My good buddy Caity sent me a link to this post on today and tomorrow, and I was instantly mesmerized.

They’re all images from IKEA’s new book Homemade is Best, photographed by Carl Kleiner. I love when people take the time to see the beauty in overlooked things, and recipe ingredients definitely fall into that category. Happily, the styling (by Evelina Bratell) is just lovely here.

Thanks, Cait!

I love these. So clever + pretty… and inexpensive, too! Choose from pink, black, white, green, or blue. Find a set of four at CITE for $10.

Have you heard of Jessica Hische’s font Buttermilk? If you 1) read this sort of blog and 2) don’t live under a rock, then you probably have. It’s available for purchase here. Since it debuted last year it’s been fun to see the great uses it’s been put to.

Suann used it for birthday party favors:

Andres used it to design his wedding invitation suite.

Mimi used it in DIY drink labels.

Jessica herself used it to design a suite for Bella Figura.

Betsywhite used it in her “Bella” invitation.

I must say I won’t discriminate, however. I also love the font “Memoriam,” which Lauren used for her wedding’s paper products, and I love whatever swirly font Melangerie NYC used on their tote bag.

More deets on the program here and the guestbook here.

What’s your favorite font?

Since it’s Kate’s birthday today (happy birthday, sister!), I thought it was as good a time as any to share her wedding invitation with y’all. These were definitely a labor of love, but since we didn’t print them ourselves, not a particularly agonizing process. In fact, I would say we were as pleased with the end result as we were the process. Without further ado…

We chose the A7 envelopes in matte lemon drop from Paper Presentation. I hand-wrote the addresses with a simple black pen, and Kate chose the wedding cake stamps.

As you probably have gathered by now, bunting is something of a theme for this wedding, and we decided to carry that through to the paper goods, as well. The envelope liners were conceptualized by me, actualized by the fabulous Chelsey from Fourth & Folded, printed and cut by me, and installed by Kate. Teamwork, I tell you!

The stack guests saw when they opened the flap. From front to back, we have reception card, second reception card, reply postcard, information card, and wedding invitation, all tied off with yellow and white baker’s twine from Divine Twine.

Instead of including a reply card, we included a reply postcard from the wedding location, and asked guests to write a note letting us know which events they’d be able to attend. I’m jealous Kate will be receiving 100 pretty postcards in the mail over the next two months!

The whole suite:

We went with simple wording for the invitation, and opted to recognize C’s parents, as well.

“And afterward for lunch and lawn games,” says the reception card.

K and C will be having a second reception in C’s home state since a significant number of his family and family friends won’t be able to travel across the country for the August events.

The information card was double-sided. The first side detailed the weekend’s events, starting, as you can see, with a wiffle ball game and wharf jumping. Whee!

The reverse included some of the details found on K + C’s wedding website, including travel and packing information.

One more look at the whole shebang…

…and it’s on to the nitty-gritty.

Cost Breakdown:
–$423 for 100 letterpress invitations, 100 letterpress reception cards, 25 letterpress California reception cards, and 100 double-sided, flat-printed information cards from Clinton Press
–$50 (approximately) for paper for all suite pieces from Paper Depot. If there was one thing we (I) could have changed, it would have been to order thicker paper.
–$37.05 for 125 matte lemon drop A7 envelopes from Paper Presentation
–$50 for 100 postcards from the wedding location
–$7.50 for baker’s twine from Divine Twine. (The spool is $15, but we used half for this project and half for another.)
–$15 (approximately) for the black markers and ink pad for addressing
–$0 for envelope liners. I printed them on my home computer and Chelsey kindly gifted her services. We love you, Chelsey!!
–$25.76 for reply postcard postage
–$56.12 for invitation postage

TOTAL: $664.43

We mailed 92 invitations, which comes out to a cost of $7.22 per invite. Yes, we easily could have bought something cheaper, but they wouldn’t have been as perfect for this wedding. We actually had budgeted (somewhat arbitrarily) $668 for invitations, so I’d say we did pretty well!

What do you think? Would you be excited about K + C’s wedding if you got this in the mail?!