amy's bridal shower invites

tomorrow night after i get off of work, jenny and i will be heading east for an exciting adventure.  saturday is amy's bridal shower!  i've known amy since i moved here in 1999, and she has been quite the friend after all these years (15 years... sheesh)
since her maid of honor is currently stationed in japan with her husband and won't be here until the wedding, jenny and i took it upon ourselves to throw amy a fantastic bridal shower to celebrate her with a bunch of ladies for her upcoming wedding day.  i thought today i would share the invitations i came up with for the extravaganza, since i am quite pleased with how they turned out.
i actually got the idea for amy's invitations as i was driving to erika's birthday dinner back in december. i had a vision for using amy's wedding colors tied in with various animal prints to fit our always imagined jungle/lion king theme... more on that after this weekend.  so after dinner, i ran next door where there was a joann's to see how possible my idea was.  i took pictures of different spools of ribbon, paper options, and everything i could think of to make things come to reality.  i went home, found some fonts and typed of a sample based on things i had pinned on pinterest.
when i went to buy the ribbons, the first bump in the road hit.  the joanns i was at then did not have enough of the original ribbon i saw, so my first improvisation came in to play.  i found this leopard ribbon and played around with the placement of the green and blue ribbons.  perfect.  the next part was finding paper to do the actual invites.  i wanted to do an off white color for the paper instead of a stark white, and i thought beverleys would have been the place to be.  i originally found the paper used for erika's advice cards there in a pack of 50 and that would have been perfect.  except it didn't come in the right color.  after much pacing the scrapbook aisle, i ended up buying a pack of 50 5x7 folding cards and chopping them in half.  this way also included envelopes, which was a plus as well.
once my printer stopped eating paper and i got the envelopes to format correctly, all systems were go!  printed off nearly 50 invites and envelopes and began making ribbons in to stickers.  i used my xyron sticker maker to feed the ribbon through, and then layered them on top of each other.  i trimmed the edges and then used clear nail polish to keep the edges from fraying.  then it was envelope stuffing time.  after i ran out of my own personal address labels, stole others from my parents, hoarded some stamps from jenny and then some... the stack was on it's way.  in the giant stack of all of them, i only got one envelope returned, and that was because i missed ONE with a stamp.  oops.  but hey, it's better than a ton of them being returned.
all in all, i am quite pleased with seeing my vision become a reality, and i cannot wait to see how the shower visions jenny and i have been planning turn out this weekend.  stay tuned for those blog posts to come.  it will be a "roaring" good time i'm sure :)
fonts used:
scriptina
gabriola

bridal shower invitations - a photo walk through

hey peeps! so last week i busted out these invitations start to finish for erika's bridal shower, and thought i would do a quick little photo tutorial of them. yeah, they are pretty easy, but i figured why not? the part of this process i left out was the grumbling and beating of the printer while things weren't printing right... and the three cards that got stuck in it as a paper jam. so you get the pretty and sparkly part of the process!supplies
cards - mine were originally planned to be 5x7 flat cards, but when i saw pink and the right size, i bought them. came home to find they were folded cards. long story short, i liked how they turned out better
glitter - as you can see, i used pearl glitter. purchased at beverley's
modge podge
blue tape - standard painter's tape.
paint brush
paper bowl to catch falling glitter/pour back in to jar
wax paper - important if you are messy like me, and do your crafting at the same place your computer keyboard isstep one: lay out tape to section off the area(s) you want glittered. for mine, i did a basic stripe to keep it simple and classy, but still sparkly and tie in her second wedding color (orange)step two: slop on that modge podge! the lines taped off help keep everything in exactly where you want it and prevents bleeding of the modge podge.step three: carefully peel off the tape. something about the blue painters tape allows for tape to stick down and do it's job, but not rip away whatever it was stuck to. i only had a few paper peel mishaps, but with my money practically invested in blue tape stock, these slip ups were minimal.step four: pour on that glitter! i started from the top and let it drift down to the bottom that way in to the bowl. it generally stuck really well, and then i tapped the card a few time to knock off any excess glitter that may have come loose.step five: let dry. and really, that's it! i finished my cards around 3pm. then got home from work around 8pm, and they were good and ready to stack up. no glitter flaking off anywhere or anything.
and there you have it! simple, easy... only five steps to go from blah plain cards to glitter fab. let me just tell you, this whole bridal shower planning process has been very glitter involved. so come the end of april, there will be much more glitter pink & orange-ness to be shared once the bridal shower is over. stay tuned, my friends!