Wedding – Page 5 – How I Can Do That

Don’t Waste That Film

Earlier this week my son grabbed my phone and asked me to smile. Of course, out of my mouth came the standard mom response, “why?”

That one moment flooded me with memories.

Flashing through my head were the countless images of the photographs that my grandparents took on their road trips. Images of the photographs that were taken during vacations while I was still a child.

If you’ve lived through life before the digital age, I know you remember all the moments where you questioned if the shot you were taking was the one that you wanted to take when you only have 24 frames on your roll. And how excited you were when you had any surprise bonus shots after you took your 24th picture. The pure excitement of what you were going to take a picture of, what you thought you would never be able to shoot.

There was one specific image that came to mind when my son told me to smile. It was the one picture that I took on a childhood Disney Land trip. We were done at the park for the day and waiting for the trolley to arrive to take us back to our hotel. My mom sat on the curb, talking with my dad. She took out her coin purse and had just pulled out her key when I snapped my picture.

We were all excited to get our pictures back from being developed. Our family tradition was always to sit down together to look at all of our memories that we captures. When we got to my roll of film, my mom’s response to the picture I took of her was why did I take that picture? Why did I waste that one frame?

I don’t remember my response. I probably just shrugged and said I don’t know.

But here is the thing. That picture stands out in my mind to this day, because it was a candid moment in life. It wasn’t posed. It wasn’t staged. It wasn’t the fake smile while you grit through your teeth, “take the picture already.” This was a picture of my mom in a moment of being my mom.

I don’t know if my son said anything while my mind went down memory lane. But I stopped tying my son’s soccer cleats and smiled for his picture.

Imporptu picture taken by my son. Not the best, BUT this is how my son sees me!

Take the pictures.

Let others take pictures of you.

During one open house that I was working, to sign up clients to decorate their weddings, this whole conversation came up. One bride was on a budget and was talking with her mom about what they wanted to do while talking with me. Part of me hated what came out of my mouth. But the other part stands by it 100%. For weddings, don’t ever skip out on having a person designated to take photographs. Even videos are important.

Weddings are one of the few times in life where all your family members come to celebrate with you. It’s the one time where the majority of family differences are set aside. (Yes, some differences can and still present themselves, but people are generally trying to put on their best behavior.) And it never fails that a year, maybe a handful of years later a loved one dies. And it was the last time that you saw them.

My wedding wasn’t the last time that my dad was in family pictures. But it was the last time that it was just him and I. And I was blessed to have a video taken of me dancing with my dad. You see, my boys never got the chance to meet my dad. I have plenty of pictures of him. But I grew up before the digital age. There were home video cameras, but it was one luxury items that was never on my family’s shopping list. And truth be told, my sisters have pictures of their weddings, but they didn’t have video of their weddings and their moments with my dad. (Sometimes we forget how quickly technology has made jumps and leaps in our lifetimes.)

This wedding video has become so much more than something my husband and I look back on and remember our forever day. I’ve sat down with my boys and periodically watch it with them so they can see who my dad was.

And this is precisely the reason why I absolutely do not regret talking myself out of a deal. I never wish anyone to lose a loved one. But I’m grateful if anyone has the opportunity to choose making lasting memories with loved ones, because there are moments of comfort that come when you can connect them in a time or day that the connection can’t be had.

Life changes so quickly. One moment you have a loved one with you and you can never imagine life without them. Or you have a friend or loved one that you are closer than close with and then life happens and there’s a difference. But the fond memories are still there.

I encourage you to make those moments.

And for all the brides that are planning their weddings that are on the side where a loved one is unable to be present for your big day, there are so many options that are coming more and more available to you to include them.

For my wedding, my husband missed his father on that day. He had passed away from cancer before we met, so it was physically impossible to have him present. The one thing that I did for my groom was plan a meaningful song for my husband to walk out to. Since his father was Irish, I chose an Irish song that my husband never knew before but spoke volumes to him. My Mother in Law also brought a picture of my Father in Law to set in a seat for him.

