Inspired by Posen Collab

A few months back my (event planner) friend Melanie and I collaborated to design and craft a wedding party scene for Nonpareil Magazine. Our look was photographed by Sarah Faubus and the result of our effort was published this month. 

Our party theme was inspired by Zac Posen’s Spring 2011 collection. Hence the bold floral fabrics....

pleating...

(This paper mobile by Haru became our seating chart)

and bows...

(These hair clips and bow ties by Peter and Wendy became our favors )

I really can’t express how much I love artistic collaborations. Combining forces with someone who has a talent I respect and admire makes me feel a little like a super-hero—even if just temporarily.

Check out this months Nonpariel Mag for more photos, party details and for instructions on how to create your own felt bow pins and how to make your own pleated, fabric invitations (designed by yours truly).

Hendrix and the Purple Crayon: Birthday Invite Year 5

I didn’t design any invites for Hendrix’s birthday last year since we had had a private family party so I'm going to move right along to this year’s invitations which were designed with the theme; Harold Hendrix and the Purple Crayon (after the book by Crockett Johnson).

As you might remember, Harold—the little boy in the story—creates a world of adventure for himself with his imagination and the use of his magical purple crayon. I wanted to tie this idea into the design of the invitation and yet I wanted the message to be comprehended should the receiver be unfamiliar with the old tale. I did this by blatantly informing the reader the theme for the party right in the text of the invite (click photo to enlarge). I also included a notebook and purple crayon for the receiver to draw their own adventures.

For the notebooks I adhered various patterned washi paper to a thick cover stock for the covers and for sketching paper I just used a plain white 20# stock. I bound each 5” square book together with a thick needle and purple embroidery thread. 

Formatting the information for the invitation was the quickest part of this project, (binding the books took the bulk of my time). The party info was printed on a linen paper and then wrapped around the notebook as a belly band. The band held the notebook nice and flat as well as housed a purple crayon which was slipped right underneath to complete the look. I had originally planned to attach the crayon another way but after much experimentation, this simple solution was the most aesthetically pleasing.

Well, that covers it a week of birthday invitations, we should really do this again sometime. And in case you missed it, check out year one's Buggy invites, year two's Car Cruising invites, and year three's Messy Party invites. 

P.S. As a piece of unsolicited advise; I highly recommended you hand deliver your 4 year old's birthday invites to their friends parents rather than have him hand deliver them himself to his friends. This will prevent an eager child from tearing off and discarding the important details to an upcoming party before their parents ever set eyes on the information and then you won't feel the need to email all the parents later on to make sure their coloring pad came with an invitation attached—this after you find a small stack of belly bands abandoned on the floor as a crumpled memory (run-on sentence to elicit drama). Obviously I am only speaking hypothetically!

Mr. Messy: Birthday Invite Year 3

When Hendrix turned 3 we had a messy party. I’m totally cheating on this one because I had very little to do with the design process here. In fact, my only contribution involved formatting the party details on the back of the postcard invitations; not very exciting (and yes, I am a big fan of postcard correspondence. I once designed a postcard wedding invitation—at the bride’s request, can’t beat the cheap-o postage).

Hendrix designed the rest of the invitations himself by painting a unique image on the font of each card.

After all the invitations were dry, I helped Hendrix stick white Avery labels to the font of each card that said, “Let’s get messy.”

This party was Hendrix’s favorite to date—with certainly the best designed invitations to date. I loved each and every one of his creations.

By the way, if you ever host a messy party for your child you absolutely must have a kiddie pool full of wet spaghetti noodles, your kids will think you’re the coolest parent in the world and all the neighborhood children will agree.

Car Cruising: Birthday Invite Year 2

Hendrix’s second year birthday party was more like a second year get-together. At this event, Hendrix had 3 friends over for cupcakes and a craft; Flintstone style ride-in cars made from cardboard boxes, construction paper and paint.

Since the only item scheduled on the party agenda was to make cars to cruise around in, I thought a car that traveled alongside a countryside scene would be most appropriate.

To make the car move this invitation had to have three parts. The first part of the invite displays a computer illustrated outdoor nature scene and road. This portion of the invitation is actually a folded pocket that the second part of the invitation slips into.

