An Experiment

Hello friends,

I’m trying something new.  I linked up my wordpress blog to a tumblr – a blog format focused on short, spur of the moment type posts.  I know I have lots of full posts to catch you up on, but maybe this way I will keep up on my blog when I only have little things to say or fun pictures to share.

Hopefully you all like this change, and hopefully I do too!

Be back soon!

- Cassie

Bow-hat Maker, Extraordinaire

 Ok guys, so in the spirit of powering through – here come some long over-due posts!   For the sake of fewer posts, and because SERIOUSLY how interesting can a bridal shower really be – I’m combining two of my friends’ showers into one post. 

My MOH K got married in September, so her shower was last July (yes almost a year ago, hush.)  The shower was held at her now mother-in-law’s house, and it was gorgeous!  The spread of food was amazing…

The decor was creative:

(We each wrote down advice to make K a bouquet!)

The gifts were plentiful:

And I got to put my bow-hat making skills to good use:

My friend (and bridesmaid) M’s shower was held this March.  I had never been on the planning end of a shower before, and Jesus was it stressful… and expensive.  But at the end it was so worth it!  This was also the first shower I’d been a part of where it was completely a surprise – and she sure was surprised.  It was great!

The favors were these intricately designed cookies in the shape of wedding cakes.  Each cake was different!  We also played bridal shower bingo as M opened up pressies… and if anyone wants the template, I should be able to find it somewhere to send you!  Just email me

And just as with K’s shower, I got to make the bow hat again!  I love how it turned out.  A lot of people think that showers get boring – but if you’re the one creating a bow masterpiece, it flies by! 

The bridesmaids all came together to put on a great shower for M.  She got tons of gifts, and I think she had a great time.  

Have you ever planned a bridal shower?  Tell me it was stressful for you, too?!

You’re Invited!

 Ok guys, I have no excuse.  I’m no longer stressed 0ut, or planning a wedding.  I’m bored as h-e-l-l at work now that I don’t have wedding projects to work on (shh don’t tell my boss), so here I am, for your reading enjoyment.  I’m going to try to go in chronological order through the rest of the planning (which is a lot of planning.)  I promise I won’t go 100% wedding on you though, I have some other things to write about too!!

Anyway, for months now I’ve been telling myself to blog about our lovely invitations.  And of course, like all of my wedding posts, there’s a story.

Once upon a time, I stumbled upon Blush Paperie.  I promptly fell in love with the colors and the beautiful designs.  I ordered a few samples, and received them over the summer when I had off from work.  I remember calling my mom going “omg I’m in stationary heaven.”  The invitations were embossed and the papers were soft like cotton.  They were matted on a complimentary color paper.  The fonts… oh – the fonts!  I knew I had to have them.

Flashforward a few months.  I’m in Target, and find a clearance rack with two boxes of 50 invitations… for $7.99 each!  I buy them.  They are pretty, but not as pretty as the Blush invitations… but for $16, the bride has to make it work, right?  Here are the invites:

So it comes time to actually print the invites.  We don’t HAVE a printer, and a good printer that would produce quality invitations would be ridiculously expensive and not worth it.  We reach out to the guy my MOH used to print her invites, and 1) he was rude and 2) he was almost as expensive as if we just ordered our my dream invitations.  A few nights of number crunching, and it was decided… why spend money on printing invitations that we didn’t LOVE?  Sure we could have saved money, but by the time we printed the invites, printed the rsvps, got a calligrapher for the envelopes, etc – we’d only be saving $100 from ordering the beautiful stationary-heaven invites through Blush Paperie.  So we did!

A few emails to the owner Michele, and we had our order placed.  It was so quick and painless.  We shot a few proofs back and forth, and she even changed her usual design a smidge for us.  She was so pleasant to work with (she even handled my OCD-esque requests with humor!), and I was almost sad when I didn’t have a reason to email her anymore!  But my sadness was quickly replaced with giddy joy over the beautiful invitations.  (And I mean quick – the entire process took approximately 2 weeks.)  Check out these beauties:

Savannah invitations with Adios font for the script wording and Garamond Small Caps for the body of the invitation, by Blush Paperie.  LOVE!

*sigh* and check out the insert cards:

You can see how she custom-made our RSVP card, as the typical design is that of the reception card above it.  I loved the way it looked with the design on the side.  Michele was so accomodating!

And finally, we had our invitations digitally calligraphered (is that a word?  it is now!).  Look at all the yummy font:

Plus – the icing on the cake is that since we sent them out around Valentine’s Day… the stamp cancelling machine printed a heart on the envelopes!  I had debated as to whether to get the envelopes hand-cancelled or not, and for once it turns out that my laziness actually paid off

Anyway, this story has two morals.  1) Go email Michele from Blush Paperie!  I promise you won’t be disappointed.  and 2) Don’t buy things just because they are cheap.  You WILL change your mind (this happened to me with bridesmaids jewelry too…) and you will be out money.  Even $15 adds up!

p.s. anyone want 100 champagne swirl invitations?  I’ll give you a bargain deal of free