Aly and Kenny's Wedding!!

La Beaume Paperie was so excited to get to be a part of Aly and Kenny's wedding in November!  It was an incredible celebration of love, with a beautiful ceremony at St Louis's Jewel Box in Forest Park - followed by what HAD to be one of the WILDEST nights Royale Orleans has seen in a long, long time! 

Cutest Pudding Shots - EVER!

Aly and Kenny decided early on that they would like for the color scheme of the wedding to be Navy and Silver, and wanted to feature circles as an understated repeat design theme throughout the entire day of events, but frankly, Aly comes from a family that specializes in Celebrating... and the main focus of the wedding was having a great time with family and friends, the party bus, and the bar!!

La Beaume Paperie was thrilled to get to coordinate from the very beginning, meeting with venues, providing props for the save the date photos, invitations for the engagement party, invitations for the wedding and reception, paper flower hair barettes for the bridesmaids and flower girl, and finally the centerpieces and favors. 

...And did I mention Aly is my cousin?!  So this was truly a family affair! All of Aly's family and friends pulled together (which is kind of thier specialty) and helped to make this wedding truly amazing!

Special thanks to the Waymire Girls for thier amazing and relentless assembling, brainstorming, creating and dedication!

Special thanks to Nikki for all her help with the invitations and Save the Dates!
Special thanks to Cindy for helping to create amazing programs!

Special thanks to Laura for the breathtaking hairstyling!

Special thanks to all of the friends and family who helped make Aly and Kenny's special day such a success!

It was truly a treat to get to not only be a part of this special wedding and reception from start to finish, but to ALSO stay as a guest and family member and celebrate, once all the setup was complete!  And keeping in mind I mentioned earlier that this reception was such a WILD night - I appologize for the blurry pictures! Once the invitations were out, the bridesmaids had thier flower barettes in, and the venue was set up - I had one last task to complete as a cousin of the bride and that was to get CRAZY and help celebrate Aly and Kenny's marriage and welcome Kenny (my "cousin-husband") into the wildest and most wonderful family ever! 

Wishing Aly and Kenny a Happy Ever After!!



Charlie's Retro Space Party

Hello! 

Today i'm featuring some of the details from Charlie's Retro Space Party.  This was Charlie's 4th birthday, and the inspiration for this party comes from Charlie's recent love of all things outer space.  He idolizes Buzz Lightyear, was particularly enamored with the Mickey's Space Adventure Episode, and will watch Lilo and Stitch - ad nauseum - just for the space parts.  Often you will see him, absent mindledly running around the house, toy rocket in hand, "flying" high in the air while he makes the appropriate "Space Sound Effects" with his mouth.  Thats why, when I saw the new  Rocket Age Line by October Afternoon I knew this would be the inspiration for the design of the party!  Some of the pages feature a little boy flying his rocket that looked SO MUCH like Charlie that it hurt!! I was thinking -" OK, 1960's, sleek chrome, retro fonts, martians, robots, slender rockets, space ray guns and tang!"  Bu-uut, Google was thinking "Space Shuttle, CGI drawings of planets, rockets made of toilet paper tubes, and NASA."  So, in the end, because I do not have a time machine to go back and buy all my Retro Space Party Paraphanalia (unfortunately), I kind of compromised.  Or made a few concessions, anyway.  The color scheme was royal blue, navy blue, with orange and silver as accents.  Because we had lots of adults at the party, the "grown up" drink was Moon-Mosas, featuring TANG (or as a friend called it "Moon Tang")

You can also see in the picture I went again with the fabulous PaperWhite Designs of St Louis for the bright paper straws that I just cannot resist incorporating into most any theme!  I opted to make a "cake" out of Moon Pies, being both a southerner and oh so clever, and placed Buzz Lightyear and an american flag on the top.  I ordered some Astronaut Ice Cream from Amazon.com because I felt like this would probably be the only opportunity in my life to rationalize buying an entire case of it.  Yummm...

I wanted to mirror the packaging of the astronaut ice cream in my favor packaging, so i purchased these awesome silver packets on amazon and customized them with stickers from the Rocket Age Line, or custom labels I designed.  The favors were Martian Space Rocks (orange rock candy) and a mix of Atomic Fireballs, Milky Ways, and Razzles (along with stickers, again from Rocket Age).  I also made a paper pennant banner (I couldn't resist!) with some of the remaining Rocket Age paper.  I used mostly glass or metal containers or serving ware in order to keep with the clean lines and also to minimize the impact so as to not detract from the actual packaging of the favors.  And we made an amazing "soundtrack" on iTunes, with a lot of David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust!!   Some fonts that work well with this theme are Font 33, Tall Deco and Denmark.  Also White Rabbit is a kind of "MS DOS" font.  Hope you enjoy!!

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Fun Summer Pennant Banner Stationery on Sale!!

Just wanted to drop in and mention that La Beaume Paperie is having a sale this week for it's Facebook fans - Gorgeous, bright, modern pennant banner notecards are on sale when you buy them in sets of 10! They come standard with coordinating bakers twine and are available with an assortment of hand stamped sentiments, or a single letter MONOGRAM!! Now is a great time to order yours, they come fabulously packaged and make great ready made gifts for a host or hostess, or wonderful heartfelt gifts to someone special (including yourself!!) These cards when sold singularly and pre packaged are regularly $3.00 per card but this week, they are on sale for $14 a set! Contact La Beaume Paperie through the message feature on our facebook page www.facebook.com/labeaumepaperie or via the contact tab on our web page labeaume paperie to coordinate and order your set!

