Once upon a time...

...I promised you a post about envelope liners from our Maids & Men cards.

Here it is.

To be perfectly honest, I was kind of oblivious to envelope liners before the wedding blog world. I did realize that some envelopes were lined and some were not, but not that you could make your own!

Once I saw this tutorial over on With This Ring, I was pretty much hooked and set off on a quest for the perfect navy and white paper for liners.

I headed to Hobby Lobby, Michael's, and even a few local craft and scrapbooking stores. What did I find? Nothing. Not a single navy and white patterned paper!

After reflecting in disappointment for a few days, I started thinking...why not print my own paper?

So I did.

I opened my favorite program throughout this process, Microsoft Publisher, and simply created a box that would be the right size for my envelope liners, on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.

Then I simply created a vertical line, with the line drawing tool, and opened the formatting options. I changed the color to the same navy blue as the rest of the card design, and bumped up the style and the weight.

Once I formatted the line the way that I liked, I simply copied and pasted it in a repeating pattern across the box, and made sure to let the lines bleed over the box a little bit. I also made sure to center my first line so that it would hit right at the point of the envelope flap.

I simply printed enough copies right onto normal printer paper and then followed the steps from the envelope liner tutorial.

Finished product looked preppy and clean, which was exactly what I wanted, and cost nothing besides printer ink and paper!

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Up Above

Anyone else have those little things that just annoy them at the back of their mind and they try to avoid at all costs?

One of the things that I always wanted to avoid in our wedding reception venue was a drop ceiling. I have spent the majority of my life in classrooms {19 of 24 years} and drop ceilings just makes me think of the kids in the back launching pencils to see if they would stick.

But, I digress. Main point: I do not like drop ceilings. Moving on.

Every reception location that I visited in Chippewa Falls had drop ceilings, minus the one place that would have been ridiculously expensive and really wasn't that great.

I was still trying to figure out what to do with the ceilings when we went to visit at Christmas and saw this

and this

While clearly these decorations are for Christmas, they gave me and my mom an idea. We could easily make white fabric panels to drape in the same way! We of course, would make more of them (for the whole room, not just over the dance floor). I think navy blue panels might be a bit much, so am leaning towards white.

The FH had an idea for doing a very large white paper lantern in the center where that green thing is, which I think would be ok, but am not really sold, so we will explore some other options.

The good thing is that Lake Wissota will let us do pretty much whatever we want in terms of decorating. AND if there is no event before ours that week {the likelihood of which is low} then we can get in to decorate as early as Monday! I would like to be able to get in there and get done asap so I can enjoy my week.

How have you all covered not-so-cute ceilings? Have you seen any great ideas out there?

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Maids and Men Cards: How to

While the cards may have seemed almost self-explanatory for other crafters out there...I thought it would be fun to break down the steps, and cost, of the cards from asking our Maids and Men.

First up was the card itself:

After much deliberation on what colors and types of cards to do, {and Austin pleading desperately with me to go to any other store besides Hobby Lobby and Michaels -sidenote: have you ever noticed there is no apostrophe in Michaels? So is it plural Michaels? rando. sorry} I decided that crisp white cards would be the best to build on from there.

I bought one of those Value Packs of cards and envelopes from Michaels for a whopping $5.99 for 50. We would only need 16...by far the most cost effective way to do a card, in my opinion, since I did not have to buy envelopes separately and all of the card stock was pre-cut. I bought the navy cardstock and vellum on the other hand at "The Lobby" as it is affectionately called around our house, for about $5.

After coming home with cards in tow, I measured them and figured I would leave about a 1/4 inch border of white, then do a 1/4 inch border of the blue, and then 1/4 inch in from that would be the photo and vellum.

It is important to remember though, if you are doing something like this with the ribbon at the top, do every other step first, before adhering anything to the card, or you will have to punch through to the inside of the card...and unless you have a long handled puncher you are in for some creative solutions...

So, we took the photo ourselves {camera with a self timer is imperative} and then I imported it to my computer where I used Picasa 3 to edit it.

If you have not heard of it, Picasa is powered by Google and is a free downloadable photo editing program. It is pretty basic, but I love it for quick fixes and it helps keep things really organized on your hard drive. It also interfaces really easily with Blogspot and Their Online Web Albums.

So, I cropped and sepia toned the photo to look copper-ish and then imported it into one of my favorite programs, Microsoft Publisher.

I know, I know, it is not fancy. But, I am of the personal opinion that with a few other small tools Microsoft Publisher and PowerPoint are some of the most easily usable design programs out there, and let's face it...most of us already have it. So I use them a lot.

I created a few pages in Publisher {it helps with my organization to be able to have multiple pages and save all aspects of a program in one file}. The first was the photo, and the next was a box with the wording for the vellum overlay.

I printed and trimmed both to the same size and then used an adhesive roller to attach the photo to the navy card stock. I used some removable glue dots that I had lying around to position the vellum on top of the photo, and then used your everyday hole punch to punch the ribbon holes.

I used white grosgrain ribbon that I found at The Lobby for 99 cents for a roll. I then tied a simple square knot and cut the edges and adhered the whole shebang to the front of the white card.

Card Cost Breakdown:

Cards and Envelopes...........................................$1.92 (for 16)
Cardstock and Vellum (8 Sheets of each)....................$5.00
Ribbon...................................................................$0.99
Total.....................................................................$7.91
Total per card........................................................$0.49

Not too shabby for 16 cute cards and the envelopes! Of course I did not factor in ink, adhesives, or regular computer paper, as I had them all already, but still pretty durn cost effective.

::whew:: That was a long explanation, but it is a relatively simple project, I swear. Next up, easy breezy envelope liners!

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