Pulling the side tab on second piece reveals all the party information. While the tab is pulled the car moves across the page. The car is the third portion of the invitation which completes the design.

My favorite thing about the end result is that the invitation is truly intended for the enjoyment of the invited child rather than for the child’s parent—although the design includes all the crucial event details that a parent should know.

Getting Buggy: Birthday Invite Year 1

We are still full swing in holiday season around here because besides celebrating the birth of a new year we have so many family birthdays to honor this month. In fact, today my oldest's is five! His 5^th year party invitations were hand delivered yesterday morning and the festivities will take place this Saturday. In tribute to birthday month, I decided to use this week of blogging to share some of the other b-day invitations I have designed for Hendrix in years past. Shall we?

His first birthday party was bug themed. I created this invitation using a felt-like Astroturf, plastic bugs and tiny dried flowers found at a yard sale. I also used a nice cover stock for the information portion of the invite.

The invite itself was postcard size and in postcard format so all the information was on the left panel of the card and the right side was left blank which would eventually be filled with the recipients mailing information—just like a standard postcard.

Next I cut rectangles from the Astroturf to match the size of the postcards. With glue I applied the turf to the front of the card and from there I added the other nature-like elements.

Each postcard was then inserted into clear cellophane bags in effort to protect the add-ons, labeled and then off to the post. There you have it, the great outdoors in a bag—or at least the appearance of such. 

Happy (belated) Christmas

Lookie what I found; cellie photos of the third annual company holiday greeting card I designed for a company called CSI. Since the assembly of these cards required a couple all-nighters, I decided to dust these images off (not really because they were on my computer and I just clicked the upload button) and share them with you today for a little (belated) Christmas cheer.

Because the good folks at CSI like me so much, they pretty much let me have free rein when it comes to the design of their seasonal greeting card. The only thing they asked was that this year's message have an emphasis on the Christmas holiday. I knew these greeting cards would be hand delivered with a box of chocolates so beyond coming up with a Christmas-appropriate copy, I decided these cards should double as Christmas tree ornaments.

The inspiration for this project came from some beautiful paper mobiles a friend and I had used on a collaboration project a couple months previous to this assignment (but more on that later). For my paper stock I choose a gold patterned one from French Paper's Mod-Tone line and after much cutting, paper punching, scoring, folding and gluing, I assembled three different sized medallions together using thin jewelry wire. The greeting itself is inscribed on a flag that is attached to a gold cording from which the mini mobile hangs. As a final detail, I attached a greenish-gold bead to the top of the threading.

I liked the look of all the greeting cards hanging on a hook in one big bunch like a bouquet of flowers (don't mind the low quality phone photos). Now that I have had plenty of time to recooperate from this project I might have to pull out the paper cutter and repeat this craft for a little home decor, or maybe I'll just sit at the computer and look at these pictures instead which wouldn't require nearly as much effort...yeah, I choose that.

Check out past holiday greetings HERE and HERE

Mustard and Blue

Just thought I'd share a wedding invitation suite for your Wednesday afternoon. The theme for this wedding was mustard and blue and so I responded accordingly.

The invitation contained 3 main pieces; a reception invitation, a map and a ceremony invite insert. The reception invitation and map were stacked together and bound with bakers twine while the ceremony invite was enclosed in a transparent 4bar envelope and then tucked under the twine to complete the package.

This was my very first wedding invitation that was almost entirely hand illustrated and hand lettered (The grey text on the invites were computer rendered). 

I'm posting this work about 10 months after it was completed but that is probably because I have been SUPER busy working on tons of projects, nurturing my children, darning socks (if people still do that), cleaning my house spotless on a daily basis, baking homemade bread every night, cooking gourmet meals, sewing stuff slash being domestic in every way and making the world a better place. Certainly my lack of postings have had nothing to do with failure to charge the camera for photo documentation, sleeping in, catching up on TV with my friend HULU, painting nails in animal print patterns like zebras and tigers, or any other acts that might fall under the category of being lazy—most certainly not.

Merry and Bright...Round 2

Last year I had the opportunity to create a holiday greeting card for an electrical company and this year they invited me back for a second round. I used the same "Merry and Bright" slogan that I used on last years greeting but unlike last years card, there was a bit more emphasis on the "Merry" rather than the "Bright."