I know the photo in a chair is an antiquated idea, so I completely understand if that is last thing you want to do to honor a deceased loved one at your event. There are so many other brilliant ideas that are out there.

Families who have had advanced notice that a loved one would not live long enough for a wedding have made videos with wedding blessings/wishes, written letters, or even provided personal items for the “something old”.

Now there are the additional technology ideas of having a Q Code set up with the voice of the loved one that people can scan and hear the person. Or Spotify recordings that are being used. And who knows what will come in the near future to honor loved ones.

Even now, I’m kind of dating myself by remembering how Natalie Cole sang a duet with her father Nat King Cole. It wasn’t for a wedding, but just the desire of hers to fulfill her lifelong wish to sing with him. She had a well known black and white video of him singing Unforgettable, and she sang with the video of her father. Maybe that’s what you do to make a new memory with a loved one, where the time has passed.

Maybe your loved one is a grandmother who tatted or quilted. In fact, a Boho Wedding featuring a loved one’s tatted lace or doilies would be absolutely perfect! If it’s a small item that could be easily overlooked, make a shadow box and set it on the entry table. Or place it as part of your centerpiece on your sweet heart’s table.

There are even ways of incorporating a Grease Monkey loved one’s creations. Metal art or wheel hubs may not be appropriate for the wedding ceremony. But they can be incorporated in the decor for a cocktail hour or reception space.

The options are absolutely endless!

If you have a loved one that you want to honor, simply pick items that represent them. Any great decorator can find a meaningful way of incorporating absolutely anything so that it looks like its part of the larger decoration concept. It can still be classy. And you can absolutely still have the presence of your loved one with you on your big day.

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

Extended Life or Heirlooms

Part 3 and Finale to Make A File Do More

To end this series on Make A File Do More, I want to switch things up a little bit. Instead of a file, I want to focus today on how to make a Statement Piece work more for you.

This is particularly important for DIY Brides. You do everything you can to make your budget stretch the farthest for you. And the best way you can do that, is incorporate as many décor elements into furnishing your new home.

Instead of using cut flowers, for table centerpieces, use live flowers. When the wedding is over you can then plant the flowers in your flower beds or planter boxes.

For your entryway table incorporate lighting from unique lamps that can be used for your bedside lighting. Mind you, I’m not talking about your standard lamp. Use lamps that have character. Think along the lines of art deco glass, stain glass, jet beads, frosted glass orbs, or even something that reminds your guests of Chihuly glass art.

Make A File Do More Part 2

Make that one thing be the end all, be all of your design. Let it be the heart beat in every element that you put out. It doesn’t have to on everything. But that one idea is repeated enough everywhere that it forces all of the other ideas and elements to merge into that one idea. Everything else becomes backup singers or backup dancers to that one idea that you make shine!

Using a Birthday Train File for a Child’s Birthday

Last week I started a miniseries, Make A File Do More. And this week I want to show you how I personally made one cut file to make all the decorations for my son’s birthday. (Please excuse some of the photos. I wanted to make sure to get this posted without causing further delay on reshooting some of the items and editing. Photos will be swapped out in a couple days to better renditions.)

For each of my boys’ birthdays, I give them the option of their theme and I make decorations for them. This year my son wanted a Train birthday. I pulled out the file I made for Easter last year and I updated it with birthday balloons and an added insert to make 3-D Table Top decorations.

The only files that I used for my son’s party, and this blog, are Birthday Train and 3D Train Frame.

As you can see here, we have an absolutely beautiful cut file that looks great in its original form. But as you see, with the cake topper above, it’s an even better as a blank canvas to personalize and use hand detailing to create something above and beyond.

Children’s birthday parties, what are the three standard decorating items for Children’s Birthday Parties? They are Cake Topper, Table Topper, and Banner/Bunting. Everyone gets them. And these items are standard products found in every store, even a dollar store. The one thing that box stores cannot sell are what YOU add and make a standard cut file into something special and unique for the person you are celebrating.

