If you have 7 minutes...

How would you answer the question?

Fifty People, One Question: New Orleans from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

I do NOT heart Yahoo!!!

Just a quick note ...

If you have sent me an email using a Yahoo account and have not received a reply, it's because Yahoo has decided to be the most aggravating, annoying email provider on earth and is bouncing all of my messages! I hit reply to your message and send off a proof or a reply, and all I get back is a "message delivery failure." I've filed a complaint with Yahoo, but it will take time for that to be processed. In the meantime, please either use an alternate email account, provide a number where we can contact you or add us to a "safe sender" list. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.

Many thanks,
Rebecca

Happy Halloween

www.target.com

My Quest for Holiday Cards

So every year I drive myself completely psycho trying to come up with "the holiday cards." In my head it's as if my relatives are secretly going to judge me if it isn't the greatest card they've ever received. Last year alone I think I went through over a dozen designs, countless hours and spent more in paper materials and postage than it could ever really be worth. I mean, I designed tags to put on gifts for my UPS driver (great guy though.) Why do I do this? Because I have some insane belief that because I design stationery for a living I must make my own cards from scratch. Well... it's been a bit of an overwhelming few months as some of you know and I am vowing right now that I am not doing it all over again this season. That's right... I'm BUYING someone else's premade cards. There are a million cute, unique, well-designed and free spirited options and I am hurling myself at them.

The Contenders:

#1 The Ever-Trusty Paper Source

#2 Looky Loo : Etsy Shop

#3: Papered Together: Etsy Shop

#4: Shakespeare Press: Etsy Shop

#5: Armato Design : Etsy Shop

Decisions, decisions. Anyone have any suggestions for shops I may have missed?

Monique Lhuillier, 2009

Just some eye candy to gaze at this Friday morning...

(All pictures courtesy of Coutorture)

Our Wedding: Part 4

What went wrong...

Well, inevitably as hard as you may try things do and will go wrong on your wedding day. For us it was the following:

1. The woman who showed up to give me a manicure had 3 colors with her; fire engine red, bright lilac and dark purple. I went lilac ... we were using mostly black and white photography anyway.

2. None of the floating candles I dragged there from the US would stay lit on the pool or on the tables.

3. The Best Man stepped on the back of my dress and tore a piece of it out.

4. We only got a handful of photos before the sunset

5. The power went out every half an hour or so due to rolling blackouts on the island

6. The Air Conditioning went out every half an hour due to the power outages

7. My veil, flowers in my hair and curls refused to stay in place and got yanked out shortly into the reception.

8. A crab decided to wander by and bite my bridesmaid.

9. Some of our friends might have had a bit too much to drink and in the middle of dinner one of them actually crawled under our table to try to shoot video up my dress.

Other things that might shock you about our wedding:
- No programs
- No place cards
- No table numbers
- No assigned seating of any kind
- No fancy chairs
- No real color theme other than what was in my dress

So what's the point of all of this? I didn't care about what went wrong. It was perfectly us. People should walk away from your wedding day feeling like it was a reflection of you, not a party someone else planned and you showed up to. That's what went right at our wedding.

Things I love about that day:
I married my lobster. I married my best friend. I married the love of my life who has stuck with me through thick and thin. We never knew the day we said our vows that the whole "in sickness and in health" line was going to be such a part of our lives so soon, and yet there's never been a time when I was so sure I married the right guy as when I've been sick. The other wonderful thing, our family and friends were all right there with us cheering us on, and they all had the time of their lives. I hope everyone has memories as fulfilling, funny, twisted and sentimental as we do.

Our Wedding: Part 3

The little details...

If I haven't mentioned it up to this point, we were pretty broke when we got married. The wedding had to happen for under $10,000 (not including my dress which my parents generously bought for me.) This meant a lot of DIY. We printed our invitations at home using ivory deckled edged paper folded into a booklet. Everything was printed in grey ink on an inkjet printer, and the line "give me a kiss to build a dream on" was a theme that ran throughout everything. Is there a difference between the feel of letterpress printing and inkjet printing? Yes. Did it matter all that much to me? Nope. I loved our invites and still do.

I was lucky enough to stumble upon Debi at The Blooming Quill a few weeks before the wedding, and she designed our menu cards for us. We just had a few of them scattered on each table as our dinner was a buffet of Jamaican food.

Our cake was really basic and really, really good. It was rum flavored and made locally. We decorated it with flowers that matched the coloring in my dress the afternoon of the wedding. It looks a little lopsided in the photo, but I don't remember it being that way in real life. Who knows...

A couple detail photos of what I wore.

The guys...

The girls...

The band...

next up... everything that went wrong

Election Party

So this year we're having an election party. I've just started planning it, and while it really has nothing to do with weddings it's still an event ... so I thought I'd share what I've got so far.

The invites went out last week via email. I know, I should be sending paper invitations but I also know my friends and realize after many failed attempts that they like to rsvp by email. This just makes it easier. Here's what I used.

Another great source for images and ideas for election stationery is the all knowing Martha. Her website has 4 downloadable images (one shown below) which apparently were brought to the show by Chris Matthews. How very "Hardball." Click here for more...

Next up is the decor. I spent a chunk of time yesterday tracking down a giant map of the US that has each state as a separate piece. You get to color them in as they go red or blue and then attach them to the country. This is the one I ended up ordering from Oriental Trading:

I also picked up Democrat and Republican cocktail napkins at Buy Costumes, and I have stacks of blue and white plates to coordinate with them.

For food, we'll be throwing together your typical Amrican spread of hotdogs, burgers and lots of beer. We'll also have some champagne chilling in the hopes the results go the way we want. For desserts, I found Eleni's NYC's incredible cookies and cupcakes on Hostess Blog.

While I can't really justify the extra $ to buy them already made, I can certainly make some donkey, elephant and star cookies along with some stars and stripes cupcakes. Here's some of the stuff I picked up at Fancy Flours.

... and last but not least, (and the wedding related portion of the post) maybe I'll have to sport this T-shirt designer by Vera Wang...

New Letterpress Eye Candy

I'm still trying to get my computer back online and retrieve all of my old data, but in the meantime we do have some new letterpress invites we're adding to the site this week. Here's a preview...

and some new letterpress thank you notes...

I'm An Idiot ...

Do yourself a favor ... back up your files today. Right now if possible.

I went to bed last night with a fully functional computer. I woke up this morning to a blank screen and a message that said "hard drive failure is imminent." After trying a dozen times to get past that window by turning the power off and on reality sunk in that it really wasn't going to start ... ever. Fun stuff. Well, on the sort of bright side I now own one of those nifty new touch screen PC's which look like a giant iphone. I'm thinking it could come in handy making new invite designs. That said, the photos I'd saved for my next blog post are stuck in the hard drive experiencing imminent failure. Hopefully I'll be able to salvage them tomorrow.

Swing State Living...

Another giant bonus of living in a swing state (though we are tilting blue around here) is that this guy might just show up in your neighborhood one rainy Autumn afternoon.

Dade and I had to cut out of work for a few hours to join in on the rally. What was really amazing to us was that when the crowd was asked how many people there had never voted before, at least half of the people put their hands up. It should make for a very fun and interesting election day this year. I just sent out our invites for our election night party. I'll share them this weekend just in case anyone else is throwing one. I hope you're all voting!!!