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Because every woman should have shoes to match the color of their car.

(Kate Spade Karolina in Aqua $298.00)

Of course, the thing I love most about Essie are the names of the colors, and the descriptions they use on their website. They are priceless.

Here are my two new fall favorites:

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Essie’s Eternal Optimism.

Essie’s Description: A spiced tea rose with a dash of cream.

My Description: Like vintage Chanel suits, wallpaper roses, macaroons, the color a poodle would be if it were naturally pink, the curtains in my childhood bedroom.

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Essie’s Merino Cool.

Essie’s Description: A sensuous autumn mulberry.

My description: The purple nail polish grown-ups can wear. The color of grape Kool-Aid before you mix it with water, storm clouds, dried lavender, Eeyore on a cloudy day (his favorite kind of day).

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Me.

Best bike ever. It even has a bell.

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How cute is that?! Seriously. So cute. And that pattern? Let me give you a closer look:

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Oh yes, that is a herd of little while elephants marching all over that sassy dress. And that gold sash? I couldn’t get enough! Good thing a caught a glimpse of the price tag before hitting the “Add to Bag button” in my fit of shopping joy. $148? Yeah, a little too steep for this thrifty girl…

Then, yesterday while doing a little harmless online shopping, I saw this:

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That’s right!! The cutest dress in the whole world was almost half price!

And then I cried a little when I saw that they didn’t have my size… but I bought it anyway, one size larger. For this price, I can afford to get it taken in if I need to, and it will still be cheaper than buying it at the original price.

Could this get even better?

Oh yes.

Anthropologie.com has free shipping and free returns until September 30… but only for full-priced items, so shipping my dress was still going to cost me $10.

But… If I bought a full priced item as well, everything would be shipped to me fo’ free. I just needed to find something on the website for around $10, or there would be no point. Of course, this really limits your search in their clothing department, but then I saw this in the kitchen section:

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I had seen a ceramic egg crate just like this before here used as a “jewelry catch-all” on a dresser, and thought it would be perfect for my vanity. Since I would have had to spend the $10 in shipping anyway, an extra $4 for this little piece (at $14) was nothin’.

This was definitely an online shopping trip success! Now, the hard part: I have to wait 5-7 days until they are delivered to me! Maybe I’ll eat some cheeseburgers to make sure that my new dress fits…

The front:

Aaaaand the back:

(4.25″x5.5″ cards printed on extra heavy (110 lb.) matte cardstock. Yum!)

I just realized that I told you all about my adventures in narrowing down all of my invitation ideas, finalizing the wording and layout, and hand-addressing everything, but I never showed you my final invitation! Well, without further ado, here it is!

So here are the individual pieces, front and back:

So there you have it, The Lindsay/Miller invitation suite! Yes, it took a lot of work, but it certainly did pay off. I am so happy with the final result!

If you haven’t been keeping up with my invitation saga, here’s a little update for you:

Part One: I had a TON of invitation ideas that I narrowed down to just a couple.

Part Two: I finalized the wording and layout, then sent them off to the printer.

Up Next? Envelopes, of course!

Choosing envelopes for my invitations was pretty simple…

If you remember correctly from my last post, I used zazzle.com to print all of my invitations and RSVP’s, and they just so happen to include white envelopes with all invitation orders! This was both kind of cool and and not so great at the same time. It was kind of cool that I didn’t have to go out and buy envelopes. The not so great part was that I had to wait until my invitations came to start working on them!

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to address all of my invitations myself to save money… but my handwriting doesn’t exactly look like this:

Photo Courtesy of www.betsywhite.com

So I decided to go with a less-traditional style of addressing known to many as “Fauxligraphay”, or: Tracing a fancy font onto your envelopes by hand. Here’s what you will need:

• PLENTY OF TIME. Seriously. This is going to take a while, especially if you are having a larger wedding. I sent out about 40 invitations, and spent a couple hours a day tracing for about a week. This is not a project for the impatient.
• Computer & Printer
• Invitation & RSVP envelopes
• Writing tools with smudge/water resistant ink: Calligraphy pens/felt tip pens/heavy flow ballpoint pens.
• A cool font you feel comfortable tracing. REMEMBER: A super fancy font will be more difficult and will take longer. (I used Learning Curve, which you can download here.)
• Scissors or a paper cutter
• A lightbox/A window/Any clear surface you can shine a light through. (I used my glass coffee table with a lamp on the floor under it. This was extra nice, because I could sit on the floor in front of my TV while tracing!)

STEP ONE

You will need to create templates for all of your addresses. I used Adobe Photoshop, but you can use Microsoft Word or whatever.

