Lofty Endeavors, or My Debut in Four-Inch Heels.

I went to my first gala this weekend. It's been a lot of fun to think about dresses, shoes, jewelry, hair, nail color and other gala-related fashion details. I found my dress a month or so ago at a thrift store for $10. Don't panic on my behalf though: I know you are probably picturing the scary 1980s prom dresses that populate most thrift stores, but somehow I found two excellent formal dresses on the same day, plus some other non-formal finds.

Because sometimes you have to throw your own parties.

I threw myself a birthday party. I knew the first part of this month might not be easy for me, so I planned ways to intentionally take care of myself. I wanted to feel surrounded by loved ones and welcome in a new year, and a birthday is a perfectly normal reason to have a party. (Unfortunately a I-survived-the-depths-of-hell party is a little less socially acceptable.) And since I didn't have someone to throw me a party, I decided to throw one for myself. This probably broke some etiquette rules, especially because I made it a potluck party, but I don't even care. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

Tenacity.

As I sit here in my sunny living room, the sound of chirping birds just outside the window reminds me that spring is technically here. Nevermind the incongruous detail that we had a snowstorm on the first day of spring and another small one two days later. It still looks like winter, but there are whispers of spring. Those tenacious birds confirm that winter will not last forever.

I probably should be working on one of the many projects I am in the middle of right now. I am getting ready to enter week four of a very busy four-week period. But I saw this article ("This is what 80 Looks Like") on Gloria Steinem and wanted to share it. So here I am.

Boxed In and Other States of Being



Credit: Adventures Along the Way

Ah, Booboo. This is Booboo's favorite spot. He has several preferred spots, but he spends more time here than in the other ones. It cracks me up when he squeezes all the way in like this.

In other news, spring seems to be here. By that I mean that the snow has stopped (well, our last snow was a week or so ago) and they have just today cleaned all the rocks and dirt out of the streets in our neighborhood. Now there are only a few patches where the snow/ice has yet to melt. It is lighter coat weather (which, by the way, is what I used to consider a "winter coat" until I moved out of the south). Cafés are starting to prepare their outdoor seating areas.

I find myself thinking about planting some herbs and flowers on the back porch, but it is still too soon to actually get started. I am interested in sewing some hanging bags to attempt to get them off the ground so that they will stay cat-poop-free. I am inspired by these (scroll down to see the "smart wall pouch"), but have a different design in mind.

I made the best lasagana I have ever made on Saturday, using a former college roommate's recipe. And on Sunday I made the worst muffins I have ever made. I was trying to salvage some not-very-good cream cheese icing by mixing it into the batter, and the muffins were a disaster too.

As for pursuing dreams, my continued efforts to pursue my artistic career have had some return. I've had a couple of opportunities so far and have two more lined up. Life is feeling less splintery. I am ready to welcome spring.

Patching things up.

Over the last few years I have been focusing on being more eco-responsible and really incorporating the reduce-reuse-recycle thing into my daily life. When we moved to this apartment almost two years ago, we tried to look for things we needed at second hand shops first, and that preference has continued, though we don't really need much these days.

I've started re-purposing old things we have to meet new needs. It's been a fun challenge. Learning to sew has opened up so many more possibilities of modifying my clothes or making stuff out of repurposed t-shirts. When I patch up a hole in my favorite shirt or in my most comfy jeans, I get a thrill from the pioneer feeling of it all. I love feeling resourceful and making stuff last longer.

There are more green changes I'd like to make in the coming months. One goal is trying to find somewhere to buy eggs without packaging. I've heard the market in town sometimes has eggs, so I am going to give that a try in the coming weeks. I'm also working on improvising patterns to make some fun clothes I'll wear out of my large collection of unworn, old t-shirts. And I am really looking forward to growing some some herbs and veggies on our back porch again this year...only this year I'll elevate the containers of edible things so the local outdoor neighbors' cats can't get in them.

Anybody else have any eco-friendly goals to implement this summer?

Hibou.

And here's the owl I made this week as a part of a gift for a baby niece. I used the same methods as the elephant and made my own pattern for all the pieces based on my original sketch. With this one, I also decided to put batting on all the base fabric of the stuffed animal since it was not as sturdy as I wanted it to be. That seemed to help a lot!

Making a "toutou" (Part 2)

After elephant version 1.0, I made some changes to the pattern and started working with the actual fabric. Because the fabric I had chosen was slippery and thin, I ironed batting on the back of all the pieces, thinking it might make it easier to work with.