Linocuts and Block Printing!

I have developed a new obsession:  Block Printing!! My discovery of this art form sprang as an offshoot from my my obsession of all things Printmaking - Letterpress, Screenprinting .. it seems it was only a matter of time until I stumbled across Block Printing.  The basic concept of Block Printing is an amazingly simple one: hand carve something onto a block - ink it up and print it.  I find it amusing - having a background in "girly crafts", stamping, scrapbooking, etc, to see what a wide crossover there is between the more masculine, gritty starving artist world and the overly perfect, posh crafting world.  In my opinion, this is where block printing lies- the crossover.  Block Printing - the ambassador into the more artsy aspect of stamping.  Block Printing - the tatt'ed up and bohemian stepbrother of Rubber Stamping.  I bought this Speedball "Easy Carve" block along with a set of Lino Cutters (aka scoring tools for my stampers out there) and a Baren (aka pressure tool) for a total of about $10 yesterday and got to work.  I wanted to create a chevron background block print (aka stamp) for La Beaume Paperie business cards.  I was pretty worried, considering I have about zero skills in carving, but it was pretty easy and I am very pleased with how they turned out!!



Oriental Poppies

Today I finished a really awesome little bouquet for a client - Red Oriental Poppies - and I can't get the Wicked Witch of the West out of my head... "Poppies... Poppies..."! In creating these I used three different shades of red/orange, starting with a very deep orange at the top, then a salmon color, and finally a bright, true red.  For the centers I used black PAPYRUS tissue paper and fine champaigne glitter.  The client was very happy with them and I was as well.  There is just something mystical about oriental poppies. 

 

 

Red Paper Poppies

Our First Ever Blogger Post!! (and 6 months of La Beaume Paperie)

La Beaume Paperie is EVER so proud to announce we have now been operating for 6 months - and I personally feel like we are off to an amazing start.  What started as a tiny exercise in brand-building for a teensy St Louis craft fair has somehow grown into a booming little local business with a growing client list (and lots of awesome new friends!), a pretty impressive portfolio of completed jobs and victories, and hours of pure unadulterated bliss at my crafting table! After a few akward false starts in the web design/blogging arena I find myself pretty hesitant to "dive right in" (and I have also "found myself" an awesome web design company - who are working on designing a webpage for the Paperie)... But, I feel like we have got a lot of positive and exciting things to blog about and I am pretty much chomping at the bit!!

So with as little additional ado as possible - La Beaume Paperie's biggest project in an official capacity thus far-

        Handcrafted Paper Flower Centerpieces

              for a St Louis Wedding

Working with the bride-to-be in designing these centerpieces - I have to admit- might  have made me a little bit envious;  I found myself wishing I could "do it all again!" Her design ideas were so excellent and defined, regal and yet - so awesomely edgy and current!! She was naturally eco concious as well as eager to have most of her items designed and created by local St Louis artists/crafters.   Both the ceremony and the reception took place at http://www.moulinevents.com/ - an incredible historic building- originally a brewery, with tall exposed brick walls, rustic wood pillars and dark hardwood floors.  A stunning "Deep Pacific" shade was the prominent color featured in the reception design, along with a mixing of lighter navy shades, ivory and gold.  The outstanding invitations, designed and created by the amazing Abbie Takes Pictures in St Louis - were printed on a creamy ivory linen  in this incredible poster style layout, with vintage typography being the main design element. The defining touch was an area on the invitation advertising "Cocktails, Dinner and Dancing to Follow" that really gave the invitation a roaring twenties Dance Hall feel. Lastly, the invitation featured a small vignette of two navy, vintage inspired lovebirds which was repeated throughout the reception design- on everything from the escort cards to the tiny navy lovebird shaped paper "petals" strewn across the cocktail tables

The bride (who, by the way is the utmost SWEETEST bride I have ever encountered, EVER!) was very much interested in alternative centerpieces and decor, and loved the idea of locally handmade paper flowers in place of fresh flowers - she loved the idea of the sustainability of paper flowers that she could use after her wedding day as gifts or personal decor.  Together we designed two seperate types of centerpieces to be staggered throughout the reception tables - one type for height and the other for detail - the Mixed Navy Hue Poms - made of custom dyed coffee filters- which stood about 2.5 feet high and really added a substantial pop of color to the tall loft-style room, and Paper Rose Centerpieces - to be arranged in navy-ribboned clear glass vases with 2 dozen paper roses made from the wedding invitations and complementary papers, and also approximately 1 dozen additional paper filler flowers. 

Words fail me in attempting to describe the awesomeness of this event!! The bride was stunning in a handmade birdcage veil and fishtail gown.  The bridesmaids carried local (etsy) handmade clutches in tones of blue, and, in my humble unbiased opinion (!), the centerpieces really helped to define the awesome complex and eclectic feel of this amazingly executed evening.