Just a quick little post about the new products we recently began offering. These custom or semi-custom gift cards and gift card holders are great for business owners looking for something a little more unique than the traditional plastic gift cards. Not to mention the perfect way to dress up a birthday card/gift certificate! Stay tuned for the Bridesmaid Thank You versions :) Feel free to contact us for pricing and details on how to order. 
This photoshoot and blog post have been a long time coming and we are so thrilled to finally be sharing it! Prepare to fall in love with this entire concept…we certainly did when Carmen of Carmen Salazar Photography first mentioned it to us last year.
Carmen and her husband were married at the courthouse and had hoped to plan a large reception closer to their anniversary, inviting friends and family to come out and spend several days celebrating. With her husband being a musician, creating a music festival themed reception seemed perfectly fitting and something everyone would enjoy and remember. The idea had our minds running wild the instant she asked if we’d take on the challenge of designing the music festival poster style invitations. However, as with the majority of us, life tends to get busy and when Carmen realized that she wouldn’t have time to put together her own WedFest, she instead opted for a fun and intimate photoshoot capturing the look and feel of what she still hopes to plan for herself and husband when time permits.
I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun Rashell and I had with this shoot. We started off with the color scheme, which was determined by looking at colors from the 70′s and giving them a modern twist – instead of mustard yellow, avocado green, and burnt orange, we went with slightly brighter tones. We tossed in a nice dark henna, bright red, and charcoal grey, giving it just the right amount of retro with a balance of current trends.
So what better way to start off this wedding than with the Save The Date designed on a 45 – fun right!? For the wedding invitation itself, we definitely loved the idea of the festival style poster and were totally inspired by this guitar pick flower we found on Pinterest. We just can’t get over how the textured paper we used helps give it all a washed, rustic look. 
The Welcome Table greets the guests as they arrive with helpful items like water bottles, lip balm, and sunscreen, as well as their commemorative t-shirt favors, festival-inspired wrist bands, custom mix tape, and VIP passes. The burlap WedFest banner with its colorful scarves (love us some Steven Tyler) helps frame the view and the wooden directional signs help point the way.
Love Notes has a whole new meaning when used as a fun alternative to a guestbook, plus a guitar case and stand make the perfect display. On a personal side-note, the songbook on the stand shows Tom Petty’s Here Comes My Girl, which is the song I walked down the aisle to on my wedding day :) 
Ok, and then there’s the Escort Card Table. This makes us smile – 8 track tapes designed to include music trivia on the back for a fun way for guests to get acquainted. Huge thanks to Audrey for the cute wooden display that worked out so perfectly! 
The table details of this shoot are pretty amazing. The table itself is simply a truckload of tree stumps arranged in a row and then surrounded by several colorful quilts. We just love how rustic and warm everything feels. The incredibly gorgeous flowers from Audrey of Botanica Floral Designs never disappoint and it amazes me how much flowers can really pull everything together. Serving light snacks on cut logs alongside all the beautiful floral elements also creates such a natural, cozy feel. We designed coordinating labels for the home brewed beer from our good friend at Robert’s Homebrew Academy. We also brought along some of his homemade cheese (he teaches classes for that as well). We figured the table numbers would need a little bit of height so we decided to use a full size lp with names of their favorite bands.
The fabulous dessert table set up was designed by Rebecca and Hector of Sweet Cakes by Rebecca. The cake was absolutely beautiful! A great combination of rustic and elegant with a sugar flower on top that used the same paisley pattern as our paper elements – so cute! They not only invented s’mores kabobs just for this shoot, but the candy apples, popcorn balls, brownies, cotton candy, and churros tasted just as heavenly as they looked! And talk about creative – a nacho style dessert bar with cinnamon bunuelos and whipped cream, including tasty toppings like chocolate chips, cherries, chocolate and caramel sauces, and sprinkles.
We ended the day with a cute little tent scene for our happy couple and the lighting by this time couldn’t have been better! Using an A-frame my husband built and more quilts, we created this fun get-away spot for some gorgeous photos!
