Free Printable Bridesmaid Card

Asking my bridesladies to stand with me on the big day was a special part of my engagement day. Since I saw the proposal coming a mile away (sorry Dan: the when wasn't a surprise, but the how certainly was!), I had time to prepare a gift bag for each of my bridesladies-to-be and "pop the question" to them right after Dan popped the question to me!

My hometown in the mountains of North Carolina is famous for tobacco, Christmas trees, cheese, and honey. A pack of cigars, 8-ft tree, or a wheel of cheese all seemed like weird gift ideas, so I went with the bees and the honey. However, you don't need a honey-themed gift bag for this cute card to make a sweet and memorable way to ask your ladies (or dudes!) to be by your side. Free printables for bridesmaids, maids of honor, bridesdudes, and your "person" are included at the bottom of this post. And the fun doesn't stop there: I've rounded up four of my favorite free printables from around the internet so you can find just the right card for your gals!

After Dan proposed, we trekked through the pouring rain to have our own mini photo shoot on Nashville's famous footbridge. The clouds parted just as we arrived, and at the end of our photo shoot, I popped the question to three of my four bridesmaids... They said yes!

With a population of less than 3000, my hometown doesn't have all that many specialty shops... But they do have an adorable honey-themed boutique called the Honey Hole. I bought up the last of a vendor's home-grown honey at our local farmer's market, and then found honey soap and bee-attracting wildflower seeds to round out the gift bag. 

My little sister said yes to being my maid-of-honor! You can set a maid-of-honor gift bag apart from the rest by printing the card in a different color or using a different color bag.

To download the printable to make a card or gift bag of your very own, click on the picture below. It's absolutely free for personal use!

To download the file, click on the picture above. Be sure to download the PDF. Once you do so, the outline on the bee that shows up on the Google preview will dissapear!

Here are just a few of my favorite free printables from around the internet. If nothing here strikes your fancy, then strike out on your own! I bet you can DIY something perfect for your ladies... If you do, post it to the comments below!

top left: only by invite | top right: coastal bride
bottom left: lia griffith | bottom right: a handcrafted wedding

Ombre Cross-Stitched Table Numbers

As a DIY-loving bride-to-be, my favorite piece of wedding crafting advice so far has been to pick projects that have the most impact for the smallest amount of effort. The logic goes: nobody's going to notice, let alone remember, the color of your meticulously lined invitation envelopes, but larger-scale projects show up beautifully in photographs and leave a longer-lasting impression. 

With that in mind, a disclaimer: this project does not follow that piece of advice. Each of these table numbers took me several hours (minimum!), so they were a very high effort-to-impact ratio. So why do a project like this? Well, for the past few months, it's been my way to unwind at the end of a long work day. I cross-stitched mindlessly while I re-binged my way through all five seasons of Fringe (which I firmly maintain is still the best show on television!). What's more, I plan to reuse them after the wedding... Perhaps they'll be hung in a baby nursery some years in the future! They might not make the biggest impact, but they'll serve as keepsakes that Dan and I continue to use and cherish after the wedding.

What you'll need: 

• embroidery hoop
• embroidery floss (2-3 shades of the same color)
• embroidery needles (regular needles will also do)
• cross-stitch fabric
• scissors

Step 1: Start by cutting out a piece of cross-stitch fabric that is slightly larger than your embroidery hoop. Open the hoop by twisting the knob until it's loose, and secure the cross-stitch fabric in the by placing it between the two hoops, pressing down until they overlap, and twisting the knob until it's firm.



Step 2: Whether you're using a pattern, making your own with grid paper, or free-handing like I did, estimate the number of rows in your number. If you're using two colors, divide your total number of rows by four. If you're using three colors, divide your total number of rows by seven. This will be the number of rows or "blocks" of each color combination. I estimated 50 rows and used two colors (orange and yellow) for this particular pattern, so each of my color blocks were intended to be 12 or 13 rows tall.

Step 3: Begin cross-stitching at the bottom with your darkest color. Since embroidery floss has six strands, I separated it out and cross-stitched with two strands of orange. After completing your "color block" (above: 13 rows of orange) tie and cut the string and pull out your next lightest color.



Step 4: For your next color block, use the lighter color on the bottom hash of your X (above: yellow for 13 rows), and the darker color on the top hash of your X (above: orange for 13 rows). This will give it the illusion of being slightly lighter than your bottom color block.



Step 5: For the next color block, use the darker color on the bottom hash of your X (above: orange for 10 rows), and the lighter color on the top hash of your X (above: yellow for 10 rows). This will give it the illusion of being even lighter than the last two color blocks.

