Over the last several months we’ve spent a lot of time learning the benefits of social media for business and finding ways to branch out and expand our professional network. Along the way, we have managed to make so many friends and have met so many motivated, inspiring people. One of these amazing new friends has recently launched an adventure that we just had to share with everyone. Erik Jorgensen has challenged himself to spend this holiday season making a difference in his community by volunteering at 20 causes in 20 days. Since beginning this lofty challenge, Erik has volunteered his time with 9 different causes within the Sacramento region and shares those experiences on his blog.

Inspired by his mother’s dream, Erik’s goal is to find ways to help throughout his community. He is determined to not only help in some small way by directly volunteering, but to bring awareness to these amazing causes and the people behind them. We’ve been tremendously inspired by his efforts and suggested a couple of causes we thought could use a little exposure. Erik immediately went into action and got involved – Click on the links to read more about his karaoke adventure and his experience with Harvest Sacramento.

We want to wish him the best of luck with this venture and we hope you will all take the time to check out his site and blog, maybe even become a fan on his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter.

Thanks for the inspiration Erik!

Tomorrow is Saturday, December 5th, which may not be a reason for all that many people to celebrate. But for my husband’s High School buddy, Justin and his fiancee Sarah, tomorrow is HUGE! Justin is a wonderful friend of ours and we couldn’t be happier that he met and fell in love with Sarah, one of the sweetest people we’ve ever met.

Just over 3 years ago Justin was the officiant at our wedding, so when Justin asked me if I’d help them with their wedding invitations, I was so honored to return the favor! Helping someone plan the most important event of their life is such a terrific feeling! Knowing the reception site would be decorated for Christmas, we decided on a festive silver star pattern, paired it with a gorgeous red, then worked in some nice contrast with dark grey and black to keep things sophisticated and elegant. I’m anxious to see how everything will come together tomorrow, so I hope everyone enjoys their weekend and I’ll be sure to post some pictures of the wedding next week :)

      
Apparently, we just can’t seem to get away from our scrapbooking roots. What are the holidays without pretty paper and losta GLITTER? On the left is a Christmas card Jessica designed for her family last year. Ok, I designed the tree but it was her vision, I just made it happen. On the right is a set of coordinating cards, invitations, and favors we did for my stepmom. Check out the super cool “Choo Choo” train on the invitation, get it?–I love my last name!!!

Carmen and Gabriel start their new life together today as well. Congratulations, we hope you have a fabulous wedding!

As much as we LOVE taping hundreds of layers together, we don’t mind letting the brides do it themselves every once in awhile. You can only imagine how tedious assembling 100 of the same invitation can become. So when Carmen said she was getting her girlfriends together to assemble their invitations, we definitely weren’t complaining. It was a nice change to be able to focus all our energy on just the design part of Carmen’s vision.

With a little help from us “professionals”, Carmen was able to create custom DIY invitations within her budget and she didn’t have to hassle with designing or printing!

We are thankful that we had the opportunity to work with so many fabulous brides this year! We’re also thankful for all the awesome connections we’ve made through Facebook, Twitter and the various offline events we’ve attended. It has been a pleasure getting to know all of you and we hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

We would love to hear what you are thankful for, so please leave a comment!

Fonts, fonts and more fonts! We could spend hours looking for the perfect font for your invitations—and we do!! With so many free font sites out there, where do you even start? Usually, dafont is where the font hunt begins for us. If we have trouble finding something there urbanfonts or fontica are next on the list.

A few things to keep in mind when choosing fonts:

• Don’t overdo it – keep your selections to a combination of 2 or 3 for formal style invitations
• When using font sites such as dafont, take advantage of the custom preview option and use your names or actual wording to see how it might look before downloading everything in sight
• Make sure your fonts are legible, some fonts just don’t work for certain words

Some of our favorite fonts include: Lovers Quarrel, Teen, Pupcat, Aubrey, Black Jack, Fontleroy Brown (for the “&” symbol)

For Graphics, we love these: KR Drink up!, Hibiscus, Nymphette, Seperates

Here are a few overused fonts that you may want to avoid: Comic Sans, Papyrus, Scriptina, Curlz MT, Bradley Hand ITC, Chopin,
Freebooter, Fontdinerdotcom

Jen and I were first introduced 4 or 5 years ago by a mutual friend when I decided to get into scrapbooking. Jen was pregnant with baby #3 at the time and was only doing photography as a hobby. Life got hectic and crazy, as it easily does, and we lost track of each other for awhile. Imagine my surprise when I came across Jen while I was checking out Sacramento Wedding Photographers on Twitter! I was so excited and immediately sent her a message hoping she’d remember me. I couldn’t wait to see what she’d been up to and was so amazed at what an incredible photographer she had become! How awesome to be able to turn your passion and hobby into a successful business.

Come to find out Jen now had 4 kids, and I couldn’t help but laugh when she told me they had 3 boys and #4 had been a little girl – the exact opposite of my family of 3 girls and one baby boy :) Earlier this year Jen’s business had flourished enough to allow her husband of 11 years to quit his job and join her in the business full time. So what you get when you hire Jen Stewart Photography is a husband-wife team who are head over heels about each other and their clients. Just read their blog and check out their portfolio to see for yourself. These two are seriously so unbelievably good at what they do and the kind of people you just fall in love with immediately – Which is why Rashell and I agreed they were perfect to start our list of recommended Sacramento Wedding Vendors!

Be sure to follow Jen on Facebook and Twitter to see what she has going on!

From my first meeting with Maya, I knew we would have fun designing her wedding invitations. She loved the Eat, Drink and Be Married concept and really wanted something non-traditional for her Lake Tahoe wedding. She gave us a few color options and left the rest up to us, which ended up being much more of a challenge than we had imagined. We thought it was pretty awesome to have no limitations – other than a couple colors. We quickly found that with so many options, we were overwhelmed with ideas. After playing with several designs, we finally came up with an invitation that we thought matched her unique style and personality. We emailed the mockup, crossed our fingers, and awaited her response. When Maya got back to us about how much they LOVED our design, we were thrilled!

Rashell and I just spent the past weekend with a group of Social Media Rockstars! It was so amazing to hear their success stories and see how social media is working for their businesses. Not only did we get the chance to meet these incredible men and women, but we had a great time connecting with so many other local entrepreneurs and business owners.

With all the inspiration and a mountain of new knowledge, we’re ready to start taking some serious action. Attending these types of local events lately has helped us make so many great new friends in such a short amount of time and with Alejandro Reyes’ 30 day plan, we’ll be Rockstars soon as well.

Alejandro aka @successfool is such a genuine Rockstar — we can’t wait for his next Social Media Weekend!

A friend of mine was having  Breakfast at Tiffany’s themed bridal shower and asked us to design the invitation. Considering Jessica and I had never seen the movie we had a little homework to do–we {heart} google! We discovered that a little black dress was a must; luckily, I had designed this super cool wedding dress die cut back in my scrapbooking days. ;) The little black dress paired with Tiffany blue and bling really set the tone for one of the most amazing bridal showers I’ve ever attended.

Side note: Since this was the first project Jessica and I collaborated on, we decided to make it our signature avatar.