The card pulls out to reveal three strands of holiday lights with the text "Peace and Light..." At closer inspection the receiver will see the light bulbs are actually just holes in the paper which revel the color from the page below.

Opening the card entirely, reveals the classic merry message.

I couldn't figure out why my right arm was so sore the day after completing these cards then Jon suggested that it might have something to do with die cutting over 1,000 little circles by hand...oh yeah, that might have something to do with it.

In your brain did it stay, that it's Boston's birthday?!

I recently had the opportunity to design some invitations for a soon-to-be 4 year old's Dr. Seuss themed birthday bash.
After a little brainstorming session I decided to hit up the local thrift store to swipe their Dr. Seuss selection. I went for the oldest and most authentic books I could find, meaning, books that were written by Dr. Seuss himself and with the pages actually sewn into the spine (none of that glued in stuff).
Once home, I quickly went to work coming up with some Dr. Seuss inspired copy for the invitation itself (click on pic above to zoom in). Then I promptly went to work disassembling the books I had purchases earlier.

I would be using the pages as a backing to the vertical invitation as well as for handmade envelopes which would later be mailed out to guests.

I really felt adding the backing to the freshly printed invitations really finished them off but I think the envelopes were my favorite part of the whole package. Looking closely you can see little holes where the threading use to be which indicated the envelope was just a portion of a real and classic book.

I think the hardest thing about designing themed birthday invitations is that there are almost too many possibilities. I love designing my own kids party invitations although, I don't recall ever posting any samples here...sad. Maybe I'll have to play a little catch up before their next celebration of birth.

UPDATE: I now have this package for purchase in digital form. The package includes files of invitation, envelope template and step-by-step instructions on how to create your own handmade Dr. Seuss birthday invitations as shown above. To purchase check out the shop HERE. Please email me if you have any questions (gnat[dot]anderson[at]gmail.com).

A Very Merry UN-Birthday to You!

Summer has been good to me this year and to say thank you to the sunny season I thought an official goodbye was in order. What better way to say so-long than to throw a party?

Lucky for me my friend Melanie is a born party planner and is always up for sharing her merrymaking skills when it comes to festivity coordinating. So we teamed up to have an end of summer UN-Birthday Party Bash.

Due to limited space I knew we would have to have a limited guest list which is the hardest part, who do we invite—or worse—who do we not invite? Jon had a great solution to this problem which was to perform a “pass-it-on” invitation-giving system. Melanie and I each choose a couple at random to invite. Both of those couples were given two invites to pass along to a friend of theirs and that friend was to pass the last invite to a friend of theirs. Make sense? I was super stoked about this plan but I have to admit, as the party date drew near I was feeling a little apprehensive as the adolescence in me began to take over, ‘What if the guests hate the theme? What if they don’t like me?’ were among the juvenile thoughts that entered my mind. Perhaps I am not as social as I’d like to think I am? Thankfully we ended up having an awesome guest list and they didn’t even seem to mind when the pouring rain threw us out of our own outdoor party forcing us to finish the celebrating in a somewhat squishy, not perfectly clean, basement.

Fortunately we had gotten in a good game of musical chairs and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in a more spacious outdoor space. Once inside we had a couple more games, a white elephant gift exchange being one of them, (you can’t have an Un-Birthday party without gifts)! And of course we had UN-birthday cake made from rice kipsie treats.

As usual, one of my favorite parts of the party was designing and prepping the invitations beforehand. When it comes to birthdays, I couldn’t think of something more iconic than the pin-the-tail game so I rolled with that.

Each invite was hand assembled into a gift card tin which contained 3 pieces; the invitation, a felt donkey tail and a blindfold. (thanks for your help Melanie!)

The donkey tail had a magnetic back which enabled it to stick the tailless donkey image on the front of lid tin.

The blindfold was also made from felt with an elastic attached for wearing.

Once all the parts were in place we tied it off with a simple ribbon bow to make it look like a present (UN-birthday party, remember?)

The same donkey image was used to create party gift bags which the guest filled with candy on their way out at the end of the party.

All-in-all I was quite pleased with the way things turned out. Even though the before and after shots of what the rain did to the outdoor photo op secction was pretty sad looking, the spontaneity kept things silly and carefree.

Well, I guess it’s on to fall season party preparations…my favorite!