Halloween Party Supplies

The catalogs with Halloween goodies have started arriving at my door and I'm ready for the season. There are just so many great ideas out there for Halloween decorating that I don't know where to start (well, actually I started making elixir and potion labels this weekend - email me if you'd like a jpg to create your own "potion cabinet")

This Halloween invite is perfect for a middle of the road Halloween party - not too cutesy and not too spooky. But you could go either way with it if you wanted to. So I pulled out a few of my favorite items from the catalogs to go with the invite.

Enjoy!


For those of you who are considering a Halloween party this year, I say "GO FOR IT!" Halloween is on a Friday night and what better time to have a ghostly time. Today, I have created an inspiration board with lots of links to make your home spooktacular.

Row 1: a. Send an invitation with silhouettes of scary pumpkins and a tree on the left side of the card. A faded orange damask design adorns the orange background.
b. Wrap your bottles with medical gauze and label them. This great idea is courtesy of www.marthastewart.com
c. Carve up a ghoulish table setting - also from www.marthastewart.com

Row 2: a. This entire tableau is available for purchase from Grandin Road.
b. These stylish owls will grace your table. Available at Ballard Designs.
c. Paint an old frame black and set up a photography spot in your home.

Row 3: a. Candy buffets are all the rage now and what better time to have one than the most popular candy day of the year - Halloween!
b. Love these! I'm thinking about picking up a few for my front yard. Or if I'm feeling really crafty, I may try to make some out of foam. These are available from Grandin Road.
c. Carve up some spooky and stylish pumpkins for the front door.
d. Use these goblets with a little dry ice for a spectacular display. Available at Grandin Road.

Row 4: a. One more great display from Grandin Road - don't you just love this guy. It makes me wish I had a window seat in my home!
b. This one is a great and inexpensive one - drip som red candle wax on a white taper and voila - creepy candles! Thanks again to www.marthastewart.com
c. One more quick and easy trick from Martha Stewart - luminaries with a haunting feel. This one says "I'd turn back if I were you." but you could always use another such as "I'll get you my little pretty."

Oh! I almost forgot! These invitations also come with a matching stamper and matching return address labels.

A Fall Party/Thanksgiving

This entry is dedicated to my mom, who does Thanksgiving dinner for 24 at her home every year and she decorates to the nines and she loves every minute of it. Last year, my husband violated all of my mom's decorating rules by choosing a plate from one table and then sitting down at another table (each table is decorated differently and the rule is that you keep your plate at the table it belongs to!) My cousins and I snickered all through the meal, waiting for Mom to notice. However, since my husband is my mom's favorite (read: only) son-in-law and he's the turkey cooker, she let it slide. If it had been me, I'd have been dead meat (Thanksgiving pun intended)! I appreciated his disregard for the rules since he changed seats to sit beside me!



If you are interested in either of these cards or would like to see the other cards we have for the fall season, click here.

Halloween Invitation with Coordinating Personalized Self-Inking Stamper

If you are looking for a coordinated look with your Halloween invitations and treats, take a look at our Batty Brackets invitation and Bat Self-Inking Stamper. The opportunities for using a Halloween stamp are only limited to your imagination. Here, I've shown using the stamp as a return address, to make tags for treat boxes and to create labels for candy bar wrappers. You could make tags for your child's treat bags to take to school or if you have a small number of trick or treaters, why not put candy in a cellophane bag and tie up with a cute and crafty punched tag. If you think of other ideas to stamp, post a comment and let me know.

If you are interested in this card or would like to see other options we have for Halloween, click here.

If you really like coordinating items, then you will love our soon-to-be-released holiday line. We are including coordinating envelope liners, matching/coordinating self-inking stampers and matching return address labels for most of our new items. (And don't let anyone give you grief for insisting that your file folders coordinate with your other office decor or that all your wrapping paper coordinate under the tree - I understand the compulsion and I salute you!)

Halloween Party for the Kids

Children's parties are always so much fun. My daughter is 12 (going on 25) and she is WAY too cool now to have what she calls a kiddie party and I call a whole bunch of cute! I always like items that worked on different levels like the witches hats on the right. Just buy individual frosting in orange, green and purple, buys some candy for decorations, make or buy some chocolate cookies and buy some chocolate ice cream cones and you have both a craft and a snack.

For older children (the ones you can trust with the scissors), you can buy lots of large black paper and they can make the bats and decorate your foyer.

And my daughter may be way too cool for a kiddie Halloween party but she's still all about bobbing for apples. I on the other hand, prefer my Halloween apples candied with the hard red coating.

If you are interested in this card or would like to see other options we have for Halloween, click here.

My Favorite Things - Fonts

Okay, I will admit it . . . I am crazy about typefaces. I have more than 10,000 and I add more all the time. For those of you who are having issues managing alot of fonts, look into Suitcase. This entry is about the typefaces that deserve to be in my personal Wall of Fame. Shown above are the all stars (for now - they change all the time). Reading from left to right, top to bottom are in no particular order:

1. Burgues . . . when you need to say it with a flourish. This typeface is just fabulously decadent and extravagant.
Alejandro Paul’s ode to 19th-century American calligrapher Louis Madarasz will sweep you away.

2. Stephanie Marie . . . A lively, brush-style script font, named after a dear friend of the designer. This one is a favorite of Susan's (boss/fearless art director). Created by Jukebox.

