DIY Handmade Wedding Invitations

The selection and assortment of wedding invitations out there is overwhelming!  We decided it might just be easier

(and cheaper) to make our own.

Fortunately I had a lot of the supplies I needed since I had previously purchased them for my
Etsy store (which desperately needs my attention),
including a mini-hole-punch, paper cutter, and yarn. 

Our invitations had 2 main parts - the actual invitation with the wedding date(s)and our names and blah blah, and a secondary info sheet that had details about the resort/travel.  

For the actual invitations, we bought a book of 12" x 12" differently patterned 'thick papers' - its not quite as sturdy as cardstock, but it's hardier than construction paper.  You can usually find it in the scrapbooking section. (Hobby Lobby classifies it as 'cardstock and themed papers' on their website.)
We used a mini paper cutter to get them to an appropriate size. 

We bought a translucent velum paper for the invitation text, and I wrote something up after looking around on the internet for appropriate invite verbage.  After a few tries, I finally got the formatting right in MS Word to print 2 copies of text on 1 sheet of velum, which I could then conveniently cut in half to size.

I went the easy route by crafting a lot of stuff straight out of MS Word, but if you have great handwriting/calligraphy skills, you could make really beautiful invitations by handwriting the text and then scanning it to print in mass.

To put the invitations together, I punched 2 mini-holes in both layers of the invitation, and tied them together with a lovely dual-stranded yard - a wispy creme mahair with glittery gold highlights.

I actually really loved that there were 15 different background patterns on the invitations.

We neatly organized them by pattern on the kitchen island.

For the secondary information sheet, I bought a set 

of smaller 4.5" x 6.5" cardstock (read: no cutting involved) in patterns that coordinated with the invite patterns.  We thought the colors in both sets matched really well, and I'm so glad that we found all of this stuff in one trip!

I had envisioned having a cute little picture somewhere in the invitations, so I drew a little 3 part cartoon - a boy chasing a volleyball to the right, a girl chasing a volleyball to the left, and a boy and girl finding each other (and love!).

After finally drawing a cartoon I was happy with,

I scanned that sucker up, formatted it in MS Word, and printed

4 per page so they could be cut apart easily.

I happened to have some heavy duty creme paper (perhaps for a resume back in the day?) so we printed the drawing on that.

To attach the pictures to the cardstock we took a dual-pronged approach: we cut corner slits in the cardstock (mostly for aesthetics) and then used glue sticks to glue them down.  Then I glued the actual information to the back of the cards. I thought about printing the info directly onto the cards, but the awkward size and thickness of the cardstock made printing on them seem like more trouble than it was worth. (I tried two, and they jammed in the printer).

For the RSVPs, we bought some 'natural-colored' blank

cardstock that came with matching envelopes, and printed them up.  As I was once again too lazy to deal with printing on 

overly awkward items, we hand wrote our address on all of the return envelopes, hehe.

Because the invitations and information cards were filled with different patterns, I'm not sure if any of our recipients actually received the exact same combination.
I loved how each invitation was fairly unique in that way.

The full package:

A couple more invitation combos:

When all was said and done, I think the invitations (we made ~90) cost us around 65 dollars and 10 hours of time.
Way cheaper than buying invites, and a
lot more personal.

If you wanted to make similar invites, I'd recommend the following items:

- Large envelopes for full invitations
- Cardstock
- Scrapbooking paper
- Velum Paper
- Yarn
- Paper cutter
- Hole punch
- Small blank cards + envelopes

:)

Living Room Painting Complete!

If there's anything that can make a house feel 

new(er) almost instantly, it's painting. 

And we've set out to paint nearly the whole house.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it, but the previous owner had like a gazillion kids (and by a gazillion 

I mean like 4, all under age 7 or 8)  

and the walls all over the house were pretty dingy.

You may remember that I painted an accent wall in the living room (see here: Living Room Updates) but I did actually go ahead and paint the rest of the room as well.  I only rushed to get the accent wall painted first so I could get all the picture frames up on the wall and out of boxes post move-in.

The accent wall was a mauve-ish pink, and so for the rest of the living room, I chose a light peachy color.
As usual, it was the Behr Ultra Premium Plus.

Personally I loved the way the colors went together!

First wall down.  You can see the contrast from
the unpainted left wall behind the TV.

In this natural-light photo you can see that
the color is actually quite light.

The peach is fairly subtle, but I love the way it complements both the pink of the accent wall as well as the brown and

white of the stairs.

The color looks more yellow at night in artificial lighting,
but it matches the top of our painting perfectly, hehe.
It's also the perfect background for that Bear Bear!

 I love the peach color against the white and brown of the stairs so much that I thought about taking the peach color up the stairs beneath the moulding, but I held off for now.

We'll see what Clint thinks and maybe we'll do it eventually...

Replacing Grossness with Lovely Carpet!

