A Wild West Birthday

Our kids were born exactly two years and one week apart so it is only natural that we'll be throwing a joint birthday party for them. At least until they have their own sets of friends to invite. For months, Adrian had been requesting a Mickey Mouse birthday party. I had pinned countless amounts of ideas for decor, food and had even started designing the invitation. It seemed perfect because Celeste loves her Minnie Mouse doll more than any other toy.

But then came Sheriff Callie...

If you have not seen Sheriff Callie's Wild West, it's a Disney Junior show about a kitty cat who is the sheriff of a Wild West town, voiced by Mandy Moore (of "Candy" fame). She has Deputy Peck, a woodpecker, and Toby, a talking cactus, as her sidekicks. Her horse is named Sparky and has blue sparkly hair and her lasso is magic and can do pretty much anything.

Adrian quotes this show almost constantly. He has, on more than one occasion, told me that "I'm the best horsey in the whole, wide world." So touching! He also will follow me places and say "I'm coming too on account that I'm the Deputy!" Those are some pretty big words that sound mighty cute when coming from an almost-three year old. Unless he's following you to the bathroom the kitchen where you were planning to sneak-eat a cookie. He also sings songs from the show and seems to always be claiming that we have "train bandits, pssh!"

Now, Adrian wants a Sheriff Callie birthday party. I didn't put up much of a protest when he changed his mind because having a Wild West-themed party seems like a blast to me! I've been working on the invitations for a little while and they finally went out in the mail today!

I don't normally do things with character images, so this was a new challenge. Trying to find balance between the characters and the birthday information (ahem, my precious kids'names!) was difficult. The majority of Sheriff Callie's images are heavy in pink, which I love. But I didn't want the invitation to feel too pink. I needed to find a balance of pink, neutrals and another complementary color. Thankfully, Sparky the horse is all blue and I was able to pull his fur color into the invitation. I also created flag banners in Illustrator using "western-looking" fabrics*. The banner tied the colors nicely together without hitting you over the head with either pink or blue.

Adrian loves his invitation! He was so excited when they came in from the photo store. He took them all out and spread them out on the couch so he could see them. Then, he watched another Callie episode.

After the party, I'll recap with photos and with files for other designs I'm making for that day.

*I've never been to the West, unless you count Las Vegas. so any knowledge I have about things that look, or sound, western is mostly from watching TV...mainly Sheriff Callie. 

Link to Etsy. 

A Monsterous Good Time!

It's been quite a week! Busy, stressful and tiring. And now, the added bonus of bracing for another snow storm over the weekend. It's going to be hilarious to do our weekly grocery shopping this weekend, with both kids in tow, while people are scrambling to buy a year's supply of toilet paper.

So to brighten my mood, I turn to one of my favorite birthday party invitations! I made this for my friend D's little boy's first birthday party. I actually custom illustrated the monsters on Adobe Illustrator using the colors she had chosen for the party decor. I then layered a chevron pattern (before it was super trendy) in the background. I used some fun "monster-y" fonts and a graphic polygon set on a diagonal to give some added interest (and messiness).

This invite has proven to be somewhat popular on Pinterest lately. I can see why! It really is one of my favorite projects. Even more because it was made for such a sweet friend.

Link to Etsy.

A Pair of Pretty Prints

Back in 2012, my dear friend Molly was expecting her first baby, a little girl named Hattie. Of all the gifts I could give her, I decided to make her a sweet print to hang in the nursery. Molly had chosen the Pottery Barn Brooke bedding and this butterfly mobile (in blue) for her little bug's room, which I used as inspiration.

As usual, I ran to Google and searched for fun quotes or sayings involving ladybugs, honeybees and butterflies. For some reason, I wanted to go with the bugs instead of the birds in the bedding. Possibly because, at the time, birds were overplayed in nurseries. Or maybe because I was still fresh off my job at a bird zoo.

I found two quotes that I loved and couldn't decide between the two, so I decided to make a pair of coordinating prints.

"She is honey and the bees don't know it."

and

"Butterfly kisses and ladybug hugs."