Step 6: Finish cross-stitching with your lightest color for the top color block (not pictured: yellow only for 10 rows). If you're using three colors instead of two, you'll repeat steps 4-6 with the your medium color and lightest color.



Step 7: Center and tighten your cross-stitch fabric (hint: the knob can be used to hang the hoop), and cut off the excess fabric. Voila: you're done!

DIY Save the Date Display

Saturday Crafternoons is back with a vengeance, and from now until August, it will be all wedding crafts, all the time! That's right, ladies and gentleman, Dan and I are officially off the market. Last May, he got down on one knee and popped the big question, and you can bet your bottom dollar I said yes!

Our very first DIT (do-it-together) project was this save the date sign, which we subsequently carried all around my tiny hometown in North Carolina, taking pictures of ourselves. We wanted to make something generic enough to use as wedding decor, but specific enough to serve as our save the date. With something of a farmer's market theme to our impending nuptials, we thought this would set just the right tone.



This will be a post of many words, but few pictures. Though I swear I took more pictures of the process, I can only find a few of them! Bear with my verbal descriptions this time around, and I promise plentiful visual documentation in future posts.

What you'll need: 

• large piece of plywood (the softer the wood, the better)
• printer and paper
• ballpoint pen
• acrylic paint and paintbrush
• wood stain (optional)
• lots and lots of elbow grease (not optional)

Step 1 (optional): Stain your plywood using any type of wood stain under the sun. I stained this piece of plywood twice with a Minwax stain called English Chestnut 233. A word to those who've never used wood stain: it ended up looking nothing like the color pictured on the can, and all three pieces of wood I stained that day (with the same stain!) all turned out to be different colors. Apparently different woods take stain differently. Who knew? Not me!

Step 2: Print out your text, and place it where you want the paint to go. I used some tape, just to ensure that the text didn't move in the process, but if you're careful, you could skate by without it.



Step 3: Use a ballpoint pen to trace each letter. And by trace each letter, I mean dig that ballpoint pen into the paper with all the elbow grease you can muster, until your hand feels like it's going to fall off. (At this point, trade places with your fiancé and let him/her take over!)

Step 4:  Lift the paper carefully to check your work. In the right light--if you've used enough elbow grease--you should be able to see a faint indentation of each letter in the wood. Fill in any gaps you may have missed with pencil, or go over your letters a second time, if needed.

Step 5: Use a small-sized flat paintbrush to "trace" the outlines of your letters, and use a larger paintbrush to fill in each letter.



Step 5: Photograph it, edit it, and ship it off the to printers! We printed our bad boys onto 5x7 postcards via my favorite printing site, VistaPrint. A few words to the wise here:

1.) I highly recommend VistaPrint, but never pay full price! They're almost always having 40% and 50% off marketing materials. We've printed 50 postcards in the past for as little as $12! (Until January 26, everything on VistaPrint is 50% off with the code "SAVEBIG"!

2.) Keep in mind that number of guests is not equivalent to the number of postcards you'll need. Account for one card per couple/family when calculating how many to order.

3.) 4x6 postcards can be sent with a postcard stamp (currently 35 cents/stamp), but 5x7 postcards require a letter stamp (currently 49 cents/stamp). The extra impact and detail of a larger postcard was worth the extra cost for us, but this would be an easy way to cut corners if you're on a tight budget.



Confession time: we still haven't painted a lettuce onto our sign! Though Dan plans to paint one on sometime before the wedding, I just Photoshopped this particular lettuce smack in the middle there (which probably seems so obvious now that you know, right?). To be honest, you could probably get away with taking a photo in front of a blank piece of wood and Photoshop the whole darn thing!

Yogurt Face Mask

You may remember my housemate, Maggie, as the model for Saturday Crafternoon's post on cold brew coffee. Well, looking cute as a button in photographs isn't her only skill; she's a DIY pundit, to boot! (She has a dozen other charms and talents, but I'll save those for another day!) Her specialty? Making all-natural bath & beauty products with things you'd find around the kitchen. Her motto is, "If you wouldn't put it in your mouth, don't put it on your face!"

That seems like a totally common sense idea, but if you really start to think about it, it's actually pretty radical in this day and age. The average person puts nine (yes, nine!) different products on his or her face every day, each with a long list of chemical ingredients you likely couldn't even pronounce, let alone would consider eating. But your skin absorbs a significant proportion of what you put on it: why wouldn't you be as mindful about what you put on your skin as you are what you put in your digestive track?

