80th Birthday Party Invitation

See below for a few more images of an invitation I designed recently for an 80th Birthday Party. The front was all based on an adorable childhood photo taken of the client... pretty easy to create a fun design when you have such a great starting point!

The next two images show two options for the copy on the back with Option 1 being a text-based design utilizing the vegetative background of the picture and Option 2 a more traditional and symmetrical concept with a paper background.

Back of Card Option 1:

Back of Card Option 2:

{baby shower} invitations

My dear friend Sarah K is having a baby in a few months! As you will remember, Camille of the styLe handLer and I designed our other dear Sarah's {Sarah B} nursery last year, which we both posted on our blogs. We are mad designing again this spring for the arrival of Baby K with the commencement of paint this weekend. It's great having a partner in design crime to work with on these project {more to come on that topic in an upcoming post}. . .

In addition to developing the concepts for the nursery itself, Camille and I are assisting with some of the details of the baby shower, which is being hosted by Sarah B. Per the hosts requests, the baby shower invites were custom designed to fit the theme of the proposed nursery. It was fun to pull something together utilizing the concepts Camille and I have developed... Sarah selected a Safari theme for her room based on some adorable Dwell for Target sheets she found. I utilized the silhouette of the giraffe from the sheet print and overlaid a more playful and "grassland-esque" motif. The tone-on-tone pattern on the background of the invitation is a reference to some of the other geometric patterns of the sheet set. I'm happy with the way the card turned out and am hopeful that the nursery will be even more fabulous!

help me finish our room!

So we got our new Room and Board sofa today and I'm so excited!

Now it's time for some redecorating and the first step is to find a rug and accent chair to spice it all up...

I am absolutely in love with this "Sweet As Honey" rug from Anthropologie, but I am NOT in love with the eight hundred dollar price tag for a 5x8 ($1,700 if we were to go with an 8x10)... so I am in search of some alternate rug + chair combos that can give me some fun color/texture at a better price tag.

Leave me your comments and give me your thoughts on which combo is your favorite!

Option 1: Neutral Chair with Colorful Rug

I love this chair from Room and Board, but at a $999 price tag it's a little more money than I am interested in spending. I would, however, be up for a few Saturday morning trips to the Room and Board Outlet to get a better deal. SO I'm not ruling it out yet... The gray color offers contrast to the neutral Pumice color of the couch and would allow us to use some fun color on the floor. For example... this amazing yellow rug from Anthropologie. Still a bit high priced at $500 for a 5x7.

Let's mark this pair as the high-end of the possibilities.

Here are some other gray chair options:

• Clara Chair - Crate and Barrel - $899

• Sweep Chair - West Elm - $550

• Steel Accent Chair - Overstock.com - $199

Here are some other "fun rug" options:

• Andalusia Rug - West Elm - $229 (5x8)

• United Weavers Countours Collection "Dazzle" Rug - RugsUSA.com - $200 (5x7)

Option 2: Neutral Rug with Bold Chair

I love this Skyline "Esprit Oasis" chair and the $225 price tag is very reasonable. I'm not familiar with this company and may be a bit concerned with quality, but going with a less expensive chair could provide more opportunity for updates in the future. Clearly this print would overpower any of the rugs above and become WAY too hectic, so I've paired it with this "Channel Rug" from West Elm, $299 (5x8).

Here are some other chair options:

• Skyline Chair in New England's Lace Butterscotch - JustAccentChairs.com - $439

• Chloe Chair - Crate and Barrel - $899

mini bathroom remodel

Josh went out of town this last week and I took to our bathroom like a banshee... I first intended only to paint the vanity, but as I started ripping things up the scope of the project grew considerably.

Here is the before:

Don't you love the gold faucet and the hokey oak vanity? It's a bit dated to say the least... so I made my way to Home Depot and picked a new vanity color "Stealth Jet" that I would call a black with a great deal of depth; it almost has deep espresso undertones. Once I had the paint, it was all about prep work. The vanity needed to be cleaned with a degreaser, sanded, and "unhinged". The work took a few hours at least, but I got to use my new orbital sander, which saved a bunch of time!

Here's a shot in progress... yes you will also note I pulled the plumbing out, whoops! Penelope knows I've gotten myself in to some trouble.

