Happy Anniversary, Sebastien! (a haiku)

leaves grow, change, fall, grow

just as we go through the same.

many more to come.

This Weekend: Invitation Design!

This weekend, I have to admit that I was at work a bit finishing up with some graphics for a report, but I was also working on a really fun project too.

I designed the invitations to my friend Leanne's engagement party. She and her fiance are having their wedding at a resort, and they don't get the fun of sending out their own wedding invitations (it was fun for me, at least!), so they wanted to create something special for their engagement party. She asked me to do it a while ago, and I have been working on it in bits and spurts.


It was quite a fun design challenge for me, because Severine (Leanne's fiance) wants to incorporate paisley into their wedding design, and Leanne is using different feathers for the event. I decided to combine the two, and came up with this motif for them. This is the pattern that is used sparingly on the front of the invitation, and also on the backside, to reinforce the theme. I think they eventually want to get label stickers with this pattern on them too! I am so happy they like my design. It was great to see Leanne so excited about it!

I will post the final results (the front of the card) soon - it is missing their picture right now.

Whew!

I am a lady with many missions these days. I have many (fun and exciting) things on the burner; things that will be spoken of soon enough.


I am working on a tablecloth for Tamara, some wedding shower invitations for my friend Leanne, adding some things onto an apron I got as a birthday gift, and I still need to send out those little monsters (sorry Chris and Chip - they are coming!!!). Things are also pretty busy at work, and I just got home from softball practice, and.... and.... Well, like I said, there are many more things on the burner.

Take care. I hope you have a wonderful week.

New and Improving

I haven't kept up my personal blog at all for almost exactly a year. Sebastien and I were so busy with our wedding, and then I was preoccupied studying with my LEED exam (and then many other excuses!) that I totally let it go.

I was, however, blogging about our wedding planning process in much of the interim. I have been thinking it would be good to get started on blogging again, without neglecting this whole last year. I found out that you can export blogs from one account into another, so you may notice there is a lot of newly added stuff on my blog, regarding the build-up to our wedding. If you want to see our wedding blog in its original context (different fonts and backgrounds, etc.), you can find it here: www.telfordrake.blogspot.com.

We are (almost) finished with our wedding Thank You cards, and we have both really gotten a great start on 2010, in terms of personal goals! I hope I can share those with you all a little better, through my new and improved blog! Please comment on anything you find interesting - I love to hear from you!

Finally Photos for Mr. & Mrs. Telford-Rake!

I am SO excited!

I only say "finally" because I have been so anxious to see the photos from our wedding. It is just over a month since we got married (four days over a month, in fact), and I have barely seen any pictures.

The photographers' set is ready and online! You can find them here. The password is " hopesebas .

I cannot tell you how happy we were with our photographers. They were thoughtful and kind, knowledgeable, and they are really wonderful artists, to boot! If you are looking for a great photographer in Portland, I would definitely recommend Drew and Jai, of His and Her Photography.

I hope I get to work with them again!

I apologize about the quality of pictures on this post. We do not have any high-resolution images yet, so these are the large thumbnails, from the site. They look great at this size, but check out the site for some nice lush photos!

Crane Chandelier Project

What is the MOST exciting thing about this is that we made these cranes for ourselves, but they are going to be charitably re-purposed after our wedding. We got an email from a good friend (who is coincidentally getting married two days after we do). She knew that we were in the midst of crane-making, and stumbled upon a blog that mentioned the "Crane Chandelier Project," which is the work of a Toronto artist. The project is to collect 10,000 total cranes, from brides and grooms. The bride and groom sign the crane with their names and the date they are getting (or did get) married. For every crane that is given for the project, 50¢ is going to be donated toward cancer research. Sebastien wrote to the organization hosting the event (The Wedding Co.), and said, "Hey - I know that you are trying to get cranes, and that you usually get them one at a time - would you be willing to still donate 50¢ per crane, if we donate 800 of them?" (or some thing like that).
They said YES!, and so we are psyched! That is $400 (at least!) that we will be able to donate. I am so happy we can do this.

That's a Lot of Birds!!

I told you a couple of weeks ago that we had finished with our cranes. Last Wednesday (Canada Day), we had off from work, and we mainly stayed around the house getting things done. We wanted to begin to string the cranes, for decoration, and needed to make some sense of them, so I decided to dump all the colored cranes on our flat file, in the middle of the living room (most of them are there still....) Keep in mind that the flat file is approximately 3'x5' large.
Anyway, I emptied the multi-colored cranes from a box onto the table, and was in awe that they only make up a third of the number of paper cranes we made (it was interesting that without any planning, we had roughly equal numbers of multi-colored, large silver, and small silver cranes). I decided to pull the red ones aside, to use with some of the silver that we want to string. When I did that I thought, "I wonder how many orange cranes we have?," and so on with green and light blue, etc....

Soon enough, the table was covered in little piles of color, and it didn't take any time at all to give them a ROYGBIV-type organization. Once we said "How cool!" enough times, I realized that the center of the table was a perfect place for all the silver cranes as well (the top picture is only half of the silver ones!). You can see the results. We were pretty excited that the pictures turned out so well too.

One Month and Counting!

We are quickly approaching July!! Our to-do list is getting longer and longer, even as we cross more and more things off.
Sebastien and I have been busy the last few nights, learning how to make neckties. We are sewing his silk tie, as wall at the one for his Best Man. They are looking good so far! This photo shows our living room, in the midst of project-time, and my "sewing table" (a.k.a. a plywood board balanced on a sawhorse). As you can imagine, our 760sf apartment gets pretty full, fairly quickly. You can see one of the silk ties on the table (we haven't started the other one yet), as well as our practice tie, made of cheap muslin. This photo is me, with the practice tie that we made this past week. It turned out surprisingly well, so I am excited to see how nice the silk looks!!

We've Finished....

Making cranes! We re-counted them tonight, and we have one thousand and one (1001) paper cranes!



2/3 of them are silver, and the rest are colored or patterned. They are all unique. I am excited that we finished with so much time to spare! Now all we have to do is sew them all together! We'll see how that goes....

More Fun Patterns!

What You'll Get in the Mail

We are very excited this week. We got so many things done over this past weekend, and we are headed to Portland to tie up a few loose ends that need tying. Things are really coming together! It is so much fun (and so much work!) to plan such a big party for so many people! I am so excited to see everyone, and really happy that so many people are headed out to share such a special time with us!

When we get back, we are start our invitations. We ordered a stamp from a rubber-stamp producer, and I really like the effect of it. We are designing all the stationary to be really simple and clean. We also wanted the stamps to have a bit of the Jazz Age in them, so hopefully the fonts and the motifs pull it all together! So far so good!

I'll take some pictures of the assembly line, when it happens, and you can see all of us hard at work!

Some Jazzy Ideas

I think I am going to post some of the great Jazz Age stuff I am finding to my blog, because I love it so much! I hope these can give you some good ideas!
The clothes were so sophisticated and simple, and the ladies looked so elegant, so self-assured.

I love the hats and the dresses....

I love that everyone looked as though they were going places!

Three Hundred Fifty More to GO!

I have been having a great time getting ready for our wedding in July. I won't lie: my life is much more hectic than I would like lately, and I feel as though I am forgetting things I need to do....
Everything will get done, I guess, and what doesn't get done isn't that important. As I keep telling myself, as long as we are married by the end of the day, things will have gone perfectly.

We have oodles of cranes right now. 650-something, in fact. I am going to make more tonight. We sorted them last weekend, according to size and color, and at that point we had 632. They don't look quite as happy separated into plastic bags as they did all together in one big box, but they have all been accounted for.