Embellish the Embellishments

Oh, Anthropologie, how we love you! We love your attention to detail and those little special touches you add to every nook and cranny of your store. The window displays are amazing and the home goods are to die for.

We really appreciate every little nuance that Anthro has to offer, so when we were in the store last weekend, we couldn't believe our eyes when we saw the little embellishments they are now adding to their hand-held items such as candles and ornaments. Being that we love to embellish our own products and really pride ourselves in coming up with new and unique ways to make our cards stand out, we of course, saw the time and love that was spent into adding these touches to their products. They are soooo cute:

A little, wooden ornament was added to this candle.

Who doesn't love little mittens?

Cinnamon stick to add to your tea?

Cut-out matchbooks. An easy way to spice up plain, old matches.

A crossword puzzle with your morning coffee. Smart!

My friend that works for Anthro said that every store creates their own embellishments for their holiday products. It just depends on the visual specialist as to what they will create for that year. If you're in Anthropologie try to find these hidden gems. We couldn't get enough of them and we hope to find more as the season continues...

Royal Jewels

The engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton has been all over the news. And let's face it, we don't really care about the proposal story or how their relationship blossomed over the last 9 years. We ladies only care about one thing when it comes to this fairy tale wedding - that amazingly spectacular, blue sapphire engagement ring. Words cannot describe how gorgeous that 13 karat sapphire is. And the fact that Princess Di picked it out herself back in 1986 (when lord knows what kind of engagement ring was "en vogue" then) makes it all the more poignant.


To commemorate the engagement of the royal couple, (and that unbelievable jewel Kate Middelton is now wearing on her ring finger) we thought we'd show you a wedding suite that has similar "royal" qualities to it. We created the invitation for a couple who were married on New Year's Eve. The wedding was a black-tie affair at a beautiful antebellum house in Virginia. To create and upscale feel for the event, we added our own jewels to the invites.












Congrats William and Kate. Here's to a beautiful royal wedding. If you need some invitations to the grandiose affair you know where to reach us ;)

Wrap It Up

It seems the holiday shopping season has gotten a head start this year. Christmas trees, outdoor lights and holiday cards have been in stores for a good month now. We normally don't start thinking of the holidays until after Thanksgiving, but we couldn't help but get into the Christmas spirit when we stepped into the Container Store the other day. **Just a little side note: Jen and I LOVE the Container Store. We could spend hours in there. We could probably live there. That's how much we heart that store.** So it was no surprise that when we saw their holiday wrapping paper we absolutely melted.

The colors and cheerful and fun. The patterns are sleek and modern without being too overdone. As usual, the Container Store did not let us down. Here are a few quick shots of some of our favorite rolls:

Look how cute the boxes are, too! Candy Cane nirvana.

And this little box is ridiculous! It's actually a tin jar that looks like a log. What a manly way to wrap a gift.

We were excited to see that many of their color schemes and patterns were ones we used on our holiday cards this year:

So if you want to get a jump on your holiday shopping, go to the Container Store and get some of their fun gift wrap. Your presents will be the cutest gifts under the tree. And don't forget to send out your holiday cards early. Our designs on Etsy are ready for mailing!

Inspiration Monday: crochet flowers

My sister is an avid knitter. She can be seen with knitting needles and yarn just about anywhere. A perfect example is this picture of her watching the Steelers game at a bar near my house. (Yes, she's drinking beer and knitting.)

So when we were concepting designs a while back, we thought it would be interesting to add something a little more tactile to our cards. We had seen crocheted flowers on clothes, bags, scarves and other items...








But we have never seen a really cute, simple card with a crocheted flower on it. So, here are the cards we created! We letterpressed each card then took the flowers my sister was kind enough to mail to us and hand- stitched the flowers to each one.







Eventually Jen and I need to learn to crochet. (For those of you who would like to learn how to crochet a flower, here is a really helpful link I found). My sister was kind enough to supply the flowers for this batch of cards, but I'm not sure she'll be so willing for the next time, especially since our phone conversation went something like this:

"Can you crochet some flowers for our new letterpress cards?"
"Sure."
"Can you crochet, like, 100 for us by this weekend?"(I had called her that Tuesday night.)

I should probably send her a thank you card...