3. Bauer Bodoni . . . Based on designs by Giambattista Bodoni (Italy 1740-1813), an Italian punchcutter, typefounder and printer who led in the development of the letterform we call ‘modern or didone, in the last years of the eighteenth century. Jen, my office-mate turned me on to this one again. I love the clean lines and extremes of the thin and thick parts.

4. Helvetica Neue . . . If I had to pick just one, this would be it. My personal faves are 25 and 43. Typography just doesn't get any better than this. I don't know of any other font that has a documentary about it. You can download the whole film to your ipod - go to http://www.helveticafilm.com/ for more information.

5. Ministry Script . . . Alejandro Paul designed Ministry Script to be “A time capsule that marks both the American ad art of the 1920s, and the current new-millennium acrobatics of digital type.” The idea was to make as many possible variants of each letter as he could possibly handle. Ole Alejandro is my hero! I love fonts with alternate characters!

6. Feel Script . . . Current script favorite by Alejandro also. See my previous blog regarding Feel love.

7. Mrs. Eaves . . . Here's a little bit of typography trivia for today (as if this entire entry isn't) - This typeface is named after Sarah Eaves, the woman who became John Baskerville’s wife. As Baskerville was setting up his printing and type business, Mrs. Eaves moved in with him as a live-in housekeeper, eventually becoming his wife after the death of her first husband, Mr. Eaves. Like the widows of Caslon, Bodoni, and the daughters of Fournier, Sarah similarly completed the printing of the unfinished volumes that John Baskerville left upon his death.

8. Engravers Gothic . . . I know I use this one too much but it works so well on invitations. IMO, it MUST BE IN ALL CAPS and typeset rather small to maintain its' elegance.



As I typed the above, I thought of those left behind . . . Bickham Script, Futura (especially light), Fling, Trajan. I'm sure there are more that I haven't remembered but I can only spend so much time on type.



So, if you are still interested in looking at type after all this, here are some of my favorite sites:

http://typographica.org/
http://www.typophile.com/
http://tackorama.net/ - Free 50's, 60's and 70's fonts
http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ - What The Font is the best font identifier I've ever seen. Upload a sample and it will recognize it or send it to a forum of super font freaks (said with love) who generally can tell you what it is and where to find it.
http://www.dafont.com/ - This site will get you into trouble. Fonts are free and I usually walk away with at least half a dozen.
http://ilovetypography.com/ - play the font game if you dare!
http://www.typography.com/ Hoeffler & Frere Jones - beautiful typefaces
http://www.wordsarepictures.co.uk/ - beautiful typesetting artwork

There are more but I am tired. Let me know what your favorite fonts and sites are.

A Halloween Party for the Adults

Way back when (for me that was the late 80's), I shared a condo with two other single girls. We wanted to live in Fourth Ward (uptown Charlotte, NC - not downtown!) and when we saw the ad for a condo with views of the park we were sold sight unseen. Upon arriving at the condo, we loved it. It was large and open and great for entertaining (something we did alot of). The "park" however, turned out to be a cemetary with graves dating from the 1770's to the 1850's. When I think of an upscale adult Halloween party, I can envision our condo overlooking the graveyard as the perfect site!

For more information about this invitation or any of our other Halloween cards, click here.


This was our "view of the park." It wasn't a bad view even if it was a cemetary!

I'm Inspired!

So I was thrilled this week when Kati, over at The Finer Things and Rebecca at Tastefully Entertaining used one of my cards to create an inspiration board for a Halloween wedding. (Thanks so much for the mention!)

I was so inspired, I decided to try it myself. I went for a different card than they used just to mix it up a little bit. To see the entire Halloween collection, or to purchase, click here.

What fun it was to look for elegant Halloween wedding ideas. I totally love the dress (Ralph Lauren). It has an Eliza Doolitle feel to it but could totally be used as a wedding dress.

I enjoyed doing the inspiration board so much, I have decided to try it with some of my other invitations.

Hope you like it!

Holiday Part 4

So this is where the vintage sign series all started . . . Last year, when I had just begun designing stationery (literally, I was on the job for less than a month), we were about to wrap up the holiday offerings and my art director/boss/owner of the company asked for a couple of invitations that looked like vintage Vegas. We designed the top two and finished out our Holiday Release for 2007. They were digital invitations (which can have white text as well as many different colors of text on the same invitation) and they sold so well that we released a traditionally printed option that we can sell blank to stationery stores so that they can print them on site (the bottom two invites). We have also released an everyday version of each of these as well as other party invitations (see all Vintage Sign Series blog entries). We will be working on more for our January release so if you have an idea of a sign you would like to see, let me know!

Color

Well, Pantone came out with their fashion colors for the fall and I thought I would share both the fall colors and the spring colors.

I check for these color forecasts habitually and they always make me think of the diatribe that Miranda Priestly goes on about Andy's blue sweater in "The Devil Wears Prada" . . .

You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

People tend to think that colors just "become" popular, but what most don't know is that there is an entire industry devoted to forecasting what colors are the next big thing. I'm especially liking the blues and greens for 2008. I have been in a "green" phase for a while now, especially what I like to call "bright olive" and I have included a silk blouse in this color. My kitchen is very close to this, maybe a little bit darker and people often say, "Wow, what a great color. I would never have thought to paint such a bold color." Or, depending on their personality, they may say, "I love this color but I could never live with it." I just know that it makes me happy every time I go in my kitchen, even if it didn't make the Pantone list.

And fashion designers would agree . . . good design is about following the rules while great design is knowing when to break them.

If you would like to see or download the entire 33 page pdf from Pantone, click here.