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!!!!

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

Head Piece DIY Tutorial

so here is how it was done


1) gather the fabric that you will need.
i used a fabric that is 100% bamboo, i just so happened
to found it when i was looking for material and it was
great for this project so i'm pleased.2) then apply fabric stiffener on to the fabric. the more
you put onto the fabric the stiffer it gets and you want
it to be stiff!3) wait for a few hours or even over night to let the fabric
to dry. if the fabric gets wrinkly as it dry, you can always
iron it nice and flat when it's dried. cut the fabric into
smaller squares: 5", 4", 3" etc. the number of squares
you need depends on how "full" you want your flower
to be, the more layers (squares) the fuller.4) like this. 5) you will also need some tulle. same color or in different
color is more personal preference. i used same color here.
so after you cut out the fabric into squares, cut the same
amount of square tulle as well. 6) fold the squares in half 7) then fold in half again 8) then fold in half again to make this small triangle 9) cut the top of the triangle and make it nice and round 10) finally all done with the cutting! 11) unfold the squares and you will find a nice flower petal 12) stack the petals up. interchanging the fabric and the tulle
and then thread it through the middle 13) add some pearl beads to the middle of the flower
14) scrunch the petals up a bit 15) and here you go! ta-da!

Head Piece

a sneak peak on my head piece. stay tune for the DIY post on how it's done ... coming soon

The Guest Book

more and more people now a days use different guest book at their weddings. some use the typical photo book, some use message tree or box, some ask people to sign around a poster size picture, some even use vintage type writers. if you are like me that love reading wedding blogs on a daily bases (well, i usually do my wedding blog marathon at work on the weekend and read all of the posts over the past week from a few of my favourite blogs in just a few hours). out of all the new and unique guest books, one is what is called a "finger print guest tree". basically it is a drawing of a tree only with its bare branches. then on the day of the event guests who attend the event are asked to "leaf" their finger print on the tree branches and sign their name on their leave. i know if i had a guest book for people to sign i might never again in my life take the guest book out and read it after the wedding, but if i have this "finger print tree" i could simply hang it up at home as a piece of art and look at it all the time. this idea of finger print guest book have became more and more popular in the wedding industry over this past year and hence created a lot of business opportunities for people who are creative. if you too are looking for a creative guest tree for your wedding or any family gathering event etc. Etsy is definitely a great place to go look for one. i found some on etsy that are really awesome but also quite expensive, so i when i decided to have a tree instead of a guest book, i added yet another DIY project on my plate.

this project was not an easy one, i tried many times and failed many (it took me six trial before i give up on hand writing our own names under the tree, six times! i hand drew this same tree six times and wasted six canvas panel!). i am no artist and am definitely not great at free hand drawing so this project did end up costing my more time and money than i had planned at first. but i made it happened and it turned out great, though it really doesnt look like a real tree compare to the one i found on Etsy it is our own unique tree and i'm very happy.

photo credit to bleudetoi

Gift Tags

over this past year of "researching" on wedding blogs, i was inspired to have a DIY wedding with absolutely everything handmade by myself. hair piece, veil, decor, flowers, stationaries, everything were handmade. i started early, almost 10 months ago, i am almost done with all the bigger project - flowers and decor, and have recently moved onto smaller ones.

a couple of months ago, after spending over seven months of flower making, i decided it's time to take a break from the flowers and get started on other smaller projects - the favor gift tags. i like the idea of using vintage looking Manila tags and it certainly had been a hit in recent wedding trend. people use them for place cards, for their guest books, favor tags and such. i really like the idea, but i didn't want to be the same as everyone else - that is buying Manila tags, decorating them with Washi tapes, then stamp them with rubber stamp for your message. i want it to be personal, handwritten and unique. so i decided to make my very own Manila tags.

although i wanted my tag to be hand written, of cause i wasn't going to really hand write all of the tags myself. for one, i am pretty sure if i hand write them all, they will all look different, and two, i will probably mess up so much that i might need to write about a thousand of them to get a hundred.

few months before i started this project, i came a cross a blog by a girl name Elise Blaha that gave me some inspiration on to how to create these gift tags of mine. but i don't have a adobe photoshop at home and i woasn't going to spend hundreds of dollars for just one tiny little project so i came up with the idea of using a scanner, the adobe reader 9, the microsoft word, the PrtScn button and a basic photo editing software such as paint. some other supplies i also need are: cream color card stock, different sizes signiture marker, mt masking tapes, cutter, cutting mate, scissors and a hole punch.

first, like elise, i wrote my message randomly on the paper. then i scanned the image onto the computer as a pdf file and open it with adobe reader 9. then i highlight the images that i like, copy it and then paste it on to a new word doc. and finally play around with the arrangement and create my own design. after i figure out the how i would like me message to be, i zoomed in and made the image really big and click the PrtScn button to capture an image just like this then, paste the printed screen on to a simple photo editing software such as Paint and crop out the final image of the tag and paste it once again on a word doc. like thiscreate a table in the size of the tag that i like copy and paste the image of the tag onto all of the spaces, print it out onto a card stock paper, trim them, stick tape on them, and then hold punch them .... and there you go ... DIY Marina gift tags