Abigail from Bambako just sent over a few photos of her super rad headbands. Could not resist posting them immediately. We are in love! How cute would these be for bridesmaids? Or for any event really. We want one of each. At least.
Go. Now. Quickly.
One of the perks of owning your own letterpress studio is that when it’s time to design and print your own wedding invites, everything gets to be perfectly printed using your own 120 year old press. Feeling a teensy bit envious yet? We are, don’t feel bad.
Andria Ledon is the owner of Lilikoi Press and we’ve been lucky enough to become friends with her over the last few months. She lives and works in Venice, just steps from Abbot Kinney… only the cutest neighborhood in all of Los Angeles. Lucky! We were soooo excited when she shared her amazing invitations for her Kauai wedding this coming May.
She worked with Betsy Dunlap to incorporate calligraphy into each piece of her invitation suite; including coasters, bookmarks, and chopstick sleeves. All letterpress. And the chopstick sleeves aren’t done. She’s going to stitch the sides together with grey thread. So cute. We love the combination of blind emboss and grey ink. It feels perfectly beachy and modern at the same time. We kind of don’t want to give her invites back. We like to keep pretty things around for petting when we need cheering, and these would go nicely with our collection.
Andria is currently working on her wedding line which should be ready in the next few months. In the meantime, if you love her style and can’t imagine your wedding without such pretty paper, contact her about custom work. She’s so super nice.
And when we say “your bridesmaids” we mean YOUR bridesmaids. That’s where the giveaway thing comes in, but more on that later. Let’s do the project first because it’s so cute!
We are so so excited about our soaps. First, because it’s fun doing an afternoon project with friends. And second, because we learned that soap making is WAY more creative than we anticipated. We’re thinking this would be a really fun project to do at a bridal shower. Everyone likes an activity and making soap is so easy that anyone (no matter how old or young) can take part. The soaps can set while the bride is opening gifts and then guests get a little handmade favor to take away from the party.
Here’s what you need for the project:
Soap base (available at Michaels). We used the goat milk base for ours.
Soap molds (also from Michaels).
Herbs, oats, tea, essential oil, anything you want to use to flavor your soap.
The creative part was rummaging through Kristina’s garden and kitchen cupboards looking for fun combinations for our soaps. We decided to make three flavors:
Lavendar Oatmeal (fresh lavender flowers, lavender essential oil, oats)
Chai Tea (steeped tea for color and scent, plus dry loose tea for a little texture)
Chamomile Calendula (dried chamomile and calendula flowers)
Here’s what you do:
1. Melt soap base (stirring often over medium heat)
2. Add “seasonings”
3. Mix well and long enough for flavors to distribute evenly
4. Pour liquid soap into molds
5. Uncork champagne and enjoy the afternoon waiting for your soaps to set!
Once your soaps have set (overnight, or we found you can refrigerate them for a few hours), you have to package them in maximum cuteness. We wrapped ours in unbleached parchment paper (in the same way you’d wrap a gift), then added a band of vintage wallpaper for decoration. We made tags using a grocery bag and a 1 1/2 inch tag punch, and tied them on with baker’s twine.
Now the giveaway part. Yay! Over our WELL DESERVED glasses of champagne, we had a genius idea. Give our soaps away to one of our readers so she can give them to her maids! Tell us something unique you’re doing or did with your bridesmaids, (we don’t want to leave out any former brides out there), and we’ll pick a comment that we think provides great inspiration to our readers. We’ll announce our winner next Monday and send off the soaps shortly after.
While we would hope that one’s wedding day would be perfect in every way, there are bound to be a few snags here and there. Your maid-of-honor gets a blister from her new high heels, one of your bridesmaids comes down with a headache due to a few too many glasses of wine at the rehearsal dinner the night before, and another bridesmaid dribbles a bit of her shrimp cocktail sauce on her mint colored dress. Thankfully, you thought ahead and prepared a cute survival kit for them.
Aspirin, band-aids, spot remover, breath mints and tissues are all good items to include to help your maids through the long day, so they can focus on what really matters: you and your groom.
Jillian came up with this cute idea you can make WAY ahead of time and pass out to your ladies before the wedding.
All you have to do is create a label (or use our templates), print, cut it out, fill your cellophane bag and staple the label over the top. Sooo easy.
Bridal Party Survival Kit Templates here and here.
Have a fun weekend everyone. We’re working on a bunch of good posts for next week.
Remember Nicole’s super cute DIY veil? We’ll here’s her veil in action, worn beautifully at her Sonoma wedding last September.
How amazing is this venue? We’re in love. They had their wedding in the stone ruins of an old winery built in the late 1800’s. Doesn’t it feel a little like the european countryside?
Nicole took a class at Paper Source to make her invites and they turned so great. She had a stamp made at Berkeley Stamp & Engraving, but other than that she bought all of supplies at Paper Source. She is going to DIY Bride heaven for sure.
Photographer – Lydia Daniller
Venue – Dunfillan Ruins at the Kunde Family Estate
Cake – For Goodness Cakes, Mercedes Ferrerira (415) 518-2172
Dress – (AMAZING) Claire Pettibone
Hairpiece – Nicole
Flowers – Viola Floral Design
Catering – Caridwyn & Sons
Music – Rollie Willis & Band, SF Bay Area (408) 483-7722
