Thank you cards

This is a thank you card I drew in photoshop and Michael vectorized in illustrator.  We have most of them sent out... We're so bad at stuff like this... though I've been trying to get Michael to push through the last of it.

But here's what it looks like.  Referencing our honeymoon to Belize and the lovely and serene resort we stayed at.  It was pretty magical :)

Update on the Flowers - Day 2

After two days the only significant change is still in the peonies.  One of the ones in the flower box is starting to wilt. 

The others are opening more and more, but are still in a good state.

It seems like the best plan for peonies is to get them the day before the wedding when they're in the closed form, and on the day of the wedding, they'll be just I want them.

Update On the Flowers - Day 1

In an effort to gauge how far in advance I can get the flowers and put together the centerpieces, I'm taking pictures of them to record how they're doing.  After a day, they still look great.

Here are all the arrangements

The only significant difference is in the peonies (and the dahlias to a smaller extent) who bloomed in the last 24 hours and are at their lush, full prime.

Here are two of the arrangements to compare the peonies between day 0 and day 1.

Flower Arranging

I decided to take care of flowers an my own for the wedding originally with great enthusiasm, but more recently it has felt daunting.  As a first step to that, Viv, Hoyt and I made a trip to SF Flower Mart this weekend to see if we can find all the flowers I want to use, check out prices, and get some for a trial run.

It was a wonderous place!  So many flowers, so fragrant, and so overwhelming.  I didn't find garden roses, which is unfortunate but I did pick up some peonies, dahlias, and hydrangeas. 

 Hoyt is holding the flowers, feeling like he just won a beauty pageant.  Isn't he lovely?

Here are $40 of flowers.

I started off by trying a technique I saw on a tutorial, by making a grid over the flower box with tape.  (I'm supposed to use florist tape, which I didn't have, so this is just good ole scotch tape.)

Then I started inserting in the white hydrangeas, since they take up the most space.

Then I added in some dahlias.

And I kept going with the peonies, and the green hydrangeas, adjusting as necessary until I got the coverage I wanted.

That wasn't so bad.  I repeated the process with the smaller flower box.  And even after that, I had a bunch more flowers left over so I went to work filling a vase, a watering can, and these lovely juice jugs we recently got from World Market.

Here are all the arrangements I ended up with.

 And here's what $40 of flowers from the flower mart looks like after some work :)

Surprisingly, I really love the two simple arrangements in the juice jugs.  I might reshape my vision for the centerpieces to make use of them some more.  The girly part of me comes out around flowers.  This sure was a nice little one day project.  We'll see how things go when we have to do this for an entire wedding.

Invitation designs that didn't make the cut

I experimented quite a bit with wedding invitation designs before deciding on the cartoon version of Michael and myself.  The original concept of graphical drawings of voluminous, layered flowers like the peony and the ranunculus.  We also liked the idea of silkscreening a graphical design onto wood cards/veneers.

I dug up some of the photoshop experiments.

Playing with colors and basic layer of concentric circular shapes.

 With wood grain background.  Varied the color in one "flower", and played how the color should be applied.  But let's face it.  They look like boobs.  Especially that one.

I put together some more interesting color palettes, and tried layering some more complex shapes for the peonies, and at the same time, went basic with the ranunculus.  

The two below are about the furthest I got with this theme and design.  They're not bad and I think we could have gotten something nice out of it, but it didn't seem feasible to silkscreen that many colors at this complexity.

Wedding Invitations

I've been keeping this one under wraps for a while.  It's our wedding invitation design :)  Now that we've mailed out invitations, I can happily post it.  It was a nice collaborative effort with Michael.  Fun at times.  Exciting at times.  And, honestly, a bit frustrating on a few occasions.  But we're both very happy with the final result!  I'll post actual pictures of the printed final product eventually.

And the wedding website is at tingtingandmichael.com.  Can you believe that wasn't already taken?  :)