Then I trimmed the edges, pinned the "right" sides together, and sewed. S made marks for me of where to sew for the leg sections, since they had to be precisely sewn for the sections to all meet up.

I trimmed the edges, turned the fabric right-side out, and stuffed. Finally, I sewed on the ears and eyes. Here's elephant version 2.0.

And judging from the speed at which the adorable birthday girl grabbed onto the elephant's trunk, she seemed to like it. Fun!

Making a "toutou" (Part 1)

I recently decided out of the blue that I wanted to learn how to make little fabric stuffed animals to give as gifts. So this past week I did some research and planning, and then bought the necessary materials. On Friday, I made my first one: an elephant for a friend's daughter's 1st birthday. Instead of using a pattern, I decided to make my own since I figured it couldn't be that hard. After researching some images of elephants, I began doing some rough sketches and decided to base the pattern on the above drawing.

I was originally just going to wing it with the fabric I bought. I think I must prefer having a bit of a sense of risk when attempting creative projects: When having people over for dinner, I regularly try out new recipes, and I often improvise with various craft projects. But for once, I decided to do a practice version.

I got some pieces of old t-shirt from my "to re-purpose" collection, and cut out my pattern and pinned the "right" sides together.

Then I sewed around the elephant and two ears, leaving an un-sewn space in the elephant's tummy. I trimmed the edges and turned it right-side out.

Then I stuffed and stuffed and stuffed. And noticed the trunk was as long as the legs....and that I forgot to make a tail...oops. As I stuffed, the elephant shape altered as it became three dimensional.

Looking at the stuffed elephant, I realized my pattern needed some adjustments to make it look less....horse-shaped. I also decided that the two-legs design looked funny on a 3-D stuffed elephant. S explained how to alter the pattern to make four legs, and made the new pattern pieces for me. So I made some changes and started elephant version 2.0 with the actual fabric...and hoped this one would come out more elephant-like. (To be continued...)

Finally getting around to the hallway.

When we moved into our apartment in July 2010, this wall pictured above was unfinished white plaster. It was the only white part in a very yellow hallway, which is a color continuation of the yellow and red walls of our dining area. The new wall replaced what had been a door before the bathroom renovation that was done before we moved in. So to make the hallway look normal again, we had bought the yellow paint in almost the same shade of yellow as the rest of the apartment, but then we never got around to sanding it down and actually painting it. Finally, this summer we got inspired and did it. (We also learned that a primer coat would have been a good step not to skip. Oops. We are hoping the yellow paint will outlast our time in the apartment, despite the lack of primer.)

Once the wall was painted to almost-match the rest of the hallway, I was ready to get up some pictures that had been waiting since the move to be hung. I did a draft of an arrangement by laying the frames on the floor of our dining area and re-arranging until it felt right to me. Then, I made "patterns" of each frame out of paper to be recycled, which was a method I learned about here.

I taped the patterns on the wall and re-arranged until the collage was like I wanted it. Then measured and marked each pattern with the spot where the hanger needed to be nailed for the frame to hang in that exact spot.

Then I nailed the hanger hooks right into that spot, removed the papers, and hung the frames in their respective places. It worked really well, and I only had to re-do one nail for which I must have done a wrong calculation. Yay, for less unnecessary holes in the walls!

Chopped.

This was a long time coming. I had been thinking of cutting my hair for months, maybe a year. But I only had the urge every now and then, so I waited. And waited. And finally my hair reached my elbows, and I always had it tied up in a bun to get it out of the way. Realizing it was finally long enough to do something useful, I knew that I didn't just want to trim a few inches to get it to my "ideal" length, I wanted to cut enough off to donate. My thinking was that if I was going to cut 4 or 5 inches anyways, why not 12, if it could be "recycled" and do some good? But it took me a while to reach the point of readiness.

After I got permanent residence and began to look for work, I decided it was time to cut my hair. Following the instructions on Pantene Beautiful Length's website, I prepped my hair and gathered it at the nape of my neck. In the moment before I made the first cut, tears sprang to my eyes and I realized the connection between hair and identity, and how long those 12 inches had been a part of me. I took a deep breath, told myself that it would grow back, and cut. Cut after cut, until it seemed like I had made a hundred cuts. By the end, I was hacking it off without much precision, as I tried to free myself from the tenacious last strands. At last the elastic-banded foot of hair was separated from me, and suddenly it became hard to believe that my hair had really been so long. Looking in the mirror, I saw my hair at a length it had last been about 14 years before. Freshly cut and still uneven, the change made me feel more sassy. More awake.

The next day, I straightened my naturally wavy/curly hair so I could even it out more easily. Since the back part was much shorter than the front (because of the way it had to be cut in the pony tail), there was a lot of work to do. Instead of going to a salon, I stubbornly determined I would make it look good on my own. After some time, it was even and looked about the same level of quality as when I go to an inexpensive, walk-in salon.

I like my new look and have had positive feedback, but I don't think it's the optimal length for my hair type because my wave-curls seem to do much better at a longer length, when they have more weight to keep the poofiness down. However, I do think the change was exactly what I needed and I am enjoying the feeling of possibility these days.

PS. Pantene Beautiful Lengths only requires at least 8 inches for a donation. I had some split ends, and just wanted to give more to make sure they definitely had plenty of use-able hair.

Veggie "sushi" attempt.

 

A while back, we had a try-to-make-veggie-"sushi"-at-home night. It turned out okay, but not great. S did get quite good at rolling though, and I hope to try it again this summer and make some improvements on the sushi rice and overall flavor combinations. Any suggestions?

PS. I realize "veggie" sushi isn't Real Sushi, but I like it.

A little garden of my own.

This is our little part of the back porch area we share with the neighbors. I have been looking forward to growing things out here for a year now, because we moved in too late in the summer last year to plant anything. (Though I did inherit a tomato plant last year, which I enjoyed.)

I chose the yellow daisies that I felt were "too tall" for my personal plant height preference because, despite that, they just made me feel so happy when I looked at them. So I bought them and gave them a prime place right by the back door and the kitchen and dining room windows. And I love looking at them.

I have wanted to grow some veggies and herbs for a while now. This box has Boston lettuce, cilantro, basil, and mint. I love drinking mint water (which my mother-in-law introduced me to last summer) because it is just so refreshing.

 

White daisies are my favorite flower. I love their beautiful simplicity. To their right is a "Chasse chats" which I got because a neighbor's outdoor cat has left us a few little "surprises" on our balcony, and this plant is supposed to make cats run away. We'll see. At the edge of the photo is our tomato plant.

I got the plants and potted them all in the same day. After I finished, I just felt so happy. Much to my surprise, somehow looking out and seeing these growing plants makes me feel deeply content.

I made a dress. It was not a hit.

Right after New Year's, with a friend's encouragement, I decided to attempt to sew something with a pattern for the very first time. I decided to make a little dress for S's niece for her birthday. The friend helped me choose a pattern and all the necessary items and showed me how to cut out the fabric pieces with the pattern. We put the interfacing on the top and sewed two pieces together that first day. Then I procrastinated for about a month and before I knew it, it was just two days before the birthday party and I had not done anything else to the dress. What can I say? Zippers and piping are just scary-sounding. Anyhow, the friend came over to help me those two days and guided me through the process, zipper and all. When I finally finished at midnight on the night before the party, I was excited that I actually succeeded in making a real-looking dress! Something that was actually wearable in public!

We wrapped it in a cute color-coordinated pink pastel striped bag with pink tissue paper for S's adorable pink-princess-loving niece. She opened it and was underwhelmed.* Maybe I should have stitched a Disney princess appliqué on it? Sigh.**

*As in, she covered her face with her hands, about to cry, when we helped her try it on over what she was wearing for me to measure where the straps needed to be stitched into place to properly fit her.
**At least I accomplished my goal of learning how to sew with a pattern and to make inverted box pleats, put in zippers, do top-stitching, etc. The next project will be something for myself. Less stressful since it won't be a gift for somebody, and I already have some fabric S's aunt gave me that I think will make a cute dress.

Booboo meets Tulle.

Booboo was quickly enamored.

Dirty laundry.

I have a lot of clothes I hand-wash, including clothes that say "Dry Clean Only"* and I hand-wash a lot of the random thrift store clothes I buy that seem a little delicate or vintage. Only the problem is....over  the years, I have acquired a lot of clothes that I would put in the "hand-wash" category. And as someone who doesn't want to be hand-washing stuff regularly every week to stay on top of it, I usually procrastinate until I get a large pile of things that need to be hand-washed. And then I wait. And wait some more. And when I finally really want to wear something in the pile enough, I wash that and as many other things as I can fit on my drying rack and hanging in the shower. But even after that, it doesn't begin to put a dent in the load. And I am tired again of the effort of hand-washing, so I end up waiting a while before hand-washing some more. It is has been a bit of a sisyphean struggle.

