I'm not as sweet as I used to be.

It's a good thing I'd already emailed everyone the details of my 40th birthday celebration. Because if I'd waited to actually invite them via my proper, real world, paper invitations, I may have found I'd left it too late and everyone's dance cards were full. So the invitations are but a formality, and yet, here's my point: they're done!

I decided to make them in the middle of a packing frenzy, when I'd already boxed up all my photos and slides. Luckily, I had this photo on my other blog, which I changed to sepia to better suit the colour scheme of the card, and I felt my expression in it conveyed the sentiment I was trying to express.


Also, due to the packing frenzy and having no time - no time! - I had to keep them fairly simple. All those strips and bits of paper and pieces of ribbon were fairly fiddly and time consuming, but I drew the line at inking edges of paper for that finished look. Maybe in ten years' time I'll look back and think, "I should have inked, dammit. I should. have. inked!!", and there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, but too bad. I'm just glad I've got invitations out.


And, wide wide world of webs, I even made one where I could show you the insides:


There are table decorations in the works, too. After all, it is my fortieth birthday. I really should make an effort. Check back here later on for progress on those.

I haven't ordered a cake yet. I was thinking of getting chocolate and vanilla cupcakes iced with green and pink icing. But I might just go for a Princess cake from Miss Maud's. I love Princess cake, and the green icing and raspberry jam would be thematically appropriate.

Pussy's In the Well

I may have mentioned elsewhere that New Girl is gittin' married. So I'm making her wedding invitations. Last night she came over to my place and we formed a little production line of measuring, cutting and folding. Henry Ford would have been proud.

New Girl handled the guillotine with great precision and disturbing gusto. Luckily Man Hands was asleep on the couch. He might have been a little.....unnerved.

You can't see the ring very well in that photo, so lets get a little bit closer.


This is what the finished product will look like. The brown, cream and coffee colours have all come together quite nicely. With a little bit of pale green.


I tried to photograph the velum we're using: it has a lovely leaf pattern on it in white and green. It hasn't come out so well here but when they're done I'll take some more photos in a better light.

Under the mistletoe and under the influence.

With the help of several glasses of champagne and a string of lewd observations by QEII about people we know, I've finally finished the tags for my Christmas presents:


This is what they look like on the back. I didn't see that mark on the Christmas tree when I took the photo. It's very annoying. Like, I'm annoyed?


You can see when they're on the Christmas presents how the whole grand design comes together. I know, they're fabulous and, by extension, I'm fabulous. Well, why hide your light under a bushel?!


The Christmas cards are, however, another story. Another unfinished story. I've decided they'll be New Year cards. Mebbe.


Finny doesn't judge you for your unfinished cards. He just judges you for how much Christmas bacon goes into his breakfast bowl.


Have a lovely day everyone!

One project finished; 550 billion to go.

So, er, I did finally finish those thank you cards. But then it all seemed like so long ago, I decided to pop them in a placky bag and save them for the end of this year. Sometimes I manage to embarrass even myself.

Thank You Card Progress

I've made some progress with my thank you cards. I sat one afternoon with the fan blowing on me, cutting and tearing paper and making my fingertips numb with handling double-sided sticky tape. And I've come this far:



I have to add 'thanks' somewhere, somehow. Haven't quite made up my mind on that yet. And some buttons. I've got quite a crush on buttons lately. They're selling big bags of them at Spotlight for $8 a bag. Not bad value. I may have to make a trip up there tomorrow arvo...

Giving Thanks

My birthday/Christmas thank you cards are a little overdue (hey, everyone has been thanked, just not with a card)...so if you've been sitting around huffily waiting for one, here's what I've picked out to make them:


My whole life has been a bit of a love affair with brown. And now the perfect green has come long to complement it - the kind that doesn't look like some horrendous 1970s kitchen colour scheme. This photo does a little more justice to the green:


I'm a bit big on buttons at the moment. I should go back to Spotlight and see what's on offer there. I'll be back with a photo of the finished product in the next day or so.

Thnx 4 thnx

Somehow I too often don't get round to taking photos of stuff until it's the black of night, so they don't turn out so well. Like these photos of a couple of cards I made for Boxer Girl, my work friend.