When we moved into our house, there were definitely some areas that seemed *very* questionable.  Things that were so ... unattractively highlighted in the real estate advertisements that we almost didn't look at the house.  Seriously.  

One such area was the 2nd floor stairwell landing/hallway.  As you can see below, the original wood flooring sustained some serious damage at some point in the farmhouse's history.  

My beloved Poco examines the terrible flooring.  
Unfortunately, Poco passed after 16 years with me in Oct 2012.  <3

A portion of the floor was nearly black - I'm assuming some sort of water damage since the floor is right next to the bathroom, though in all honesty I have no idea what happened. Clearly large portions of the floor had been removed and replaced - with newer hardwoods and straight up plywood.  Needless to say, both solutions looked hideous! Hehe. I googled our address and I actually found the realtor pictures from 2008, when the previous owner bought the house from the owners that preceded her.  In those photos, the entire upstairs was carpeted (and it looked WAY better), so we figured out that the lady before us must have ripped out the carpet in an effort to get to the original hardwoods below, but found THIS.  

There's a similar makeshift flooring solution in our 2nd bedroom...
part of me really wants to take up the floor and see if
there's buried treasure under these wacko floorboards!

It's not terribly terribly obvious in the photos, but there's also a full step - at least 3-4 inches - between our hallway and the bathroom... while we couldn't really address that with carpet, I DO hope to eradicate that with the upcoming main bath renovation!  (Woot! Stay tuned for that!)  Our hallway also had a huge slope - this 100+ year old house has settled, and the flooring reflected that.  It kind of made me seasick.  

Naturally, we needed a fix.  Since the hall is upstairs where the bedrooms are, we opted to go to with carpeting.  We chose a luxurious Stainmaster carpet from Lowe's. It was definitely one of their more expensive carpets (at least within the Lowe's selection), but it was so worth it - it feels like heaven underneath the feet!  We chose the 'Capri Place Comic Plush' carpeting, and it was lovely!

As the name says, it's really plush, and the only downside is that footprints are very visible, as you can see!

We didn't overtly address the sloping, but after carpet padding and carpet, the slope virtually disappeared.  It still exists, but its barely noticeable now. 

At the time, we only carpeted the hallway and not the bedrooms - only because carpeting is pretty absurdly expensive.  We did, however, take a runner down the stairs to prevent falls for us and our 4 legged friends.  Safety first!

The carpet looks way browner here.
I guess it's the lighting.

We're actually about to install carpeting in two of our upstairs bedrooms, but not our master yet, mainly because its an extra 1k just to carpet one room, and the original wood flooring in the master is actually pretty nice.  I'm excited to get that done and start making some of the other bedrooms nice, instead of random receptacles of storage. :)

Ahhhh!!! I must start posting again!

Oh my gosh, my last post was Oct 7 2012 -- I haven't posted in over 1 year!  SO MUCH has happened in just this 1 year that it's really unforgivable that I haven't posted any of it... haha. 

With every new thing we've done, I've been meaning and meaning to catch up on posts but couldn't manage to get it done. It didn't help that at some point in the last year my computer died and I lost a lot of photos... but I'll see what I can do with what remains!  Some of the catch-up posts to come include: painting more rooms, carpeting upstairs, painting some furniture, planting trees, building garden boxes, our wedding, and maybe more! We've also started a whole new round of home renovation projects, so I can't wait to catch up on old posts so I can start on some current posts!  Yay!

Fixing up the Stairs

When we first moved into the farmhouse, the stairs were in pretty bad shape. And by bad shape, I mean they were really ugly. There clearly had been a runner on the stairs that was pulled up, and the remaining white paint left something to be desired.

So, painting the stairs was actually the first thing on our to-do list. We got started pretty much the day we closed on the house - we figured it would be better to paint the stairs before tons of critters (namely our 4 cats and 1 dog) were in the place. We started painting despite the fact that we didn't even have power in the house... fortunately it was the beginning of summer. Still not too hot but very bright!

We spent a ton of time sanding down the stairs a bit and then cleaning them up. We discussed filling in the divets and dents and nail holes from the historic runner with wood putty to make the stairs perfect and flat before painting them, but then we said SCREW IT!  We didn't buy a 101 year old house so it would look brand new! These dents have charm!  (this could also be interpreted as: we were just too lazy).

We meticulously taped all of the stairs. Then I just had to slather the brown paint on.  Again, we used the Behr Ultra Paint + Primer in 1.  No particular reason.  I just like it.

After painting the stairs, we took some time to get the bannister and the top rail, to complete the look.  We also painted the stair faces and crown molding white, to make them look clean and pop.

the final product

from the top of the stairs

The stairs actually got a little knicked and banged up when we moved in and hiked furniture up this squeaky set of old (and surprisingly narrow) stairs.  In that respect, it would have been better to wait until post furniture move-in to paint, but we plan on getting a carpet runner, so we weren't too worried about it!