The great part of making one file work extra is that you can pick and choose what you want to use, and how you want to use it. For example, the train is 5 elements. For the Cake Topper, I chose the most important part of the train and then worked with the baker to make the cake and the decorations cohesive. The baker was excited to see me today, because all they saw were my notes asking them to move the white icing balloons in from the corner a little bit so that I could use them as the steam coming from the smoke stack of the Engine.

Let me tell you, when you’re in one industry you look forward to the unusual. It was unusual to ask for balloons to be turned into steam. And I’m sure it made their day! It definitely made my guest’s day. I’m happy because this was the easiest way to make train steam in my busy mom schedule. Otherwise, if I had the time, I totally could have gone the next step and got dry ice and rigged a system to produce actual “smoke” for the train. (Something I would create and recommend to my clients.)

As you’ll see with the 3D Train, you can even change up how you decorate within all your different components.

Instead of the “confetti shower” inside the train (Cake Topper and Banner/Bunting), you can create reflections on the window.

What I absolutely love about this cut file is how easy it is to combine with any other decorative element you want to choose to go with. If you’re party is on the budget, you can go to the dollar store and get the balloon print table cloths. You don’t even have to coordinate you paper plates. If you child literally went down the aisle and grabbed plates of one color, bowls of another, cups of a third color, and napkins of a fourth color (all because they LOVE color), it’s okay. It’s perfect even! Because the different colors of the balloons have you covered.

If you have even more to your budget, you can have the dry ice rigged to all your engines. You can put in your photo booth, carnival stations, balloon arch… everything you desire can be used with this cut file and you have the perfect unifying piece to make everything cohesive.

This train can be added to shirts for the birthday boy/girl, the party planner or point person, as a go away gift for your guests.

Birthday Train can even be resized for countless other items. I’ve successfully used all 5 cars on a 12 inch wide canvas bag. It can be sized up to make even larger items. In fact, I sized the Banner/Bunting train cars up so that most are 12 inches wide. The Closed Car is the largest car, and that one ended up being cut from two 12×12 inch cardstock squares and pieced together. If I can piece together one train (and absolutely no one knew!) then it’s possible to make lawn decorations from this cut file.

The bottom line is that when you have the right cut file, the possibilities are endless!

Just like I said in Make A File Do More, it doesn’t matter which type of an event you are planning for. It doesn’t matter what your inspiration folder in Pinterest looks like. The one thing that every event needs is one item to be your focal point. Pick your favorite phrase. Pick your favorite SVG. Pick your absolute favorite Pinterest idea. Make that one thing be the end all, be all of your design. Let it be the heart beat in every element that you put out. It doesn’t have to on everything. But that one idea is repeated enough everywhere that it forces all of the other ideas and elements to merge into that one idea. Everything else becomes backup singers or backup dancers to that one idea that you make shine!

If you are interested in train cut files, please visit Pacific Northwest Event Design. Coming up in time for Easter will be my Easter Train. Sign up for my newsletter below to find out when that file is live. Also coming in the future will be seasonal trains.

The Files used for this blog are Birthday Train and 3D Train Frame. For more information on these files, please click the above links!

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

Make A File Do More

If you’ve been in any field long enough (craft, wedding, art, photography, name the occupation), you realize that you can collect files and ideas for eternity and use it once. Or… you can find a way to make one file work for you in countless ways.

For example, photographers take the time to develop their basic settings for editing a photo. With this setting saved, they take a photo, hit the saved button, the adjustments from the saved settings are automatically added, and then they make a few minor adjustments before going to the next photo. So instead of spending 15-30 minutes on one photo, they can have one done in a couple minutes.

The same can be done with cut files.