The first is an RSVP to her 40th birthday party, which is going to be a 60s theme. (What 40th isn't? In the 2030s will invitations be going out for 40th birthday parties with a 1990s theme?) I used the same papers she used in her invites.

Sometimes I like to make cards that are flat, not folded in half. Usually it's when I'm feeling lazy: lazy enough to think that spending two minutes measuring and folding a card is just beyond me. But it does free up precious seconds to paint some chipboard letters. I'm a bit addicted to chipboard letters at the moment. You shall know me by my chipboard.

A few of us went to Boxer Girl's place for lunch on Melbourne Cup day. Luckily I didn't over-imbibe on the champagne so I was able to go home and make her a thank you card - maybe if I'd had a few more bubbles in me the card could have been a little fancier.

I think there's nothing nicer than a written thank you note and in some circumstances it's simply the done thing. I am thinking here of the txt msg I got when I sent a friend a wedding present: "Got yr prsnt - thnx." I assumed that was just a preliminary notice, but it seems it's all I'm going to get! I suppose it is better than no thanks at all - which seems to be just as common nowadays.

I know I often surprise people when I send a thank you note for some things (like lunches) but I get a lot of pleasure from making them and, anyway, I think it's so nice to get an envelope in the mail that doesn't contain a demand for money.

A bit of everything.

Slightly less simple is this little card I made. Somehow it all came together quite quickly. I could see which colours would best suit the pictures and would go together straight away. Then it was just a matter of cuting and sticking.

I can only show the cover. The recipient says she'll cut my throat if I show the photos inside. And I believe her.

Paper Round

Another busy weekend with paper. It's nice to have time to sit at my desk and make little bits and pieces. I had a go at a red and lavender card for Princess Mary, as opposed to the pink. I like the red. I wouldn't say it was pretty, but it's certainly quite attractive and most definitely striking.




































Princess Mary also likes the red but thinks she's swinging round to the same style as an invitation I made a few years ago for friends of hers. I can't remember the invitation exactly but I do have memories of them being time consuming and a hassle to make. The kind of memories that evoke a sinking feeling...

I also had time to whip up a bunch of little tags for various people for various reasons. They were fun to make.

These red and yellow cards were looking a bit lairey until I added the green sequins, which calmed them down a bit. Grumpy said they looked like eggs with tomato sauce. I've never understood the attraction of eggs with tomato sauce. Bezley got one of these with her Mother's Day present. She seemed quite pleased with it (and the present).

The brown thank you card below is supposed to be like a block of chocolate, with teeth marks in it. It remains to be seen whether the recipient sees the link. [Update: Yes, they did. Phew.]

And this is NOT some kind of floral tribute to my favourite steak sauce. This is a card for friend whose dog died. Her dog was called Al. I'm sure she'll get it.

It's Not ALL about food...

I have managed to find the time to play with paper. My friend Princess Mary is marrying her Danish prince and has asked me to make the wedding invitations. As is always the way, when it comes time to sit down and come up with something for a particular occasion , I can only ever think of one or two options. I guess its because that particular look is what I like at the time. Then I just have to cross my fingers and hope that the other person happens to like it too.

These two styles are essentially the same, but one has a curve cut into it. I wanted a curve to represent the elegant line of a bride's dress. I suppose that would have been better represented by a convex curve - but when I tried that all I could see was a suggestion that this was a shotgun wedding.

Anyway, Princess Mary wanted some kind of "typical" wedding colours, hence the green and ivory, and I wanted to do something to reflect the fact that the groom is Danish (the red, though looking more pink here, hmmm - well, those Danes are notoriously open-minded) and that the wedding is happening in the Lavender Courtyard at the Hyatt Hotel, so the red/pink and lavender.

I'm seeing her later today so she can decide for herself. For the record, everyone I've shown these to likes the straight green card with the rectangle on the front. I wonder which she'll pick? Which do you like? (Click on the pictures for a closer look.)

Ibu's 70th Birthday

My friend Rhinobert's mum, Ibu, is turning 70 next month and a gala bash is being organised so that all her family and friends can attend and pay her due homage. Flatteringly enough, they asked me to make the invitations.

Rhinobert is organising the cake, which will have three, different-coloured layers and will be decorated with frangipanis. I tried to make the invites to reflect that:





(Pardon the pixellation in the first and third photos: I had to blur some personal information. Next time I'll mock up a fake-name version.)