Huge shout-out to more great people involved in this project:
Marty from Dig Music for all the vinyl we could possibly want
Audrey from Fringe for the dress and so many extra little details for this shoot
Matt from Fibers.com for the awesome T-shirt favors that Rashell and I love to wear – you have to get one of their organic shirts, LOVE the look and feel!
Dominique Obrien for her hair and makeup magic
And of course, our wonderful models – Scott Freshour aka “Fresh” who emcees for the Sacramento Kings and the beautiful Mara Croesy
To be honest, neither Rashell or I are the super mushy, overly sentimental type, but when I started thinking about what my husband and I could do this year for our 5 year wedding anniversary, Rashell and I realized that it was around this time 5 years ago that we had met! We’ve reminisced about all the things that have led us to this point and knew we had to do some kind of blog post about it all. It’s been quite an adventure, to say the least, for both of us individually as well as these last few years in business together.
Our very first post on this blog starts with “had Jessica had not wandered into Rashell’s store…” And we’ve somewhat come full circle, since I was shopping at the scrapbook store for paper products to use for my own wedding. And now here we are, combining both of our talents and love of paper and design for other brides looking for that same unique, creative touch.
I don’t want to babble on and on and make anyone gag, but we owe such a huge thanks to our terrific customers who not only keep us in business, but continue to allow us to challenge ourselves creatively. And to the amazing, wonderful, inspiring friends we’ve made within this industry – we’d be lost without you! We sheepishly admired these Superstars of the industry when we first started out and now we feel so fortunate to call them friends :)
So cheers to many more creative and prosperous years! And now for a nice good laugh, some of the little projects made when Rashell and I first began in our quaint little scrapbook store. Did I mention we’ve come a long way creatively-speaking? ;)
It’s nearly June and when it comes to weddings, we all know this time of year is pure craziness!! About now begins the weekends full of beautiful couples saying their “I Do’s”, other beautiful couples getting last minute details worked out, vendors working their awesome little tooshies off, far away tropical resorts preparing for the cute honeymooners {insert jealous sigh here}, and kids out of school driving most of us crazy.
This is the time of the year that we tend to get too busy to stop and smell the roses. But Rashell and I have a couple quick things that we’re super thankful for right now that we just have to share.
First off — drumroll please……….Invitations Ink was announced as this year’s Winner for Best Invitations on the KCRA 3 A-List. I cannot even tell you how excited we were to see the amount of support we had for this contest! We took 2nd place last year, so coming in 1st this year was a great feeling! Thank you to everyone who took the time to vote, we feel incredibly honored :)
Our next “Feeling the Love” moment really took us by surprise and literally made us giddy with excitement. Recent customers and Rashell’s good friends posted on the Brides Magazine Facebook page about the wedding invitations we’d created for them. The following week, we saw this article on Brides.com
Yep, you guessed it – Brides.com mentioned the super cool wedding invitations we designed for Lyndsey and Michael! Talk about exciting! And, having our name under this gorgeous picture of Kate Hudson is a huge bonus! We adore her!
Wedding season is starting off great here at Invitations Ink, and we hope your summer is going just as well!
Thanks again to everyone for all the love and support!
Oh, and be sure to scroll down a tad to check out that super cool, awesome invitation that “everyone” is talking about, hehehe ;)
This blog post is waaaaay overdue! Hostess with the Mostess recently featured this photoshoot, which made me realize that I had never even posted it on our own site! Geesh! What a slacker, right!? ;)
We had an amazing year last year – filled with so many new friends and opportunities. One of those new friends we met with was Jackie of Jacqueline Photography who is such a sweetheart! It started like most of our relationships – we stalked her :) Between Twitter and Facebook, we felt like we already knew Jackie even without having met her in real life. With so many friends in common, it’s easy to know someone without actually knowing them. You see their conversations with others, you read their blog and see their work, you share in their excitement when they announce the news that they are expecting a little boy!! Even better is when you are asked to do the invitations for their new bundle of joy! One of our mutual Twitter, Facebook, and real life friends, Aimee (2Chic Events & Design) was planning Jackie’s Baby Shower and came to us to handle the stationery. We were slightly excited (LOL – OK, our minds were exploding with ideas, whatever).
