It's almost a month to the day that we had our wedding. Which, as I've mentioned is the reason things got reeaal slooow around e.m.papers. There was a lot of DIY and as they say over on A Practical Wedding, a lot of 'DIT' (Do it Together).

We did have caterers and rented all the tables, chairs, china etc. but the rest we did ourselves. Since it was at my parent's place we needed to do a lot of landscape (most of which my husband and dad took care of) We hung lots of strings of party lights,obviously created all the paper goods (printable programs, menus, place cards, seating lists, etc.) My dad printed the invites which I posted about earlier, he also made some cool table numbers out of wood type from his collection. My sisters did the flowers and my aunt, step mom, sister and dear family friends baked a zillion cookies for the homemade cookie bar and our friend Bonnie from Windowpane Press made us a gorgeous guest book.

Putting together this wedding was a lot more work than the one we had last fall in Munich. We had to do a lot of coordination and planning for that one, but basically for the dinner we just showed up at the venue. For this one we were responsible for the atmosphere and planning of the entire thing: people arriving, cocktail hour, dinner and dancing and the after party (camp fire) - but wow was it worth it. It was a lovely and beautiful with a handmade touch that never felt stage-y or over the top - just what we wanted.

For more pix see our Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27511405@N00/sets/72157624716744991/with/4963467026/

Ooh. I've been really bad about posting, I'm in wedding overdrive planning and doing a lot of DIY or in some cases DIT (Do it Together, my husband, step-mom, aunts, cousin and sisters have been and will be helping out.) Here's a quick pick of one of my ideas, that isn't turning out as wonderfully as I hoped. This idea is on a few of the wedding blogs out there; using this 99¢ Ikea frame as a menu holder. The problem is it's small, and the (ridiculously overpriced!) kraft paper stock I got from Michaels isn't taking the ink so well. Somehow I'll make it work. This is how I'm spending my days. Onward.

I've been meaning to do this since forever, and it took me a long time. Sometimes when I do something new I have a little bit of a block. This video tutorial is faar from perfect, because in the end I just wanted to force myself to just produce something, but I think they will become much more polished as I go on. Feel free to provide any feedback in the YouTube comments, or shoot me a mail with questions. Part 2 completing the instructions (the whole thing was just a little longer than 10 minutes) should be up soon.

This tutorial is based on what I've done with my own Save the Dates, by the way.

I've been remiss about posting, but I have a good reason! I've been working with my Dad to get our (California) wedding invitations printed and out the door.

I've mentioned that my dad is a letterpress printer, otherwise I would definitely not have had the budget to have invitations done letterpress - twice. I'm not only lucky to get them done for free, but usually my dad refuses to do wedding invitations because according to him people getting married are the 'worst clients in the world.' In spite of this, I've spent the last week sitting with him in his shop, going over my Illustrator files, creating color separations and finally working with him (or more accurately observing him) while he printed all 3 pieces of the invitation suite. While this was going on Armin documented it, taking pictures and video. I hope to make a little montage of the whole process but for now, I've just uploaded the pictures from the day in the print shop to the e.m.papers Flickr page.

I designed a 3-color invitation suite including an invite, RSVP card and map. The design used white ink on chip board, which I thought would be really easy. When my dad took a look at it he sighed and muttered something about 'designers always wanting something impossible...' I thought he was being melodramatic. What I didn't appreciate was how difficult it is to work with white ink, and white ink on dark chip board no less. We had to do a 'double bump' (run the white ink twice) to get it to read enough, and with letterpress getting everything to register (align) isn't as precise as with offset or digital printing. To make matters worse chipboard is heavy and more uneven in weight than normal paper, so it was tricky to get it to feed consistently on the printer.

It was a long 2 days in the shop. Although Armin and I were both surprised by how much we enjoyed it, I remarked to my dad "Wow. This is a lot of work" without missing a beat he responded "Yeah! that's what I wanted you to see!" At the end of it all, we have really beautiful invitations and a new found appreciation for what my Dad does (you think I would've paid more attention over the years.) The best thing about these invites though, is that they are permeated with the  love, laugh and happiness that Armin, my dad and I spent during over the couple of days in his shop getting these printed.

P.S. If you like the design I offer a similar DIY downloadable template here , here and here.