A butterfly baby shower

A friend of mine is expecting a little girl next month and I cohosted a shower for her. Amy was going with a butterfly theme in the room with pink and sage green as the colors, so we went with that as the theme of the shower. Since Amy already has a little boy, we wanted a girly shower. All pinks, flowers and butterflies.

I designed the back of the invitation as well. I did a mama butterfly and 2 little baby butterflies; one for each of her kids (her son, and soon to be daughter).

The main hostess is fabulously crafty, dare I say even more crafty then myself, so it was a lot of fun planning and designing the shower. Hannah makes really cute door wreathes (that she sometimes has in her etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/sweetpartdesigns) and she showed me how to make one so that I could help with some of the decorations.

Since it was a small intimate shower we were able to make all of the food ourselves. I was in charge of the fruit and cheese.  I also made little signs for all the food, so everyone knew what everything was. I dusted off my old fruit tray making skills (ah, the things you learn at your job in high school. I bet I can still make a tomato rose if I needed to), and made a very pretty fruit tray. In case you are wondering that is mint mixed in with the watermelon (try it sometime, its tasty and refreshing).

My friends learned that if they want normal cheese then they shouldn’t put me in charge of it. But I think I got a few of the girls hooked on chevre.

For favors we got little plantable paper cut into butterflies and assembled the little containers to plant them in. And Hannah made chocolate butterfly lollipops.

Here are a few photos of the decorations. The vision was Hannah’s, I merely assisted and fluffed pom poms.

The happy mother to be.

The shower was a lot of fun, and we got to celebrate the mama to be. And I will happily cohost any event with Hannah again, it was so much fun working with another crafter/artist.

1st birthday invites

Its been awhile since I have posted design work. Mostly because I know nobody really wants to look at boring powerpoint presentations. But I have had the chance to design a couple of invitations recently, which I love to do.

A friend of mine’s son turned 1 a couple of days ago, and she wanted some fun invitations for his birthday. They were going with a Mickey Mouse theme, but didn’t want it to be too over the top Disney.

I came up with a subtle Disney design, that was still bright and fun. The colors are red and yellow which are the colors of Mickey’s clothes (red pants with yellow buttons). I used a small silhouette of Mickey’s head with his iconic ears and the Disney font for his name to make the Mickey theme noticeable.  The result was simple yet fun.

Happy birthday Lucas!

Orlando – TEAM

I’m wrapping up at TEAM Polycom, and I am looking forward to being done. It has been a fun but exhausting project. I’m glad I got to come to Orlando and be on site to see the event. I watched the keynotes yesterday, and when I was working on the presentations its hard to imagine just how big the screen would be. 150′x15′ is a hard size to visualize. The screen size is impressive.

I didn’t work on keynotes, but I did work on some General Session presentations that were presented on the big screen, unfortunately I did not have time to watch any of those.

I was excited to see some of my work in the keynotes though. See the photo on the screen? Its of Kiosks in China. See the graphic/chart on all the kiosks? That’s mine. I made that graphic about 8 months ago for a different presentation, and some how that graphic has infiltrated the company and I have seen it all over TEAM Polycom. There are a couple of other graphics like that as well. It made me all warm and fuzzy to think that my graphic has made it around the world.

I am officially on vacation for a whole 24 hours before I dive into another project. I am going to make the most of those 24 hours. There will be lots of snuggling and floating down the lazy river. And probably a large amount of photos of kids in swimsuits.

Holiday packaging

I love to bake, especially around the holidays. I also love to make candy, and I am known for my peppermint bark, its fabulously minty and delicious. People start asking for it once December rolls around. I also make my own marshmallows (yes, you can make them. No, Im not crazy). Home made marshmallows are what store bought ones dream of being. My neighbor sent me a text after her delivery of the homemade fluffy goodness; “I will eat store bought marshmallows again, but I wont enjoy them!” This year I added home made graham crackers to the mix. So it was kind of a play on smores. And of course my favorite thing about baking is packaging up all the goodies. I have been wanting to do a play on our last name for a few years, so this year I finally made boxes that I deemed “Heaps of Sweets”, it had all three goodies in one box.

I also made a few boxes that were just peppermint bark (similar label to the Heaps of Sweets) and some that were graham crackers and marshmallows. Home made graham crackers are seriously tasty and paired with the home made marshmallows they were down right addicting.

Since Fiona is 2 and starting to really get in to the holidays I wanted to start establishing traditions with her. I mixed up a batch of reindeer feed (cereal, dried strawberrys and yogurt covered raisins) for her to sprinkle in the driveway for the reindeer to snack on while Santa delivered the presents (we also left out a special key just for Santa so that he could come inside, but that is for another post). Of course I couldn’t just leave the reindeer feed in a bowl, so I designed a label for it. I made a couple jars to give to a few of Fiona’s friends.

I will post a few holiday photos soon. Meanwhile I hope everyone had a good holiday!

Party decor: Banners, cupcakes and the snack table

I didn’t do a ton of decorations, we wanted to keep it fairly simple. I designed a banner that was hung between the playroom and the living room. We also hung a smaller one outside, so that people knew which house it was. I bought the polka dot paper, and had “Fiona” and “2″ printed at kinkos.