And not just the plumbing... turns out there were some surprises for me waiting behind the old light bar fixture... who needs a junction box anyway?? It is only code... gotta love the random wires hanging out of my wall! Turns out I needed to put on my electrical hat as well.

One last hiccup before I get to the fun stuff... the picture below shows a hole in the wall the vanity light bar was hiding. I now understand why the previous owners failed to install the junction box... it turns out that center section of the hole is a stud that just happens to be on center with the rest of the vanity. A stud that is the entire depth of the wall cavity and prevents a light fixture to be mounted on center with the vanity fixture... I did end up cutting in a new box for safety, but then had to get creative with the new light fixture to install it on center. I had initially wanted a design that had a small mounting plate, but ended up having to go with a design with a longer mounting plate so that I could jerry-rig the new fixture on center with the vanity. Toggle bolts are now my best friend...

Once I cleared these hurdles, it was all execution and detail work. I picked up some new hardware for the vanity from Anthropologie (below) that really helps pick up on the 1940's character of our house (now I just need to convince my husband to let me replace the nasty gold door knobs throughout the house with crystal!).

And here are the after pics! It took me 3 solid days to complete, but I'm pretty happy with the update. What do you think??

things i love

I've been doing some online browsing this evening... here are a few things that caught my eye!

hello long lost friends

I'm finally back from the dead and ready to get back on the blogging bandwagon!

In case you were concerned, I did not fall off the face of the earth (although I may as well have). As many of you know, our wedding was in September and the months leading up to the big event had this DIYer frantically pulling together last minute details... thus the lack of posts from July through October. The only excuse I have for my lapse of motivation AFTER the wedding is what many call the post wedding let down... not so fun. I barely felt like I could lift a dish when I got home from work for the day! However, now with a new year and some fire in my veins (thanks to a week-long marathon of Glee), I'm ready to get back to work!

There are a lot of fun projects on the horizon and one I am most excited for is another baby nursery design for my other dear friend Sarah. I can't wait to get going on this project since Camille and I had such a great time designing Sarah B's nursery last spring. Also on the radar: furniture restoration (thank you to my hubby for buying me an orbital sander for Christmas) as well as some home remodeling in our house. Projects in our home were put on the back burner due to wedding planning and there are so many things I have in mind for the place.... which leads me to my post for tonight!

We live in a typical 1 1/2 story 1940's home in one of the 1st ring suburbs of Minneapolis. Like most of the homes in our neighborhood, we have a converted attic as a master bedroom (hopefully we will be adding a bath in the future), as well as the two smaller bedrooms on the main level. In our house, however, the previous owners built a 3 season porch off of the rear of the home, causing our 3rd bedroom to become more of a passthrough room. Currently, we are using this room as the office/storage/room to feed the dog. I would love for this space to be more cohesivily integrated with the rest of our home since right now, we really aren't making use of the square footage. Long term, I would love to be able to recreate this room as a traditional 3rd bedroom, but this will likely require a great deal more renovation than we're able to finance right now.... so I am interested in exploring the possibility of turning this room into a more formal dining area for the time being.

Our existing kitchen has a small seating area where we currently have our dining room table. It works well enought, but there really isn't any storage space for my china and crystal, which are sadly sitting in our basement in boxes at the moment. If we were able to repurpose the "office" into a dining room, we would be able to fit a buffet server along with our existing dining room furniture. We could then use the space we are currently using as our only dining space for a more casual dining area in the kitchen that could also double as additional storage and work space.

I spent some time today and modeled my proposal using Sketchup... Our concern was that the more utilitarian kitchen dining area may not look as nice when walking into our home (it's the first view from the front door) than the more formal dining set we have now, but I'm starting to think I'm willing to sacrifice the potential view for the additional storage space we will create. It would also be nice to have a more formal dining area to entertain guests...

I'd love to know what you think! This proposal would really require minimal upgrades. I'd love to add the french doors to the porch, but other than this there would be minimal building changes other than some lighting and paint!

See below for the before picture of our current "office". As you can see... it has a tendency to be dumpy and underutilized.

And now for the proposal...

I think the furniture and lighting we implement at the new kitchen dining area will be critical for keeping this space from appearing too kitchen-like. I have my eye on a table at Crate and Barrel that has the butcher block table top and storage without looking too much like a kitchen island. See below: