Wedding Invitation - Vancouver Edition

for our vancouver celebration i created another set of invitation the same way as i did with my hong kong invitation with a slight change in style. the hong kong invitation it's more classic and vintage while the vancouver invitation is more modern and chic.

Wedding Invitation

when i decided to DIY a lot of the elements of our wedding, i had thought i would go all out and make my own DIY letterpress wedding stationary. i even found this amazing post over at "the paper place" by Luke Pauw about how he created his amazing looking DIY letter pressed invitations. i really thought i would be doing just that, but reality is, do i have the time? no (i've got three jobs and still go to school part time!). do i have the money to buy all the equipment for the letter pressing? well it's not THAT expensive, but still ... no! plus, we are really only having a very small and intimate celebration with a handful of my closest friends and family, why waste so much money in such little things. after banding the idea of DIY letterpress, i thought of making a custom stamp instead. it's much cheaper and less time consuming, but still it seems so much of a hassle to design the stamp, send it to the stamp making company to have it made and ship to me then hand stamped each invite and mail it by post. so in the end, i decided i would still DIY my stationaries for our wedding, but I would do it digitally, which I thought I would never do in the beginning of the planning, and then send out my invitation via facebook and email instead of post.

it's at least a couple hundred bucks that we've saved but yet we've still got a DIY invitation. though it might not appear to be amazing to you but it sure did to me, for it was a lot of hard work to put together what we've created and it was a DIY project that Roy was highly involved as well (in the design decision making part of things of cause).

i looking around on wedding blogs for ideas and inspirations and i found "oh so beautiful paper", a blog that focus on wedding invitations and also a post from "a practical wedding" about how to print you own wedding invitation. through them i also found some online invitation design companies, such as "a printable press" and "thomas printers" that custom make wedding invitations and only send you the jpg. file of the invitation so that allows you to either print them out at your own cost or send out in digital forms. they still cost you some money of cause, but definitely not nearly as much as a set of custom made letterpress invitations. but i wasn't looking for any fancy over the top design, so spending $80 for a simple invite still seems a lot to me, and so what i did was found the design that like the most, follow the pattern and put together something simple myself on microsoft publisher. to make my invite a bit more custome made, i also downloaded different fonts from dafont.com and customised the colours so they match our wedding colour. and ... then ... tata ... here is our wedding invitation!!!!!!

The Revised Boutonniere

really wasn't happy with the original boutonnière I made a while back so did another one. look much better.

ps. departing tomorrow to hkg for the big day in just a week. so excited!!!!

Gift Registry

recently over at green wedding shoes, saw a post about setting up a gift registry in a bit of a not-so-traditional way - Deposit a Gift - a way to give cash towards something what the couple really want instead of something for their home that they don’t really need. i thought it was the perfect way for us as well and so i too went and set up a honeymoon registry for roy and i and should you want to contribute to our honeymoon as a gift for our wedding, follow this link http://gloriaandroywedding.mydagsite.com/ and give us the honeymoon that we have been dreaming of for a long time.

XOXO,

g&r

ps. deposit a gift is not only for wedding but also for many other events as well, such as house warming, baby shower, birthday, etc.

The Signs

this is yet another DIY post of something that i've made for the wedding. this time it's all about the signs. signs can be used as a part of decoration, or it could simply use as a "sign". i've made about three of these for my wedding, two of which are more for photography purposes and one is more for decoration. and here's how it's done.

first you'll need all the supplies: fabric (i've got the blue for the backing and the white for the letters), iron-on adhesive and an iron also a template, some thread and needle, a hole punch, siccors, farbic cutter, pins, and fabric stiffener the first step is to iron on the adhesive to the back side of the farbic. make sure you follow the instructions of the adhesive's packing and don't over heat it. once the adhesive is cool, iron both sides of the fabric together so there is no wrong side of the flags (this is important if you are only making garlands and not message flags). the next step is to use the template, a ruler and a fabric cutter to cut out the flags. like this! then, if you would like your flags to be nice and stiff, apply some fabric stiffener and let em' dry while waiting for your flags to dry, print out some letters for your message (i chose THANK YOU for mine here) iron on some adhesive onto the white fabric then use the letter template as a trace and cut them out individually like this once the flags are dried, iron them again on low-medium heat to get all the wrinkles out, if there’s any. Then peel the paper backing of the adhesives off the letters you just cut out, position the letter however you like it on the flag and iron the letter on with medium heat Once you’re done with all the letters then you can start punching holes. for this project, i’ve used a single handheld vertical hole punch. if you are using paper instead, regular hole punch would work just fine. punchin’ done punchin'! the last step is to sew the flags together. i used baker’s twine for this project to add more color. and done! Thank you for reading!

Roy's Boutonniere

when i planned to DIY my wedding flowers, i found a couple of sites that has tutorials on fabric boutonnieres and here are two that i found most easy to follow ... one's from once wed and the other is from sew mama sew. so i spend sometime this afternoon and did a trial run with roy's boutonniere and here's a picture of it ... i like it but i think i might try again if i have time and see if i can make it look even better.

DIY Cufflinks

when we were out looking for roy's outfit about a month ago, we couldn't find any cuff links we liked so i decided to make him a special pair for our special day. found this site when i googled DIY cuff links and it was awesome. tried it last night and took me about an hour and half, waited for 24 hours to let it dry and got it right the first time ... so happy

the two characters on the cuff links are the characters for roy's chinese first name ... means sunrise