gold dove and letterpress

I spent today with my mum, searching for gold doves. Preferably stickers, but was open to paper cutting tools, paper doves...just in general, two small, flat, gold doves.

"Gold doves?" I hear you say. "That should be fairly easy!"

Don't be fooled. It's not. NO ONE HAS GOLD DOVES. No one even has SILVER doves. No one had any dove stickers, cut outs, ribbon OR paper cutters.

"What the?" I hear you think. "Aren't doves nice and wedding-y?"

Yes. Yes they are. Or they USED to be. Nowadays? Impossible to find...

*sigh*

So, a new project was born. Fairly simple really but just a pain in the butt that it even had to be done. We managed to find some cream, felt doves. I have now had to paint said doves gold. And I will have to adhere them to an envelope and hope they stay...

Voila!




"Well what on earth do you NEED doves for?" (I'm good at reading your mind, aren't I??)

That question brings me to the project I have started for my little flower girls.

Given the effort I put into the cards for my lovely ladies, I wanted to do something fun for the littlest members of our parties too!! Now, the two youngest are at ages where quite frankly if it can't go in their mouth, they don't really care about it (they're 7 months old - they'll be 2 at the wedding), but I wanted them to have something to keep. My older flower girl (or my "senior" flower girl, as I like to call her) is almost 3 and definitely able to enjoy this a little more.

Back when I first started to organise the dollies for my ladies, I hunted down a Flower Girl and Ring Bearer (we aussie's prefer the term "page boy" but good luck finding a book about THAT) book and saved them both to my wishlist on Amazon. It just so happened that while I was at the bridal expo a few weeks ago, with my mum and bridesmaids, they were selling Flower Girl books. They actually looked a little nicer then the one I had found, so we picked up two.



It wasn't until we got home and actually read through them that we realised (drumroll please)...

...the bride in the book is none other then "Aunty Amanda!"


Pretty damn cool if you ask me! I was pretty stoked.

SO. After reading through the book and finding that, I decided that rather then just writing in the front cover of the book for the girls, I would replicated the letter in the book and adhere it to the inside front cover. As you can see, the envelope has a tiny gold dove in the corner, and the girl's name in "curly special writing". Well, that would be easy...or so I thought until today!



Anyway, I've now got some little gold doves (even if they're not tiny!) and will be doing up the girls envelopes and letters soon. I will definitely keep you all posted on the end result!

In another note, today my mum and I discovered the L Letterpress by QuicKutz. I may have fallen in love...



Since getting home and doing some research on the product, there have been a number of problems with the printer plates cracking after a number of uses...presumably because they are only plastic. However the QuicKutz website offers custom made printer plates in the professional moulding, which appears to fix the issue. That and a soft rubber brayer instead of the included brayer, and most people seem to have agreed that you can get some good looking work out of the machine! Sooooo....I might be getting one to do our wedding invites on! I'm VERY excited and can't wait to get one and play around on it. Will keep you all updated on any practice projects!

Have any of you guys bought craft-related items you usually wouldn't have, for wedding related projects?