Saturday, March 15, 2014

Invitation Design

Confession:  I've had a secret wedding ideas board on Pinterest since before we got engaged.  On that board, I had several things that I was already sure I wanted and one of them was pocketfold invitations.  I initially decided I was going to make them myself since my inspiration invitations were made with materials from Cards & Pockets.  The sample pocketfolds I ordered were already in the mail when we met a potential invitation designer at Weddings in Woodinville.  We went ahead and had a consultation with her and liked what we saw, but realized that we had severely underbugeted paper goods.  In my calculations for DIY I had completely forgotten to include actual graphic design of the invitation, how we would get it printed, and the fact that I needed more than just invitations(programs, etc).  I'm no graphic designer and a little research about printing options just overwhelmed me.  I felt like my DIY project was or quickly would snowball out of control, so we decided to alter the budget and go with the designer.


She had a physical proof worked up for us in no time and after a few iterations, we came up with the final version(bottom left).  I could not be more pleased with how they turned out.  We ended up assembling them ourselves to save a bit, but had the envelopes printed with our return address as well as guest addresses since we agreed that it was worth the money to avoid the headache(more like hand ache).  We also received a discount for ordering invitations, programs, place cards, and thank you cards all at one time.  We're planning to have all of them match our invitation, so future design iterations should be minimal.  I'm so happy we decided to go this route to avoid the last minute get things done rush.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Bofur Style Hat

Ever since seeing Bofur in the Hobbit movies, I have wanted his hat.  I didn't really dig any I found online, so I decided to try crocheting one with leftover yarn from my ear flap hat.  I found a Bofur inspired hat pattern by Shaina Dyson on Ravelry and got to work.  My first try using H and I hooks turned out teddy bear sized, so I sized up to K and L hooks.



Either I have a huge head or I crochet way too tightly because the hat was still too small.  I ended up having to add five rows to the length of the hat and two rows to the length of the front flap.  If I made the hat again I would also add some length to the ear flaps.  It's almost guaranteed I'll make this again and make sure it fits this time... it's just too cute to pass up.