Today, Maggie and our fellow housemate, Poli, walk us through making a cleansing facial mask that requires only four ingredients... all of which are not only FDA-approved, but probably in your kitchen already. This recipe is specifically beneficial for combination skin, but Maggie also offers substitutions for any dry- or oily-faced DIYers out there.

And in addition to this easy-peasy recipe, there's another free printable! You may have noticed that I've never included a craft on this blog that incorporates illustration. That's because, despite my love of all things artsy-fartsy, every dog I draw ends up looking like a cow, every person looks like an octopus, and so on. There are five-year-olds who draw better than I do.

However, what I love about this blog is that it gives me an excuse to try my hand (literally!) at new things, including crafts outside my comfort zone. When Maggie suggested I package up her face mask all fancy-pants so others could more readily make this as a gift, I decided to try hand-drawing a label. I probably won't be switching careers any time soon, but I loved working on this label, and I'm pleased as punch with the final result! If you want to use this printable yourself, it's available at the bottom of the post, and as always, it's free for personal use. Now, let's get started!

What you'll need:

• 1 part oatmeal
• 1 part coffee beans or grounds
• 1 part plain yogurt
• 1 part honey
• coffee grinder

This recipe is best for folks with combination skin: dry in some areas and oily in others (most likely in the T-Zone, i.e. nose, forehead, and chin). If your skin type tends toward being dry all over, skip the coffee and add in vitamin E oil or olive oil. If your skin type tends toward oily all over, keep the coffee, but substitute strawberries for the oatmeal. 

Maggie recommends using somewhere between 1 teaspoon and 1 Tablespoon per ingredient, per person. A little goes a long way: we used two Tablespoons of each ingredient, and had enough to make masks on six different faces!

What do each of these ingredients do, exactly? According to Maggie, each ingredient plays a critical role in revitalizing your face. Coffee improves circulation and serves as an exfoliant. Oatmeal is an exfoliant, too, as well as being anti-inflammatory. (Anybody else have childhood memories of Aveeno's oatmeal baths after chicken pox or a bad sunburn?) Yogurt serves as a soothing base, moisturizing the skin and holding all the ingredients together. And finally, honey is not only a natural moisturizer, it is also a powerful antimicrobial. In fact, one kind of honey been proven to cure the dreaded MRSA infection, which is resistant to most antibiotics (source: National Geographic). So say goodbye to your zits, and hellooooo smooth, clear skin!

Step 1: Grind the coffee and oatmeal up in your coffee grinder until you've got a fine powder. Since there was likely only coffee in your grinder prior to this use, there's no need to wash it out beforehand. It's up to you if you want to wash it out afterward: the thin dusting of oatmeal left on the grinder walls isn't likely to affect the taste of your coffee, unless you're a descendent of the Princess and the Pea. 

Step 2: Pour all the ingredients, including the oatmeal-coffee mixture, into a bowl. Mix the contents of the bowl thoroughly until you have a nice paste the consistency of wet mud. It's that easy! Your face mask is ready to go.

Step 3: Dampen your face to prepare the "canvas," and begin buffing a small quantity of this mud mask in a circular motion over the entire surface of your face. Buffing as you go sloshes off the dead skin cells, leaving your skin fresh and glowing. By the time you're done buffing, you should have a thin layer of "mud" over your whole face. Maggie wants to remind readers not to forget their lips: they're an important piece of facial skin, too!

Step 4: Now you wait! Find a comfortable spot to relax while the face mask does its magic. If you have a cucumber around, throw some slices on your eyes for the full spa experience (not to mention moisturizing and anti-inflammatory benefits) When the mask starts to dry and you can feel your facial skin tightening, you know the mask has done its job. For oily skin, this will be after five or so minutes, and for dryer skin, closer to ten minutes. Maggie recommends washing the mask off with a warm washcloth.

At this point in our photoshoot, Maggie's boyfriend and Poli's husband walked in and wanted to join in the fun. And why not?! Face masks aren't a gendered activity: they're beneficial for everyone with a face to put them on!

To download the full-sized printable (free for personal use), click here or on the image above.

Face masks are a great treat for yourself or for a friend. Download and print out this free printable to gift your next batch to a loved one: the label looks adorable on an 8oz mason jar. You can use Maggie's recipe or do some internet research to come up with your own: yogurt serves as a base for a lot of homemade face masks, and there are so many different kitchen foods that can benefit more than just your digestive track.