Using patterns from the Brooke bedding, combined with butterflies, bees, ladybug polka-dots and other trendy patterns, I designed two pretty prints for the sweet little Hattie.

For a while, I debated about the "honey" print, thinking that maybe it was too sassy for a little baby. But having met Hattie, and seeing her grow up, she truly truly fits that quote to a "t."

Link to Etsy. 

Valentine's Day Results

I promised to share a photo of how our valentines turned out. Here are Adrian's car valentines:

Here are Celeste's monkey valentines:

Adrian loved giving his out to his friends at school! Celeste is too  little to know the difference, but I sure enjoyed making these for her friends. 

Happy Valentine's Day!

This will be my ninth Valentine's Day with my husband. We had been only dating a week (and a day) when we celebrated our first Valentine's Day together. He got me a single red rose as we walked to the local college bar for a non-date, with his best friend Duncan tagging along. I reluctantly shared with him some Valentine's Day chocolate I had grabbed from a bowl on my way out to meet him. It was not romantic, but it was a perfect reflection of us.

I don't normally get sappy, but I did make him something for this Valentine's Day. It's an 8x10" print that captures our most important dates: first date, engagement, wedding, buying our home, Adrian's birth and Celeste's birth. I hope to hang it in our art-less bedroom.

True to my style, I wanted to keep it simple. There are a lot of different ways to do this type of print, but a few things were important to me:

I did not want to label each date. This print was for my husband, for us. Not to hang somewhere for everyone to see, so I felt that labeling the dates was unnecessary. We knew what the dates meant and not having them labeled made it more personal and intimate.

I wanted to use the font from our wedding invitations to designate our wedding date.

I wanted to keep it mostly black and white, with one pop of romantic red.

I started with my trusty chalkboard background. The same one I used in the header for our website. Then I layed out all the dates in different, but complementary fonts in all white. I used our wedding font for our wedding date and changed the periods to hearts. Then I used Pantone's Red 032 for the color.

After playing around with the shades for the other dates, I settled on a slight gradient of white and gray, with white at the top and bottom, lightest gray (black @ 20%) on the next set of dates and a slightly deeper gray (black @ 35%) on the date right under the red.

Eddie, hope you like it! Happy Valentine's Day!

My Little Ballerina

My little girl is almost ten months old. It has gone way too fast for me! Pretty soon, I'll be planning her birthday party and accepting the fact that she won't be a baby anymore. She'll be a toddler. So for today, let me reminisce a bit.

When I was pregnant with Celeste and we found out that she was a girl, there was no doubt in my mind how I would decorate her room. She was going to have a ballerina room. I was a ballet dancer from five to sixteen years old, even dancing professionally at the local ballet company in my hometown. An injury that still nags me to this day caused me to give up dancing, but I still hold ballet very dear to my heart. So many of my childhood memories revolve around dancing!

When decorating Cece's nursery, I chose a color for the walls that coincidentally matched my old pointe shoes. I made her crib a tutu skirt and I bought these prints from Etsy. I also made my own version of this lamp and hung a small crystal chandelier in her room. I was looking to make more art for her room when I found this fantastic quote from Gene Kelly:

"You dance love,

You dance joy,

You dance dreams."

I knew I had to make a print of it for Cece's room. I wanted something simple. I started playing around with color, starting with a swatch that was 2-3 shades darker than her walls. Then I layered thick bands of the same color, making it slightly darker for each band.

To lay out the text for the quote, I did one of my favorite font combinations: handwritten with fancy script. I wanted the words "love, joy and dreams" to stand out, so I centered them and made them larger than the rest of the text.

I printed this onto 16x20 matte photo paper and framed it in a simple white frame. I hope it'll hang in her room for a long time!

Link to Etsy.

Adrian's Car Valentines Preview - FREE Printable Download!

Our son loves cars. Car was the second word he ever said. The first was dog. Mommy was about the 20th, much to my chagrin. Anyway, I decided that he could give out cars valentines this year.

I wanted to avoid giving out candy to his class, again. Every holiday we seem to come home with a bag full of candy from school and, given that we just finished the Halloween candy last week, I really did not want to contribute to the candy loot this year.

