I can’t believe how quickly time is flying by… it’s hard to believe it is only 6 months or so until our wedding! Although we have booked most of the big parts (venue, photographer, DJ, dress etc), there’s still a million little things we need to get done!

I thought it would be neat to show off the little save-the-date cards we sent out just last week to all our guests. It’s part D-I-Y and part bought, but we really loved how they turned out!

I purchased a calligraphy pen to do dip pen calligraphy. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be… and very messy! We also only bought the exact number of envelopes needed (not a good idea!) so there was no room for error with the handwritten addresses.

I am actually really happy with how the calligraphy went. Although it wasn’t traditional formal calligraphy, I got the hang of dipping the pen in the ink, holding the pen properly, and learning how to regulate ink flow. In hindsight, it would have been easier to use a normal calligraphy pen, but I do like the effect the dip pen has.

I love LOVE LOVE the save-the-date cards we ordered from Night Owl Paper Goods. These beautiful wooden invitations are very “west coast”, but still elegant enough for a wedding. We designed the artwork, layout, and text ourself using Adobe Illustrator, and then had Night Owl print them on their high-quality very thin birch cards. Each one is unique with the wood grain and they are very sturdy while still being light. They also came with envelopes and are very good value. We LOVED them! You can see both their custom wooden wedding invitations and their ready-to-go wooden wedding suites here. Highly recommended!

I also did all the embossing and envelope decoration myself. Do-it-yourself embossing is time consuming but the final result is really cool! We cut a custom tree stamp into the correct size and shape.

Then you sprinkle embossing powder onto the clear stamped area, and then gently shake it off so that only the shape you want remains.

You then use a special heating tool to melt the powders which then gives a raised metallic sheen. Pretty!

On the back of the cards, we used a gorgeous custom made return address stamp that we purchased from Etsy from Paperfinger. Bryn creates your return address stamp using hand-drawn calligraphy. Each letter and stamp is unique (it’s not a font!)! We really loved it!

Last but not least, we attached a gold sticker seal to the back of each envelope and categorized them by country to get ready for mailing!

Wohooo! One hundred custom Save-the-Dates done! And it only took 20 straight hours of work

What do you think?

This Thursday, Allan and I will be heading to Apex Mountain in Penticton, BC for his hockey team’s annual outdoor hockey tournament. It also means lots of snowboarding for me! We’ll see how well my eyes are doing by then, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to snowboard and at least watch some of the hockey games, even if they are blurry. In case you’re wondering, laser eye surgery went alright — not great as it is still quite blurry, but hopefully is on the mend sooner rather than later. I can see quite well, but reading text on computer screens or books is still very difficult.

In anticipation of heading up to Apex this week, Allan and I put together a fun little movie of last year’s trip to Apex, complete with snowboarding, hockey, and some point-of-view footage with the GoPro. I have to give Allan all the credit for editing the video since I couldn’t do it with my blurry eyes, and for him putting up with my “creative input” a.k.a backseat driving of the video editing

Apex Snowboarding and Hockey Extravaganza HD Video on Vimeo

So check it out on Vimeo!

Hope you enjoy the video. It’s been quite a while since I’ve put up a snowboard flick on VancityAllie and I am hoping to put up some more before the season is over!

Have you done any snowboarding or skiing this season? If so, where have you gone and what has been your best day?