But today, while trying to figure out the right way to hand-wash some vintage dresses I bought recently, I ran across the brilliant idea of putting delicate clothes in a pillow case and tying it up to go in the washer on delicate cycle with Woolite. So, I grabbed two white pillow cases and tossed one probably-should-be-dry-cleaned-white-vintage-dress in each.** And the verdict is: they came out of the wash and look perfect. Whiter, clean, and no damage. Amazing. I already have in another load in the washer including a couple of dark previously-hand-wash-but-now-pillow-case items. Whew. This short cut has me looking forward to less hand-washing and more time wearing fun clothes that previously spent long lengths of time in hanging out in the dirty "hand-wash" pile.

*For some of the "Dry Clean Only" clothes that seem to be at risk of damage with hand-washing (wool sweaters, etc), I use Dryell. I once worked at a dry cleaners, and since those four days of employment there, I am a firm believer in Dryell. My job at the cleaners was steaming and ironing ladies dresses, and I must say that dry cleaning does not get B.O. out.
**They were two for $15....I can not bring myself to pay to dry clean them and have not yet been able to find Dryell in Canada.

Getting settled.

Moving is hard work. Physically, of course, especially if it is a DIY/DIT move, but I find moves are also emotionally exhausting. It hate that feeling of displacement while you are between places without a home base anywhere. Traveling is different because you have a home out there somewhere, even if it is far away. But moving means being in-between homes and living in that liminal space when you have to say things like "our new apartment" and "your old place in Québec" and "my apartment in Montréal" because there are just too many home-like places floating around out there making things a little confusing.

We accomplished our bizarre (and, we hope, worst-ever) move between June 21st and July 11th.* We used the help of professional movers in Montréal to move out of the apartment there (3rd floor apartment with a couch that had to be sent over the balcony to get it out!), and we were so thankful for the help of many friends and family in Québec in moving and getting settled here. S's mom graciously welcomed us to her home so we would have a place to stay while we waited 11 extra days beyond our lease start date for our bathroom to be renovated, S's friend let us store our massive amount of stuff in his warehouse for those weeks when we were apartment-less, and friends and family helped with the prep and the actual move into our new apartment. It was hot on our Québec move-in day, and everyone worked so hard helping us.** Everyone was drenched in sweat after the REMARKABLE feat of moving all our stuff into the apartment (which is one flight up) in only an hour and a half. I have absolutely no idea how that happened so quickly. S and I had for real thought it might take all day. And I had worried I might end up in tears multiple times that day from the stress of it all, but it was all exceedingly better than expected. It went really, really well and I was especially moved by the generous community that helped us.(Haha, pun not intended but I am keeping it cause it makes me laugh!)

In the week or so since move-in day, we have been unpacking and cleaning and trying to figure out where things go and maneuvering around an overwhelming amount of boxes. And trying to buy the things we need to get settled, like curtains and curtain rods and other needed apartment-y things.*** We have been trying to buy stuff second hand, for the eco-friendly aspects, and also for the thrill of discovering something we can re-purpose to fit a need.**** It is going well and over the weekend we even found an unconventional solution to a coat closet. (Our almost 100 year-old apartment doesn't have an entry coat closet, and has very pitiful closets in general. Sadly.) And we found a vintage table we love.***** More to come on that later, after we get more unpacked and take some pictures.

Settling in to a new home is a slow process, at least for us. But thankfully, Booboo seems to be handling it quite well.

*Well, really like four separate moving days: 1) My Montréal stuff to warehouse in Québec; 2) S's Québec stuff to warehouse in Québec; 3) Loading almost all our joint stuff from the warehouse into the moving truck; 4) Moving all the stuff from the truck to the apartment; 4) Some upcoming day where we will get the last of the stuff from S's dad's. Maybe in a week or two?

**That was the week of the "canicule," or heat wave, here in Québec (and elsewhere). And some of our boxes were HEAVY, as many of my Chicago friends certainly know. I am still SUPER thankful for all that help with last year's move. Boy, we have amazing friends. And we should really try to stay put for a while. :)

***This is the first time I have been in an apartment that didn't have blinds left by the previous tenant. Now I am entering a new era of being a curtain-and-curtain-rod owner.

****And we love that it is WAY less expensive too.

****Not that we needed a table at all. But we were surprised by discovering it at the flea market while looking for other things on our list. And we couldn't leave it there. Some things are like that.

Packing.

Crafty.

I got inspired and made a birthday card the other day. I used some leftover wedding supplies and made a sort of banner to spell out the friend's name. On the other side, I wrote out a birthday haiku wish. It was a fun spontaneous creative project.