Now go treat yourselves! You DO deserve it! Happy spa day, everyone.

DIY Chalkboard Sandwich Board

I love sharing the creative pursuits of my talented friends, so I'm delighted this week to feature this chalkboard A-frame sign made by my super-creative housemate, Jessica Parra-Fitch. As a grassroots community organizer, she was shocked when she heard the organization she works for was willing to spend $200 for a plastic sandwich board to support her work. She wanted to gain more visibility in the neighborhood but felt that those funds could be better spent on things like providing healthier food at community events. She told told her colleagues, "I can make that myself for cheaper!" And indeed, she did!

If you already have a screwdriver and chalkboard paint (which you can make very cheaply with our DIY chalkboard paint tutorial, also the brainchild of Jess!), this project will only cost you $20 and some change. That's a 90% savings from a store-bought easel of a similar size!

I love how thrifty and creative this project is... The plywood panels are held together with door hinges, of all things! So brilliant. I could see it being used in so many different, practical ways: tailgating, wedding signage, yard sales, BBQ menus, low-tech scoreboard for sporting events, family game night (hangman, anyone?), kids' crafting corner... What other great ways would you use an A-frame easel? There are so many fabulous possibilities! 

Inspired to make your own yet? Get down to the nuts and bolts (literally!) to make this sign like Jess!

What you'll need:

• 2 pieces of plywood (can be any size, but must be the same size as one another)
• masking or painter's tape
• chalkboard paint (make your own with acrylic paint and tile grout with this tutorial!)
• paintbrush
• 2 door hinges
• 8 nuts and 8 bolts, sized to fit your hinges
• screwdriver
• wrench

Step 1: For each piece of plywood, choose the side with the cleanest edges. On one side of Jess's plywood, there was some text stamped right on the edge of the board, so she flipped the board over and used the other side!

Use your masking or painter's tape to create a straight border around the edge of your plywood. Everything will get coated in paint except this taped-off border, creating a really lovely faux frame around the chalkboard. (This was an idea Jess had moments before she began painting: it adds such a nice touch!)

Step 2: Paint the taped side of the plywood liberally with chalkboard paint, and repeat with the second plywood sheet: Jess used two coats on each plywood sheet. Once the paint is thoroughly dry, you can remove the masking tape border and move onto the next step.

Step 3: Flip both boards (chalkboard side down), and align the top ends, leaving just enough space for the hinge in between. Arrange the hinges such that they are equidistant from the edges of the plywood as well as from one another. You can estimate if you feel comfortable (this is what Jess did, and it turned out great), or if the perfectionist in you rears its punctilious head, then break out the ruler and your high school math skills! 

Once you've got your hinges where you want them, use a pencil to mark where your drill hole will go. Jess skipped over the middle hinge hole, marking only the holes on the far sides of each hinge: eight in all.

Step 4: Pre-drill the holes on each board using a properly-sized drill bit. We were fresh out of drill bits, so Jess instead used a nail slightly smaller than the nuts she was using. Make sure the edge of the plywood is hanging off the table you're drilling on: the nail or drill bit will be longer than the width of the plywood, and you don't want to accidentally drill through dining room table!

Step 5: Align the top edges of your plywood again, place the hinges back over the drill holes, and nudge the boards around until the drill holes align with the hinge holes. With half of each board hanging off the edge of your table—again, to avoid accidentally drilling through the table—screw each nut through the hinge and drill hole, all the way through to the other side of the board. It helps to have a second person to hold both pieces of plywood steady (thanks, Alex!).

Step 6: Flip the chalkboard back over, and you'll find some fine-looking nuts poking through your chalkboard sign! Use your wrench to attach a bolt to each nut. Pat yourself on the back for simultaneously securing your chalkboard sign and preventing a drunken injury on those surprisingly sharp nuts at your next tailgating party. 

Step 7: It's ready to go! Fertilize your creative genius, grab a pack of white or colored chalk, and draw whatever strikes your fancy. I especially love the the birds and grass in Jess's design!

And that's it! Have you made one of these for yourself? If so, post a picture of it in the comments, and tell us what you use yours for! This sandwich board is a blank slate in more ways than one... The possibilities are endless!

