Thursday, January 29, 2009
BLURB Book in the Making
I've been stuck about how to create our honeymoon photo album. I know I'm going to do it through Blurb, of course, (like our wedding album here) but I don't want it to look just like every other vacation book--at least not on the cover. Inside the book I want the pictures to be big and plentiful. Just like I like my women..uh, wait.
I think I've mentioned before that I would LOVE to do book design, and how do you get good samples of how great you would be if you don't make books? I'm taking this honeymoon book as a challenge and a chance to create a great sample of my design work potential.
So last night I googled "best book cover design" And I found this website, which isn't plentiful in posts, but had a plethora of good ideas. I was actually to the point of thinking: Okay, so I just need to create a frame of some sort around one of the photos from the book and put some type on there. But after looking at that website, I felt challenged.
So all of these photos are the pieces leftover from my scissors and xacto knife frenzy for the front cover. Here below is the rough draft. I didn't plan it this way, but the colors are actually my wedding colors!
Here are questions I'm asking myself about where to go next:
1) Should I go through and change the colors of the individual letters and objects like I planned originally or leave them?
2) Should I make it look more graphic, and less photographic? (As it is, I put these on the scanner bed without the top closed so I could get a nice shadow)
3) Does it look too childlike? If so how to tweak it?
4) What kind of design parameters does this set out for the inside of the book?
5) Do I need more elements or more negative space?
6) Is there anything I'm missing, and will it look dated in 5 years? (With everything with the wedding, I obsessed about looking dated--you know, like those 70's weddings we all laugh at. It's probably inevitable at some point, I suppose)
Feel free to weigh in!
Here is one of my inspirational images--I love that pinwheel, and all the colors, so that's why I'm torn about changing colors on the cover page.
(From this AT post)
Labels: design, weddingness
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Our Wedding Album
I found our wedding photographer on Flickr. (Notley Hawkins) I'm of the opinion that no matter what, you should have an excellent photographer for your wedding. Those truly are the images you will be remembering the day through for the rest of your life. Sure, I have little snapshots in my head, but for the most part, I was concentrating on the task at hand.
Having said that, I did not have room in the budget for a $2000 photographer, and quite frankly, I didn't even think that the $2k photographers were worth it--I was looking at much more expensive people.
So I made a deal with Notley that at the end of the day, I would pay him a flat (well deserved) fee, and he would simply give me the raw dvds. All 3500 photos without editing by him. I work in photoshop all day long, and am perfectly capable of doing that stuff.
I knew all along that I would make a Blurb book for the album. Blurb is SO AWESOME!!! I've evangelized about it to so many people, I can count at least a dozen books that I have talked people into making after showing them some of the books I've made. They have great usable templates for photos, photos and text, or just text.
I, however, do layout design for a living and couldn't be so simple as to use pre-made templates. So I designed a whole photoshop layout and design look, and plugged in each of the hundreds of photos myself, saved them out as full-page jpgs, and plopped them into the book. Here are a couple of the pages (you can click to make bigger)
This 80 page, 13 inch by 11 inch coffee table book cost $80. Are you freaking kidding me? That is the best value for a wedding album I've ever heard of!!
I SOOOO loved designing this book. I would love to be a book designer for a living. I have so many plans for other Blurb books--a family quilt encyclopedia, a family cookbook, a portfolio book for me, and the next one will probably be the honeymoon album. It's so affordable that I couldn't have had 4x6 prints made of all those photos for that price! I'm never messing with printed individual photos again. You can make a 7x7 70 page book with about 300 photos for less than $30. You just can't beat it. And the quality is amazing!
Here's the cover my Mom, a.k.a the Craft Fairy made for me. She took fusible heavy duty (1/8 inch thick) interfacing, ironed it to the wrong side of this fabric, and bound it. Reall, it's just 2 seams up the side, then machine stitched with bias tape binding. It's perfect!
Labels: weddingness
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
The Wedding Quilt FINISHED
It's finished! I started this quilt at the end of September and actually had it finished in time to wrap it and take it with me to Tennessee last weekend.
I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. I'm so darn picky about colors. If I could go back I would probably tweak them a little (Sorry, Jenn!) But since the otherwise awesome quilt store 2 blocks from my work doesn't carry solids, I was pretty much out of luck or up to dying my own.
(And as an aside: why are quilt store ladies so freakin' grouchy? I mean, really? It's not a place anyone HAS to go. It's a store for something fun. I brought 2 quilts in there to find backing for, and no one even wanted to see them. The owner did say something snarky about how my wedding quilt had a LOT of colors in it. And that clearly wasn't a plus in her book.)
I love the way you can see what's on the front through the "quilting". I'm not sure you can call it quilting since I used embroidery thread. I loved working on this quilt by hand. It sat on my lap through several Netflix movies.
Movies watched while quilting:
the entire first season of the HBO series Rome (very violent. Yuck)
Run, Fat Boy, Run
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Love in a Time of Cholera
Feast of Love
Baby Mama
Death at a Funeral
and many, many episodes of The Office and 30 Rock.
I resisted the urge to wash and dry this to make it look more "quilty" But perhaps Jenn will do that. I did wash all the fabric before I sewed it together since I was making it for someone else and I didn't want it to be screwed up or run when they washed it later.
I take some sort of sick pleasure from embroidering. I wonder why. And I wonder why I consider it to be a guilty treat. Maybe because I could do this so quickly on my machine, but instead insist on spending a couple hours doing it--even though I'm not that good at it. Or because I know it plays to my neurotic love of tiny tiny work. I also love doing really picky photo touch-ups in Photoshop, which is just weird.
I love how the signature looks--sort of beaded.
Labels: quilts, weddingness
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The Wedding of Jenn and Aaron
Cedarwood, Nashville, Tennessee. 6pm. Friday.