Invitations in the approach of an Amish barn raising.

I realized that I never blogged about our DIY wedding invitation making experience last August, so I thought I would share in case somebody out there is considering DIY invitations.

When we started planning our wedding, one of the first things we started with was pricing how much having invitations printed would be. After realizing that they easily cost several dollars a piece, and even the very most basic (and often ugly) ones were about a dollar each, we decided maybe we should make our own. I enjoy making invitations and stationary, and we figured we could create something nicer than those cheap/ugly ones for slightly more than the least expensive cost we saw. So we priced out the supplies we would need. I think our estimate came down to $1.23 or so an invite. (This did not include the cost of a paper cutter, tape, and the punches we bought.)

Then we took a slight detour and decided to check out the kits you can buy at craft stores. We had seen some online that matched the look we were going for, and we thought this could be a low-maintenance solution. With half-off craft store coupons, it would have been cheaper too. So we bought the kit that matched our desired "look" from a craft store in the U.S., but after opening it, I was disappointed by the quality of the paper. Really disappointed. I love quality paper products and this kit was far from that. Parts of it looked like it needed ironing to be flat and some white paper had black random print smudges on the edges. After some evaluation of our situation and deciding that the invitations were very important to me, we decided to work hard and pay a little more to have invitations we would be proud of. And since we wanted to do bilingual invitations, we thought we could get what we wanted more easily if we had more control of the layout.

After deciding (for the second time) to embark on the full, "from scratch" DIY invite experience, S, my parents, and I came up with a design for the invitation. It was back in July and we were visiting my parents in the south. While we were there, and since my mom is an expert in craft-store shopping, we figured out what supplies we needed and bought it all with coupons at various craft stores. We bought a paper cutter too, since we were doing massive amounts of cutting and my dad said we needed something "professional" that could handle it. I don't know if our cutter is professional, but we did get one on the top of the spectrum available at normal craft stores. Thank goodness for all those 50% off coupons we used! We got most of the supplies we needed and took it back to Chicago.* We waited to get the black envelopes and the cards until we got back to Chicago, since I already knew where I wanted to purchase them.

Once back in Chicago, I started researching wedding invitation wording and creating drafts of the invitation, in French and in English. I started out trying to do this in Word, but then ended up teaching myself how to use Publisher because I realized I would not be able to do what I wanted in Word. Finally after many edits and the help of S's mom with the French grammar and etiquette of invitation wording, we got it down to the text wording we wanted.

Then there were some minor aesthetic disagreements about fonts. (I liked the two fonts look, but others thought that looked a little weird and wanted only one uniform font.) The initial two fonts I had thought of using were dramatically different, but I finally decided to compromise by finding two fonts that looked like close cousins of each other. A more elegant one just for our names (Freebooter) and a more standard pretty one for the other text (Monotype Corsiva, which comes normally with Microsoft Office). Because Freebooter looks like a dressed up Monotype Corsiva, I think everyone was pleased. I had the interest I wanted with two different fonts, but everything looked like it "belonged" together and did not have the jarring effect of my initial font combo proposal. I ended up really loving our font choices. Way more than my original idea...

Then I sent out an email to friends in the Chicago area asking (er, begging?) for help assembling our invites. (S was in Canada at this point.) To me, having friends help was necessary (I never-ever-ever could have finished in our short time frame otherwise), but also having those friends gather with me was unexpectedly calming. These friends kept me sane and kept the experience enjoyable. It felt like a communal effort, like what I imagine an Amish barn-raising to be, only not mandatory and with less physical labor and no expected gender roles. (Yes, two of my guy friends did help and put in HOURS of work, along with some female friends.) It did wonders to have those friends around me, successfully pushing back my feeling of being overwhelmed just by cutting, taping, sticking, and chatting.

The above pictures showed the part put together by my parents who, a week or so before, had spent a couple days cutting and assembling this external decorative strip that would eventually be wrapped around the invite. They cut the red strips and white strips; the red being slightly wider and longer than the white, so it would create a red border around the white piece. Then they attached the red and white strips together using double sided archival quality craft tape. After that, they punched out the two fleur-de-lys holes. Finally, they attached double sided tape to the ends of the strips so that they were ready to affix to the cards later in the process. As an added bonus, they divided the strips into groups of twenty-five so we could keep track of how many we had, and they wrapped up the little punched out fleur-de-lys holes in red and white for potential use in another project. Because of the massive amounts of punching they did, they went through two or three of the punches. Evidently those are made for more occasional punching and not repetitive and frequent use like this project.