The hit of the party, at least for the kids, was the snack table I made.

I found some really cute cupcakes paper, and the purple polka dot ribbon and I had the giant number 2 printed. I glued everything down to a piece of posterboard, including the bowls. And using ribbon I attached the board to a trunk that we have in the playroom. The bowl were glued down so that the kids wouldn’t wander off with the bowls. All the kids loved that the snack table was at their height and spent a good amount of time hovering around it.  I think Fiona will be sad when its gone.

And in case you were wondering the table was stocked with goldfish, annie’s organic graham cracker bunnies, trader joe’s cheese puffs, and frozen grapes. All child friendly, and more importantly, things that wouldn’t stain my carpet Fiona was a good little hostess and would come and tell me when the snack table was out of a snack.

Speaking of food… the last thing I designed was cupcake toppers. I made 2 different types of cupcakes; a vegan banana with a cream cheese/marscapone/maple frosting, and a vegan chocolate with vegan buttercream. I designed 2 different toppers to distinguish the 2 cupcakes.

The chocolate cupcakes were frosted pink and the banana had purple sprinkles to go with the color scheme.

Fiona loved the cupcakes. She would pull a stool over and climb up to the counter just to look at them. And when it came time to eat them, she was even more excited!

I will post a few photos from the party tomorrow.

Party favors: Coloring book, crayons and bubbles

I meant to post this on friday, but I was having too much fun with the birthday girl. We shopped, prepared decorations, played, and made cupcakes (Fiona helped with the banana).

Once I decided to make the coloring book, crayons seemed like the obvious choice for another party favor. Of course I couldn’t just have regular crayons, they had to match the coloring book.

The crayons actually had 2 designs; one on each side of the box.

The last favor was bubbles. What kid doesn’t like bubbles? I have a ton of bubbles left over, but for some reason I don’t think Fiona will mind

Next up the decorations and the party.

Party favors: The coloring book

I will get back to photos next week, this week is pretty much going to be all about Fiona’s birthday party. One of Fiona’s favorite things to do is color. So I illustrated a custom coloring book full of her favorite things for party favors. There are 16 illustrations in all, and since I don’t consider myself an illustrator in any way, I am really happy with how they came out. Here are just a few:

I drew her “Baby”, which is part of her entourage and I’m sure looks familiar.  There are several musical instruments, the drums are shown here. A penguin, which Fiona is obsessed with, this one is made to look like the penguin she drags all over the house. A rocket ship; Fiona’s favorite show is Little Einstein’s and her favorite character is Rocket. I also illustrated animals; a tree with a bird is shown, Fiona likes to point out every animal she sees and knows most animal sounds. Lastly I drew several different bugs; Fiona is represented as a ladybug in my tattoo so its kind of her bug.

Since I was having so few printed, I sent the files off to the nearest Kinko’s and crossed my fingers. Luckily they came out pretty much how I had hoped. A slightly thinker cover, and printed on 100% recycled paper.

I got several extra printed so that Fiona could color a couple of them. Hopefully she likes her custom coloring books.

2nd birthday invites!

Fiona turns 2 on friday! I can’t believe 2 years have gone by since she made her early arrival. She is an incredibly bright little girl, and she amazes me everyday with what she knows. We are of course throwing a party, and I have been preparing for weeks for it. First came the invitations, then the custom coloring books I illustrated, then custom crayons and bubbles as favors. All will make an appearance this week, but first; the invitations.

Mark drew the illustration with her name, which most of the design was based around. I laid out the invites and designed and illustrated the front of the cards.

Why yes, that is a cupcake on the invites…again. What can I say, Fiona and I both love a good cupcake. Her invites this year are a 180 from last years design. I wanted to go with a clean, fun look that represented her personality.

Happy 2nd birthday Fiona!!!

Powerpoint Before and After

I mentioned before that it is event season, and for me that means conferences that need presentations. I’ve been working back to back conferences with a few other projects thrown in the mix.

Since I do a lot of event work, most of what I do is clean up to an existing file. But one of my projects was a new project. I worked with a content developer who came up with the initial sketch:

I got my hands on it and turned it into this:

This is not the final version, it is still a work in progress (note the stock image placeholders). But its a drastic difference from the initial sketch.

I have events for the next 3 weeks, so things will be busy around here and will include a trip back to CA!

Petalworks

Dear blog, I haven’t forgotten you. I’ve just been buried with presentation work and haven’t had the chance to update you.

A couple of weeks ago I helped out the lovely April from Petalworks design some postcards and business cards for an event that she was a vendor at.

This is the postcard (the photos used were supplied by Petalworks)

And the back:

Petalworks has a fun logo and we played with it a bit to come up with the design for her double sided business cards:

Petalworks was one of the many vendors at I Thee Wed Austin a bridal event/fashion show that was held last week. I tagged along to see April at work (and get out of the house and be surrounded by adults).

Here are some of her amazing creations for the event.

The tables were gorgeous, and the flower arrangements were beautiful. 7 years ago I was lucky enough to have April do the flowers for my wedding and now I consider my self lucky to be her friend. Great job April! To book Petalworks for events go to www.petalworks.com