The perfect part of working the same basic cut file over and over again is that you create more value for yourself, save time (instead of always starting off from scratch), and you have a primed canvas ready to go for your next idea. Sometimes you have that perfect text or saying that you want to use, but don’t have the inspiration to make something unique to go with it. Think of it like your basics white T-shirt and jeans combo. It’s always ready to go and you just throw on something on top to make it just right for the moment.

If you set up shop at a craft fair, this is especially important for you. How many times have you heard someone comment that they like something, but it doesn’t quite fit them (whether style, color, whatever). By having one item a couple different ways, you decrease the chances of a whole lot of product going home with you AND find out how to optimize your sales by what style sells better. Plus, when it looks like someone is getting a one of a kind (instead of a cookie cutter) item, it’s most likely to cause a sale. It’s the thrill of buying what someone else can’t have.

Cohesion and simplicity work when you have one key element and you work it over and over again. That element is incorporated in everything. But it’s also slightly changed up.

For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to work a simple heart cut file over a few different mediums to show you what I mean by working the same file over again, for cohesion and still find a way to add diversity.

This week I’m going to use paper and vinyl with this Heart Card file.

The craft here is a card. But it has two different ways of decorating built in.

Each year, for Valentine’s Day, I write on hearts what I love about my boys. And I use the hearts as part of our house decorations. As you can see in picture 3, this card is perfect for standing on its side. However, my youngest is at the paper shredding stage. So instead of standing the hearts up all over the house and letting the boys scavenger hunting for their hearts, I will hang some decorative baker’s twine and hang the hearts like bunting/garland.

First things first, decorating. In the past I’ve done solid hearts and lace/doily hearts. I haven’t done a stain glass window style. And the leader, of one of the crafting groups I belong to) posted her heart idea using scrap vinyl. I loved her idea, because I have three small scraps boxes that I keep adding to. (I save scraps to minimize what I throw out.)

These scraps I cut into glass shard like pieces, triangles, squares… really I just grabbed my scissors and mindlessly cut away. The odd angled bits were probably my favorite ones for this project.

This was the set up for one of my sons’ class valentines. He’s a crafter and went to town, happily making his valentines.

There were a lot of the red heart components (from my Hearts collection) that were left over from prepping for my son to make his class valentines. And I was particularly in love with the thin spiral looking heart. So I couldn’t let those go to waste.

And with a little glue, the finishing touches go on quick and easy. I ran out of With a little glue, the finishing touches go on quick and easy. I ran out of glue stick and used some Elmer’s spray adhesive. Both glues worked great and I had no issue with the card stock sticking to the top of the vinyl (which was a combination of shiny, glitter, metallic and holographic).

After completing my 12 cards here (in addition to the 11 I prepped for my son), there is one bit of advice I want to give with the small pieces of vinyl. It sucks pulling the backing off of all those tiny pieces. If you puncture the vinyl, it really doesn’t show when you press it down and use a scraper to burnish the vinyl down. So you don’t have to worry too much about that. It was easier to take one larger piece of scrap, remove the backing, and cut as you go. However that has its own drawbacks. You don’t have the freedom to lay the piece down to see if it fits in a space. Nor can you adjust it if you don’t like the color combination of a neighboring piece. It is quicker, but you lose out on the control of how everything fits and looks. I wasn’t so much concerned about that in this project, because the red card stock on top framed or covered up areas that I was less than impressed with.

If my 80’s Retro hearts are not quite your vibe, please don’t dismiss this heart or technique. There are so many options out there. If you only use one or two colors of vinyl, you will have a completely different look than what you see in these pictures. If you’re not feeling the vinyl, you could do something If my 80’s Retro Funk hearts are not quite your vibe, please don’t dismiss this heart or technique. There are so many options out there. If you only use one or two colors of vinyl, you will have a completely different look than what you see in these pictures. If you’re not feeling the vinyl, you could do something different. Use Solid or Printed card stock. Paper Mache pages from a novel or sheet music onto cardstock. Or even use photographs for the non-scored heart. Glue on lace or doily on top of drawings, painting, or photos. There are so many ways of making this Heart Card work for cards or decorations for a wedding or other event!