Hammer & Wine Housewarming Gift

You know you're really entering into adulthood when your friends start getting married, buying houses, and having babies. For me, that trend started a few years ago, when it seemed like every week another mid-20s acquaintance announced an engagement, marriage, or pregnancy. My high school friend, Maris, and her main squeeze, Cole, were the first of my close friends to hop the train to adulthood when they tied the knot last year. Then, a few weeks ago, they took the next step and bought their first house in Western Massachusetts! It's no small feat to independently purchase your own place, so I wanted to be part of celebrating their achievement. I scoured Pinterest for fun housewarming ideas, and this blog post from MotherStucker ultimately served as my inspiration:

Source: MotherStucker

Given my newfound love of free fonts and graphic design, I wanted to create a more formal wine label for the newest homeowners in my life, as well as something I could also share with all of you! The printable is available at the bottom of this post, and as always, it's free for personal use! 

What you'll need to embellish a hammer:

• hammer
• wax paper
• sharpie markers (I used fine point and ultra fine point)
• clear acrylic sealer
• tape

What you'll need to make a "get hammered" housewarming gift:

• embellished hammer
• bottle of wine
• free printable (available at the bottom of this post)
• scissors and glue
• twine
• colorful ribbon

Step 1: Use any word processing program to design your embellishment. Once you've got it properly sized for your hammer, flip the entire design horizontally (some programs will call this "mirroring"). Alternatively, you can use the printable at the bottom of this post, already flipped horizontally.

Step 2: Print your design embellishment on wax paper: a process that's tricky, but can be done successfully! I followed a great tutorial on a blog called A Piece of Rainbow, which I'll outline for you here:

Cut a piece of wax paper to about 8.5x11.5", just 1/2" longer than a standard piece of computer paper. Fold the extra 1/2" of wax paper over a piece of computer paper, making sure you have a sharp crease. Tape the 1/2" wax paper flap to the computer paper.  Finally, feed the paper-wax paper sandwich through an inkjet printer, taped side first. You'll be more successful if you guide the paper through the printer, so it doesn't get jammed or feed through improperly.

Sounds easy enough, right? It seems like every crafter on the planet has this down to a science, but my own experience was a comedy of errors! It took twenty minutes and several sheets of wax paper before it finally fed through my finicky printer properly. I ran to grab my camera for a picture when it finally printed successfully, and in those precious few seconds, my sneaky little printer sucked the wax paper back up and ruined it! I had to start all over again. Twenty minutes after that (and several more sheets of wax paper), the wax paper finally fed through properly again. I don't have a clue what I did differently the two times it went through successfully, but I can't tell you how glad I was to finally be done with this step!

Step 3: Get your hammer thoroughly wet, dry it off with a towel, and carefully tape down the wax paper embellishment, ink side down.

I'm not sure wetting your hammer actually does anything, since most hammers have a waterproof finish, but because all the tutorials I read recommended it, I went ahead and did it. (It certainly didn't hurt anything, anyway.) Carefully cut out your wax paper embellishment, and then carefully tape it down onto the hammer. "Carefully" is the name of the game, people: you have to do all this without touching the ink or moving the wax paper around on the hammer. Otherwise, it will be SMEAR CITY!

Step 4: Rub the wax paper with your finger (and a little bit of elbow grease), hard enough to leave an ink imprint on the hammer. Remove the wax paper, and you should see a very faint imprint of your design. Now, grab your sharpie and start tracing! I used an ultra-fine point sharpie to trace the smaller letters as well as the outline of "HOME," then used a fine sharpie to fill in the bigger letters in "HOME."

Step 5: Carefully take your hammer outside. Emphasis once again on the word "carefully": due to the hammer's waterproof finish, the sharpie ink never fully dries on the hammer, which is why this step is so important! Use 1-2 coats of clear acrylic sealer to seal in your sweet little design and make it permanent. Now that your hammer is properly (and permanently) embellished, it's time to tie it all together (literally) with the finished housewarming gift.

Step 6: Print and cut out the printable (available below). The original label on my wine bottle was easy to peel off, but if it doesn't come off easily, simply size your printable to be slightly larger than the original wine label. Glue the printable onto the wine bottle.

Step 7 (optional): Tie the hammer to the wine bottle by wrapping twine around both every which way and double knotting the ends together. You gift will still be fairly stable if you skip this step and only use a ribbon to hold the hammer and wine bottle together, but it will be even steadier if you use twine first.

Step 8: Tie your ribbon in a lovely bow around the hammer and wine bottle. And you're done!

Download the PDF sized for a standard wine bottle
by clicking here.

Download the PDF sized for a standard wine bottle
by clicking here.

Download the PDF sized for a standard wine bottle
by clicking here.

Download the PDF sized for a standard wine bottle
by clicking here.

To download, right-click on the image and choose "Save Image As..."