It amazes me when I come back to this blog and realize that it's been almost a year since I've posted anything. I am going to try to put stuff up more often.

We have been working on Halloween invitations lately and have just released them to the internet vendors. Here are a couple of samples.

My co-designer, Laura, painted the elegantly spooky one based on her view of the catacombs of Paris. It's one of my new favs!

I've also gone "girly" with our invitations. I have been working on all kinds of girls - graduation, holiday and Halloween. Each of our "girl" invites is available as a blonde, brunette, redhead or African-American. Some of them are also offered with an Asian option.

Each of our Halloween invitations also has a coordinating response card and 2.5 inch square label. Hope you enjoy!

Independence Day in my family means heading to the mountains of North Carolina for a family get together at my Aunt 'Nette and Uncle Davy's home. They have a home on a golf course and we all drag chairs out onto the tee box and watch the fireworks that night. This photo is one of my favorite family photos. My grandmother (in the center with the light blue shirt) and my father (on the right with a red shirt) both recently passed away so this photo is especially dear to me even if I no longer look anything like I do in this photo (I'm the one on the front row with the short brown hair).

Thanks to our vendors!

Want to win a free custom stamper? Just go to Invitation Consultants Blog and follow the simple and quick directions and you might win one for yourself.

Looking for savings on your holiday invitations? I received this email yesterday from Fine Stationery with LOTS of our cards represented! (Top left corner - "Welcome to Vegas"; Directly under that one - "Holiday Glow"; Bottom right corner - "Holiday Loops"; Directly above that one - "Blue Menorrah")

If you love stationery, look on your favorite sites for email updates. Most sites send out email periodically letting you know what's on sale or what's really hot.

And speaking of really hot - if you are looking for Halloween invitations, look no further than Invitation Box. They have all of the hottest Halloween cards (ours, of course!) with matching stampers and return address labels. And don't forget, the return address labels can be used for treat bags for the kids or for your friends and co-workers.

Thanks to all of our vendors who work so hard at getting our products out there in the world. We really appreciate all your hard work!

And if you have been wondering why I haven't blogged much lateley, it's because I have been working so hard at getting our products out there into the world for the holiday season!

Happy weekend everyone.

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!)

Just a quickie post to give a shout out to Invitation Consultants for their recent blog entry promoting the oh-so-hip MP3 invitation. On a personal note, my daughter requested these invites for her upcoming birthday party.

To see the entire article, click here.

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!

Holiday Part 3

Having a holiday party and want a fun invitation that's not fussy at all? We have continued our vintage sign series of invitations to include holiday. From a champagne celebration to a tropical holiday party, the vintage signs are a whimsical way announce a less formal party.

More to come . . .

Holiday Part 2

So here are some more of the Halloween/Thanksgiving invites that we are presenting this year. I really enjoyed working on Halloween designs. The colors are vibrant and fun and I've always been fond of orange. Hope you like them!

Holiday Part 1

Okay, so I've been working like a maniac for months now and ignoring my blog. And today is no different than the last 100 work days . . . there is production work to do, design work to do and administrative work to do. But I am going to take the time to blog because there is always other stuff to do and it will always be there waiting for me.

So today I am going to start showing off the new Holiday designs. In the interest of full disclosure, some of these designs were done by my co-worker, Jen. We really work as a team and you probably won't be able to tell which ones are hers and which ones are mine. And sometimes, we both worked on a card at different times.

I will begin the Holiday display with Halloween invites. We've never really done Halloween before so I am interested to see how this goes. Halloween is on a Friday night this year which translates to two things . . . the obvious is that there will be more Halloween parties (start planning yours now!) and the other is that there will be rehearsal dinners taking place on Halloween. In honor of that, I tried to design some invites that were elegant and yet Halloween-ish at the same time. Let me know what you think!

Return Address Labels

Well, lately I've been working on the cutest thing . . . circular return address labels to match the designs that we released back in January. They look so nice on the back of the envelope. Around the office, we are thinking about using the invitations as note cards with just our name as the personalization just so we can use the return address labels. Sorry, these aren't for sale yet. They will probably be released in a month or so. You just get the sneak peek today!

. . . or maybe not . . . . I can't seem to get the images uploaded for some technical reason. I will try to get them uploaded as soon as I can. Gotta go design for now!

Sugar & Spice or Snips & Snails

Here are two more of the baby digital photocards that were just released recently. I must confess that I do have favorites of the cards that I have designed. They don't come along often for me, but I just love the snips and snails one. I especially like the "waggly" tail of the dog. And here's the thing that pushed me from happiness at a job well done to all-time favorite - the pattern around the edge. . . it's houndstooth. Corny, I know, but it makes me smile when I think about my little goofy design joke on this card.

Why is that boys get to be a tail of a dog, while girls are everything nice? It just makes me glad to be female!

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.

Classic Design continued

Here are a couple of baby designs that I did just recently using a damask pattern and they have Engravers Gothic also.

Which just leads me to this conclusion: The Sound of Music is still the best movie of all time (I must confess to being prejudiced by childhood memories and the fact that I am named after Julie Andrews).

Have a great weekend everyone!

Classic Design

Last night I was watching The Sound of Music with my daughter and I was struck by how much I still like the design used in this movie. The script font used in the credits looked very much like Ministry Script, that we have just added to our list of available typestyles for customized invitations and the other typefaces looked very much like Trajan and Engravers Gothic, both of which are all time favorite typefaces of mine. Then, when Maria pulled down the draperies and made outfits for all the kids, I was struck anew at how "current" the design of this movie is. Oversized damask has been quite trendy lately and Maria was just a little ahead of her time when she outfitted all the kids in matching lime green and white oversized damask outfits. I think I may have to go work on a Christmas design using this look!

Vintage Sign Series

Another big hit of the January release is the Vintage Sign Series. With a nod to Route 66 and fifties Vegas, Jen and I created a series of eight invitations that are both kitschy and whimsical. The Barbeque one makes me think of the pig from Piggly Wiggly grocery stores. Those of you from the southern eastern seaboard know what it's like to be "big on the pig." Susan, my esteemed boss and fearless art director pushed for all the little details that you might never notice but really bring out the design - the fringe on the Fiesta sign, the bride's bouquet in the Honeymoon Inn sign and the texture on the trunk of the palm tree. Hope you like them! PS - You can click on the image to see it larger.