I'm not sure where you start with describing your dear friends' wedding. Just a few adjectives: Romantic. Loving. Candlelit. Warm. Affectionate. Artistic. Beautiful. Autumnal. Sweet. Perfect. So Jennifer and Aaron.
I didn't take many photos during the wedding because I didn't want to cause a distraction or bother the bride and groom. I figure they hired a photographer for a reason.
I took many befores and afters, though! I love this blurry shot of Jenn and her bridesmaids. She wore a mustard colored J.Crew cardigan on top of her dress--so pretty!
The flowers were gorgeous. I probably took 30 photos of them. The late afternoon sun was shining through some clouds, so the light was perfect!
Two words: Pumpkin cake. Oh. Yeah. Jenn made this cake topper all by her little self! Amazing, no? I spied a little scrap of some vintage fabric that I handed down to Jenn as I was moving. Excellent!
These were the favors. Delicious and very personal. They had a little Tennessee vs. Arizona theme going. Dinner was a fajita bar and pulled pork, and it was delicious!
Before the wedding I arranged and rearranged these bowls, some photos and napkins. I went back and Cedarwood's slightly witchy wedding coorinator arranged them differently. Not badly, just differently. So I re-re-arranged them, and she re-re-re-arranged them. She won.
Complete pics here.
Labels: weddingness
Friday, September 26, 2008
The Last Wedding post--probably
All the DIY projects: We saved a TON of money--probably thousands of dollars--by doing things our own little way.
Here's the rundown:
1) The "guest book" I silkscreen fabric squares for people to sign and will be made into a quilt in the future.
2) the paintings: I wanted large splashes of wedding colors on the walls, so I used a hair-dye bottle to "draw" abstract designs, then we all pitched into paint in between the lines.
3) The table numbers: Made by my awesome friend Carrie, (she finally has something I can link to!) she got hunks of a branch and carved her own set of numbers to make printed table numbers and she hand-lettered the place cards, too!
4) the Centerpieces: Tissue paper flowers made by me, my mom (mostly), and anyone else who would sit still for long enough. I bought a Martha Stewart kit, and then went freelance from there.
5) The quilt: I didn't even plan this, but I got it done in time, and it made a great focus point for the room--and it was just so...me.
6) The punch. I didn't really make it myself, but I really loved the idea. Check out how we used up the extra flowers!
7) The invitations--that was a mother of a project, let me tell you.
Really, the whole wedding seemed DIY because it was exactly how I pictured it, and I feel like I made all the right decisions--not to toot my own horn or anything. I just couldn't have been happier with the way it turned out!
I think I'm wedding blogged out, at least for the time. Next week we'll be moving on to honeymoon.
Labels: weddingness
Friday, September 19, 2008
Wedding Attire
Probably the most gut-wrenching part of having a wedding for me was the dress. In the beginning, there were lots of tears. I'll try to not go nutso on this aspect of things, but let me tell you--finding a dress for someone who is 6ft tall and built like a football layer with a killer rack (hehe)--is really difficult. So many of the styles these days are strapless, and while I think that's totally fine and beautiful for most people, I need some serious hardware to keep things up and at attention.
I think the first mistake I made was that the first place I went was a really upscale boutique in Green Hills in Nashville. The dresses were made for a 5'4 person, so when I put them on, no seam hit me where it was supposed to. The very sweet and apologetic sales girl told me that it would have to be custom made, and oh yeah, cost $5000. Hmmm. For a $10,000 budget, that just wasnt' going to work out. Insert much tears, talk of making the dress ourselves, and general drama.
Then I walked into this place in Nashville called Bridal Warehouse. And I walked out with my dress in my arms and without $600 in my wallet. I know lots of people find dresses for less, and on the sale rack, etc. etc., but after countless bridal stores, tales of 16 week "if you're lucky" wait lists to get your dress, I was thrilled. This was a dress that I had torn out of a magazine because I thought it would be flattering. I didn't even realize I had pulled the same dress off the rack when I tried it on, but immediately I felt at home in it and so closed the book on the dress drama. It's a Casablanca from 2006, by the way.
Kim and my mom made the veil, which was lovely, and definitely didn't cost $200 like the ones in the store. It is totally doable to make your own veil, and totally crazy that some people spend that kind of money. And I don't know about anyone else, but mine was trashed by the end of the night--torn, stained, you name it.
And now for the attendant's outfits. While I have seen plenty of examples of brown bridesmaids and black tuxes, for our outdoor wedding, I just didn't feel settled about that. Coupled with a less than stellar staff at Men's Warehouse, our trusty pal Chris Cannon (left in the above photo) took us to K&G menswear in Nashville (but they're all over the south) and we picked out lovely tan suits and green ties. Total cost for suit, tie and shirt? $125. And they got to keep them.
Jason's sister was a groomswoman, so she got a special wrap made by my mom to match the guy's ties.
The girls' outfits were just awesome. We went for the JCrew Ballerina in brown, paired with some cute pumps. I have a horrible hatred for bridesmaids dresses--you can spend $275 on a dress just to feel and look so terrible in it--and the seams weren't sewn to boot! The bridesmaid dress industry is really really shitty, pardon my french. They use totally crap materials, sew them badly in a way that is so not flattering and takes advantage of the poor helpless bridesmaid. Nothing says you're one of my closest friends like "Will you please stand up with us for our wedding and wear this hideous plastic death trap and pay $200 for it?" I know that's not anyone's intention at all, it just seems impossible to avoid, especially when you're inundated with wedding stuff.
I think if I had had more attendants, they might have worn different outfits in the same color, but as it was, my sisters really liked their dresses--right?
Anyway, everyone looked just beautiful and amazing, and hopefully liked their outfits also.
Labels: weddingness