I was lucky that our local dollar store was selling sets of five cars for $1 and $3 later I had enough for his whole class (including one for him). Now I needed to figure out how to put them together or package them. I scoured Google and Pinterest and, let me tell you, there are so many ideas for car valentines! From cars placed in baggies, to glued cars to washi-taped cars (my favorite).

I was attracted to ones that featured tire tracks instead of a road, but the Pinterest ones mostly had you paint the tire tracks on. I knew that there had to be a free Photoshop or Illustrator brush for tire tracks out there! Took me about two seconds to find it (source). Here's what I came up with:

I used another one of my favorite fonts, a simple color scheme with his favorite color and I opted for tire tracks that were more squiggly than straight, more reminiscent of how my kid would "drive" his car. 

I left out my son's name from this version so you can download and customize it for free, if you'd like to. Honestly, as much as I'd love to charge for this download, there are so many other cute free ones out there that I'd feel like I was cheating you!

Now all I have to do is washi tape the dollar store cars to the tracks and hope Adrian doesn't want to keep them all for himself. I promise to show you the finished product soon!

A Flashback - Zoo Birthday Party

Let's go back in time to spring 2013. I was nine months pregnant and my son was turning two. Having no local family, we know that there isn't really an option for a "family-only" party unless that involves just us at home. We knew we had to invite friends if we wanted to have any kind of celebration. We also knew that I was super pregnant and not in any mood or capacity to clean the house and host 15 adults and their children for an afternoon.

We considered that this was going to be our son's last party without his baby sister, so we splurged. We booked a party at the local zoo. And let me tell you, it was worth every darn penny! I did not worry about food, menus, activities, cake, favors, decorations or anything else. The only thing I had to do was invite our friends!

Enter, the Two at the Zoo invitation! I thought the word play was cute and I had just found this polka-dotted font that was reminiscent of both a kid drawing and some animal print, so I started by focusing on the text treatment. The border of the invitation got a green tiger print, the letters in "two" got zebra, leopard and giraffe prints. Then, I combined my new favorite polka dot font with one of my favorite casual fonts and a kid-look handwritten font to jazz it up.

The hardest part was picking the animals and arranging them on the invitation. If I were doing this now, I'd probably use some of the animal illustrations my hubby did (we'll blog them soon), but I didn't have them at the time. I couldn't find any illustrations I liked, so I went with photographs. Finding them was difficult, while trying to not pick images that were copyrighted or restricted. I resorted to some old tricks I picked up from working at a zoo years ago and found enough animal photos to fill out the frame. There was a lot of editing and scaling of the animals, but I was thrilled with the final result!

I printed these through Target Photo as 5x7" photos and mailed them to our friends. The party was a total blast!

Link to purchase on Etsy. 

Bananas For You!

It's the week of Valentine's Day and, in an effort to be crafty and creative, I decided to design my kids' Valentine's Day cards on my own. Celeste will be giving out infant banana cookies to her classmates, so I wanted to incorporate a monkey into her design. I googled around for Monkey phrases that were appropriate for Valentine's Day and settled on "I'm Bananas for You!"

I also wanted to keep it girly without going for the pink and red, so I chose a yellow gingham pattern and a teal polka dot pattern. Then I played around with a few fonts until I liked the result. I'm a font addict and seem to hoard all kinds of unique fonts, so any chance I get to use them is a win for me. The monkey was edited from a free printable I downloaded on Google only because my hubby didn't get a chance to do a custom monkey this time around. (We do have elephants, birds, dogs, cats, fish and a few other custom animal illustrations.)

Here's the result for Celeste's Valentine's Day printable:

I set it up to print four-up on an 8.5 x 11" piece of card stock, then cut them with a paper cutter. Hopefully next week, I'll have pictures of what they looked like all put together with the banana cookies and ribbon. 

Next up: Adrian's Car Valentines. 

Link to purchase on Etsy. 

Welcome! Nice to Meet You!

Welcome to our website! We hope to give some insight into what goes on behind the scenes as we put together some designs for our Etsy shop, for our own use or for friends and family. Now, bear with us, because we are just getting started on this!