FOR YOUR MAIN ENVELOPES (GUEST ADDRESSES): Start by making a box the same size as your actual invitation (mine was 5″x7″.) This is so you can cut them out and slide them easily into your envelope to trace them. Type out the guest’s address (using your special font) where you will want it to appear on the envelope. Make sure you leave plenty of room at the top for your stamps. Enter your guest’s addresses one by one, and print out all of your templates. Make sure you DOUBLE CHECK your addresses!

HINT: If you begin with an 8″x11″ document, you can probably print out more than one template per page, thus saving paper!

FOR YOUR RSVP CARDS: This is basically the same process as above… (My RSVP’s were 4.25″x5.5″). You will only need one template, since you will use the same address on all of your RSVP envelopes.

FOR YOUR RETURN ADDRESS: For this you can use the same template as your guest addresses, just insert your address, and move it to the top area of the template, so it will all fit onto your flap. (You can see my return address template in the photo below, to the right of the envelope I’m working on.)

STEP TWO

Cut out all of your address templates. (I used a paper cutter, so I could cut out more than one at a time.) Here are my RSVP and Return Address Templates all cut out:

STEP THREE

Insert your template into your envelope, and use your lightbox (or glass coffee table, or window) so you can see the font through the envelope. (I’m using my RSVP envelopes here as an example.)

STEP FOUR

Carefully trace the addresses using the writing implement of your choice. I used a combination of Paper Mate felt tip pens and Sharpie pens, but you may want to use chisel tip calligraphy pens if you choose a font where the line width changes.

And here are the return address templates in use. As you can see, I lined up the top of the template with the crease of the envelope flap so the address would be even:

STEP FIVE

Remove your address template, and you should have a little somethin’ that looks like this:

STEP SIX

Now continue tracing and tracing and tracing!! Like I said before, I sent out 40 invitations. This means I traced each of my 40 guest’s addresses, my RSVP address 40 times, and my return address 40 times. This will take a while, but don’t burn yourself out. Work on this project for a few hours a day in front of the TV or while listening to music, and you will be done before you know it. The results will be well worth it and VERY budget friendly! GOOD LUCK!!!

UP NEXT: The final invitations, REVEALED!

If you haven’t already read this post, let me give you a little update on my invitation progress so far…

I knew what I wanted, I found the perfect font, then another perfect font, and started to put everything together.

Anyway, I was still going back and forth between my two lovely font choices, and came up with this:

I still wasn’t completely happy, but I finally felt like I was getting somewhere… Then I decided to work on the other inserts…

(Fun Fact! My sister’s birthday is my RSVP deadline.)

While making progress on the inserts, I decided to beef up the green, and to make the ampersand the main focus of the invites… It just seems so fitting: Ampersands bring words together, weddings bring people together!

Anyway, after many more hours of nudging fonts around and stressing about the green being REALLY GREEN…

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I finally sent the invites off to one of my favorite websites ever, Zazzle.com to be printed. (They were having a really awesome New Years Sale at the time and I got a REALLY good deal!)

As an art school graduate and professional graphic designer, I knew from day one that I wanted to design my own wedding invitations. It was something I had been looking forward to for a VERY long time, and had done plenty of brainstorming since our engagement back in December, 2009. Here were a couple things I knew I wanted to incorporate:

• A clean, modern design.
• A layout that showed off my love for type and layout.
• Bright colors and images, but not too bright. (Either green or purple, but not green AND purple!)
• Designs on the front and back of each piece.
• Minimal inserts (to be nice to the environment, and to cut back on postage!)
• Fun calligraphy for the outside that I could accomplish myself.
• Simple text, not a ton of fluff.

About 6 months into planning, I began putting together some ideas:

If you’re anything like me (and my that, I mean if you are constantly stalking the interwebs for fun and new wedding invitation trends) you have maybe seen some of my inspirations.

(Prepare for some extreme font-geeking-out in the next paragraph.)

You can also see that I was tossing a few font choices back and forth. I fell in love with this Sweetheart Script early on in my wedding planning. I was fun, whimsy, and still fancy-shmancy. I thought it was the one… until Aphrodite Pro came along. It seemed just a tiny bit more mature, but still fun! Just look at those flairs! Seriously people, if you want an amazing font for your invitations, the $37 is WELL WORTH IT. You will continue to use it for everything, and usually if you purchase a script font, you get a zillion fun glyphs to incorporate. (Glyphs are different versions of letters. Check out the two L’s in Mark’s last name in the third invitation!)

Anyway, I liked the style I was coming up with, but I wasn’t completely happy….

[to be continued!]