Thanks for joining me today! Be sure to come back next week for the next installment for creating cohesion for an event with one file.

Files Used This Week

Click the links for Heart Card and Hearts to see product descriptions and get these files for your projects.

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

Modify to Personalize

It never fails! There is a picture of a loved one that you want to use (whether for a gift, a wedding, various other reasons), BUT the background just ruins the picture. Do not fear! This post is for you.

My son has seen me make a few shadow boxes for gifts and what he wanted to gift more than anything else was a shadow box of him and his BFF for her upcoming birthday. The best, and most recent, picture that I have of them is of course the one that had a pile of yard waste behind them. Fortunately, I have a trick or two up my sleeve.

Background removed and a new back ground added

There are a few good free online programs that you can use to remove your background. For this particular project, I used Remove BG, because they’ve always offered a good selection of different backgrounds with three different blur settings. If my count is correct, there are 93 as of the time of writing this post. And the best part is that you do not have to be computer suave to change your back ground. All you have to do is upload the picture and hit “remove background”. You will have the focal point of the photo on a checkered background. You can then superimpose this image on any photo you have or you can hit “Edit” to add a background from this program.

Once I downloaded the picture, with new background, there was one additional step I needed to take before submitting my picture online to print and pick up at my local photo department. From the photo editor that came standard on my computer, I resized my picture to a larger file size. (I had gotten the error message, online, saying that I had low resolution.) With this larger file size, I was able to submit my photo. And it printed exactly as you see above. We’re not talking professional quality, but perfect for this project.

While we waited for the 5 x 7 print for my 6 x 6 shadow box, I designed a layered cloud shadow box mat to make the print fit seamlessly in the shadow box. BFF Shadow Box can be found here. My son added glitter to the second layer and chose the font, text, and vinyl choice. My about to be six year old was so disappointed that he couldn’t do the shadow box from start to finish, but he has no idea just how much he did create in the design. So in honor of the work he did, all proceeds from the sale of this cut file will go to my partner orphanage in Rwanda for the education of the students there.

For assembling the shadow box, I started by attaching the 36″ fairy lights, with hot glue, to the back panel of the shadow box.

Many shadow boxes have a finish where you can attach the lights to the inside side and top/bottom panels so you can have the lights shine through the layers. This particular shadow box has a wax like finish and the glue would not adhere. The back panel was brown and I had painted with black matte chalk paint. The hot glue loves this paint that I had no problem attaching for a back light.

With battery pack lights there are two options for how you mount the switch. This particular shadow box had a slot in the top for coin deposits. For wall mounting, or if you plan to decorate the top of the frame, this is a great option. However the kids I’ve gifted shadow boxes to have enjoyed having the ability to sit the frame on a table top so they can turn it on and off as they please. For this reason, I prefer the second option for a hidden switch. All that I had to do was take an X-Acto knife to the bottom corner of the back panel (where the battery pack was nearest glued to) and cut out a small notch. Then I hot glue the battery pack to the back panel. Make sure the screw side is out so that battery changes can be made without taking the pack off.

Once the lights are secured, I turned my attention to the shadow box layers. 1/4″ raised adhesive tape is perfect to attack the two cloud layers and photo. The depth that you see in the final product is actually from two layers of the raised tape stacked on each other.

All the prep work is finished. The vinyl text is applied to the outside of the glass. Place the cloud layers inside the shadow box. Then close the box up by placing the back panel.

This project is perfect for birthdays, weddings, showers, and celebration of life. And now that you know how to remove backgrounds, you can now use your favorite photos that you thought was unusable because of what was in the background.

If you have any questions on how to do this project, or want to know how to do some other project, please leave a comment below or email me at info@pacificnorthwesteventdesigns.com

See you next week!

All proceeds from the sale of this cut file will go to helping Rwanda orphans with their school tuition.

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.