I got the black envelopes and cards that would be the main "base" of the invite at Paper Source in the Chicago area. My friend L went with me on a lunch break one day, and we had a quick task of figuring out how many packages I needed and how many extra we would need to buy to get the bulk discount. Since our numbers were so close to the number needed for the discount, we bought a few extra to get the discount. (As a side note: weeks before my mom and I had briefly thought of making the cards ourselves by cutting them down from larger paper, but after one or two failed attempts to get a folded card with 90 degree corners and a clean fold and some frustrated, stressed tears by me, we all decided my sanity was worth the $20 or so difference in cost to buy the cards pre-made. And a huge plus was that the cards and envelopes matched exactly and looked great together.) These cards from Paper Source were great and I was very pleased with the quality and the customer service! I love that store.

At the first night where friends were coming to help for our invitation "barn-raising", I was having the font crisis mentioned above and had not yet printed the invites. So, just before they arrived, I finalized my font choice and started printing on my ink jet printer. As I printed and let the pages fully dry, my friends arrived and we established a kind of assembly line approach. I printed the white text pages for the inside, one friend cut the pages with the paper cutter to the proper size**, one friend attached the white invitation text parts (one French, one English) to the inside of the card, and the next friend attached the wrap-around strip. Broken down into parts like this, the process went pretty quickly, but if I had had to do this alone, it would have taken forever!

After they were all assembled, I had another friend who asked if she could take the invites and the envelopes home with her overnight and stuff them for me (while I was packing for my move and trying to get the addresses in the spreadsheet so we could print labels for the invites.)*** Meanwhile two other friends volunteered to help create a label design into which we could import the addresses and print. I had bought large labels already, with the thought that I wanted to use black envelopes and print the recipients' address, our return address, and some sort of wedding image/motif on the label we would attach. But I had no idea how to do that, and these friends stepped in to figure it out.****

On the way out of town, right before our vintage jewelry shopping adventure, we stopped at the post office to mail the invites. I was working myself up to the experience (because my then-neighborhood post office is notoriously mean and many people rant on Yelp about it) but it turned out to be a fine experience, other than a long time in line, and the clerks did not make me angry or cry out of frustration. (Which was often my experience there.) They were quite nice, actually, and went to the effort of finding enough pretty stamps for the envelopes, which ended up being the wedding ring ones. I didn't care what stamps went on there as long as they weren't ugly, so this was fine. We stamped them all then dropped our U.S. invites and some international ones in the mail, and saved all the Canadian ones to mail from Canada several days later.

All said and done, it was a LOT of work for me and a LOT of friends and family who donated hours and hours of time to help. It did end up being less expensive than ordering invites (well, invites that were anything more the very cheapest ones available), but what was most special to me was to be able to create an invite that was very "us", with the French and English, and with the colors and design we had chosen. It makes me smile to know that our invitation was truly was one of a kind, made just for us with people that love us. We got some good feedback on it, and I am kinda proud of the fact that our invitations looked a little unconventional as far as a normal wedding invite goes (at least where I come from), but still remained classy. I loved using our fun labels (S was great at applying the labels and stamps, and very precise at sticking them on straight, which was surprisingly difficult for me!) And I know it is standard to use calligraphy and black envelopes are probably a wedding "no-no" to some, but we didn't care and it felt just right for us!

 

*A fun benefit of making the invites is that there was some leftover supplies and I have been using them for business cards and have enough cards and envelopes to make some cool stationary later. And the paper cutter has totally come in handy many times. Who knew how useful they were?


**For some reason, the act of cutting the paper down into the proper size while keeping it centered (there were two on each page that had to be cut out) almost sent me over the edge. Thankfully, I was rescued by my (male) friends, M and D who manned the paper cutter and did a FABULOUS job cutting them down exactly right. 

***We skipped calligraphy, handwriting, RSVP cards, and inner envelopes and I am still so thankful we made each of those choices! It saved trees, expense, effort, and reduced stress.

****How did we end up with such amazing and giving friends? I feel so thankful. All these wedding-helping friends saved me from countless tears and from losing the little sanity I was holding on to at that point, less than two weeks before an international move and about seven weeks before the wedding. As did the many friends who about a week or two later helped me pack and move. And then the friends who helped with even more wedding stuff before and at the wedding. I can not say enough how much all that amazing help those few weeks carried me through one of the most stressful times I have experienced.