We love the creative freedom that Aimee lets us run with when we collaborate with her. She gave us our guidelines and here was the final design we settled on for the invitation:
Once the invitations were sent out, we set to work thinking of other aspects we could add in. We knew Aimee would need signs for the food table, lots of paper stars to hang throughout the house, and her super cute Mad Libs she created just for the party!
We eventually put together an entire Bingo Game set (we’d been dying to see this idea in action), some cute little napkin rings, Thank You bags for the dessert station, and these amazing wooden letters that we cut out on a scroll saw, hand-painted, then hand-glittered to match the font used in the original invitation. Check out all the details:
Joe from SJ’s Disc Jockey also provided additional fun that day with his popular photo booth. If you’re even thinking about having a photo booth at your event – you totally should! And give Joe a call, he’s seriously awesome! For Jackie’s take on her shower, visit her blog to see what she had to say. She had some gorgeous contributions from two of our favorites in the wedding industry, Audrey from Botanica Floral Designs and Rebecca from Sweet Cakes by Rebecca, so check it out!
First pic of Jackie’s invitations up at the top there is courtesy of Nick at Wilson Fotografie.
I think by now it’s a huge understatement to say that everyone knows someone affected by Breast Cancer. The Susan G. Komen Foundation recently launched their 69 Seconds campaign, driving home the devastating fact that every 69 seconds a woman dies of breast cancer somewhere in the world. 69 seconds….simply heartbreaking and unacceptable.
For our Friday Freebie this month, we wanted to focus on finding a way to help those who are trying to raise awareness and support their efforts to help find a cure for Breast Cancer. With bake sales being a popular fundraising method, we decided to create some cute little freebies to help beautify all those baked goodies. So part one of this release is the set of tags – use them for ribbon tags, cupcake toppers, decorative garland or print them out on sticker paper to seal up those goodie bags.
{filelink=15}Breast Cancer Awareness Tags
If you know of any bake sales or fundraising events going on, let us know so we can give them a big shout out! :)
Big thanks to Tiffany of Tiffany Grace Photography for the great photos!
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I’m gonna seriously vote Tina the best sister ever! The details she had planned for her sister’s baby shower were absolutely adorable. We totally wish we could have been there to see how it all turned out! For Tina’s design, we needed to find something unisex and bee related, so we came across the cutest little bumble bee ever on istock.com. After printing the graphic, we used a scallop punch, added some glitter, and adhered with pop dots over some super cute polka dot ribbon. In my completely unbiased opinion {snicker}, these are the cutest darn bumble bee invitations I’ve ever seen ;)
We also created little tags of the baby bumble bee to be attached to itty bitty jars of honey Tina had planned for the party favors. I simply couldn’t resist adding little touches of glitter to the cutesy little bumble bee wings for those as well.
Can’t wait to find another excuse to use this little guy! Anyone having a baby soon ;)
Big Thanks to Nick from Wilson Fotografie for the great image of this little guy!
So if you’ve been to a Sacramento Kings game lately, chances are you’ve seen our customer and friend–Scott aka “Fresh”. He’s the in-arena host for the Kings who can be spotted running around during timeouts and half time entertaining us alongside Slamson. Still not sure who Fresh might be?–check out his Slam Wow and Tyreke Evans parodies.
Now that you have a better idea of Fresh’s crazy awesome personality, you’ll see why we couldn’t go with ordinary invitations. After meeting with his beautiful bride-to-be Yolanda, we decided to mirror their invitations after our {oh so popular} Eat Drink and Be Married invitations. Of course we couldn’t use the same wording, so we had to come up with something really clever and FUN! After much thought and some really bad singing in the car, we worked in the lyrics from Celebration by Kool and the Gang. The front flap was inspired by their Mexican food reception and their names–“Yo and Fresh”.
We really enjoyed creating these invitations for this amazingly fun couple and the cutest, most unexpected thing happened when I delivered these invitations to Fresh. All he could say was “I can’t stop staring at them!” <— We never get tired of hearing this, but we’re just not used to hearing it from the groom!!
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!!!