating charts. Which only means lots of fun blog posts. :)

(Oh, and to throw a BTW in here...I already have three - three! - Christmas cards done. The unofficial goal now is to do one blog post a month showing some new designs. Those will be coming up in the next few weeks.)

Want to hear more about the value of custom invitations? Check out this post. 

Goals

At midnight on New Year's Eve 2005, my best friend, Amy, and I sat outside of a mutual friend's house in her parent's Trailblazer. We had lost interest in what was going on inside the house (to this day neither of us remembers exactly what that was) and decided that we'd retreat to the car and talk.

(Because I like blogs better when they have pictures, I've strategically placed old photos of Amy and myself in between paragraphs of this story.)

Amy and I in high school - please note the sweet scrunchie on Amy's wrist.

In the car, we talked about the year 2005. I was finishing up getting my teaching certification and about to start student teaching. I had just started dating my future husband a few weeks into December, so you could say I had several new things going on as I started 2006 that were exciting but a little scary (I tend to over-analyze everything, making it all much more scary than it ever needs to be).

Chicago 2007 - one of my many trips there throughout the years.

Amy had had a very different 2005. She had graduated years prior with a degree in journalism and moved to Chicago to pursue a job. However, she was at one of those super annoying in between jobs and was really unhappy. She was ready to be done with it. Overall, she was ready for a fresh start.

Morocco 2008 - we took a two week trip with a group of women from Amy's office.

At some point in our conversation, we decided that this new year needed to be awesome for both of us - Amy especially - and we decided to do something about it. We vowed right then and there that we would each come up with 5 goals for the New Year that we would share with each other. Then, at the end of the year, we'd look back on them and see how we did.

Amy and I repelling in West Virginia circa 1998.

So after we both returned home, we emailed each other our 2006 goals. (For the life of me, I can't find the email that details what they were.) Then, at the end of 2006, we emailed again to see how we did.  If I remember correctly, Amy accomplished most - if not all - of hers that year. I, on the other hand, only accomplished one or two. But we kept it up. Every year for the past seven years, about a week before New Year's Eve, we email and remind each other to work on our goals. A few days later, we send another email, critiquing how we did with our own goals and declaring our goals for the coming year. Some years Amy does really well and some years I do really well (brag - this year I blew my goals out of the water). But no matter how the year went, we keep sending our goals to each other, just like we did back in the beginning of 2006.

Amy and me singing what appears to be a powerful duet in someone's basement in high school.

So here we are and it's 2012. A lot has changed since the first year we made our goals. Amy met her now fiancé. I got married. Amy served as my MOH. Amy asked me to be her MOH. Amy started her own photography business. I started this custom invitation business.

So this is kind of a different blog post. I just wanted to start off the year publicly declaring a few of the goals I have for this business in 2012. It has been extremely helpful to have Amy to share my goals with, and I find that sharing things on the blog gives me that extra push to get things done, too.

I have five goals this year, as per usual, and two of the five are Vivian Elle related. Last year, my goal was just to get this business up and running. Check and check. If all goes well, the following will happen by the end of 2012.

1. I will be marketing in two new places and participating in a bridal show.

Right now brides will find me on The Knot and Wedding Wire. I'd like to find at least two additional locations to post my business cards or even advertise with a local newspaper. I am also starting to scout out bridal shows (this would be the biggest overcoming of my fears move ever) to see what I would need to do to get in one of those.

2. I will have a part of my website that is dedicated to Christmas cards.

So far, my time has been taken up with wedding stuff, which I absolutely love. But I realized this past year that I really enjoy doing Christmas cards and I want to work on getting some designs up on my website that people could just pick from and order however many they need, just like you can from Minted or Kodak Gallery or Wal-mart. I plan to start working on those designs next week and have them up by September or October.

So that's it. I'm starting out 2012 with very specific goals and I even have an action plan for each of them. The problem is that life always gets in the way and a goal that should take a week or two to accomplish (if I really dedicate time to it) will end up taking months and months. But I'm going to make my best effort and I have Amy (and now my blog readers!) to hold me accountable, which has always worked on pretty well in the past.

So here's to a happy new year, (hopefully) accomplished goals, and really great friends.

Amy giving her maid of honor speech at our wedding in 2009.