Wood You?

As the maid of honor for my dear friend Alexis' wedding I get to throw her a bridal shower up here in Provo for all her college friends and I've had a lot of fun coming up with ideas. This last week I made the invitations for the shower and it was a lot of fun to have an excuse to do something crafty instead of my schoolwork, and based on the invitations alone it would seem that my theme is "young love".

I had the idea to make the invitations look like initials carved on a tree and so I scoured the local scrap booking store for paper that looked like tree bark or rings, and almost gave up when one of the lovely ladies who worked there showed us this:

you may not be able to tell from the picture, but the paper is actually a think slice of cherry wood, mounted on white paper. I am admittedly a little obsessed with this paper, and I wrote the couple's initials with charcoal. Then I continued with my pseudo-theme and used an idea from Offbeat Bride.In order to further evoke the middle school mystique, I found a great handwriting font that dotted all the i's with hearts. I chose envelopes in one of the bride's wedding colors, and found some stamps that pulled it all together. Finally I filled each envelope with hand-punched confetti made out of notebook and red paper. It was a lot of fun coming up with invitation ideas and now I'm on to invitations and food... more pictures to come.