Elizabeth Grace

Monday 19 January 2015

wedding making day

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Now that it's 2015 it's finally the year of lots of lovely peoples weddings - exciting! Included in this is my sister, and the time is certainly flying by. A lot of her wedding will be homemade by ourselves, purely because we are a very creative family and it's just a big bonus that homemade decorations are much cheaper than bought decorations, as well as being much more personal. One of the main parts of the wedding is the table centrepieces. On Sunday we had a wedding day, with the intention of building a mock centre piece to make sure she likes it before making them all. In a previous post I showed how the trees we bought were transformed from a winter wonderland piece to a warm alpine piece. We spent the day making paper flowers to attach to the tree, and to put in the clear baubles that will hang from the tree. It's a working progress and we have a bit of tweaking to do to make it perfect, but it's coming along nicely.

Watch out for a blog post showing off the finished mock tree soon!

grace xox

Monday 12 January 2015

birthday cake

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I've had a very busy weekend baking, and I want to share my masterpiece with you all. My friends little boy turned 1 on Saturday and had his birthday party on Sunday. She didn't want to spend endless amounts of money on an extravagant birthday party that he won't remember! One part of a birthday party that is a complete essential is the cake ... that said some people spend 100s of pounds on their child's birthday cake, and your child is never really going to remember it. His favourite tv programme is dinopaws (I'd never heard of it) and they wanted to have a dinopaws cake for his party but without spending much. So I offered to do it! I've done a few cakes before with my sister, including an amazing Winnie the Pooh cake - purely just for friends and family, I couldn't do it as a full time career. I wanted him to have a really cool cake for his 1st birthday without spending loads, so that's what I did. I bought some different colours of fondant icing and a number 1 candle for really cheap and already had a cake board to use. I then made a chocolate sponge with chocolate buttercream and jam (any kids favourite). I wanted to make something a bit more exciting than your standard supermarket cake, so went for two tiers. I covered them both in green fondant icing, and made some flowers, mushrooms and other little bits seen in the programme to put on top. I then modelled the three main characters out of icing to put on top. I made a batch of brownies and crumbled it up to give a rubble effect and finally iced his name on the board - it's fair to say I was pretty pleased with the outcome. I'm by no means a professional cake decorator, but I'm quite impressed with what I managed to produce - and I have to say, that was one happy little boy!!

grace xox

Wednesday 7 January 2015

save the date

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Now that my sister and her fiancé have sent out their save the dates, I can finally share them with you all. I love graphic design and hope to start my own wedding stationery business - so when my sister asked me to do her stationery I was over the moon. Obviously as she's my sister I can't exactly charge her and would never want to. For me I see it as a great opportunity to practice my skills first hand and to build up my portfolio. What's really nice is that they've both sat with me during the design process and have told me exactly what they'd like. I then transfer their vision to the digital world, and with a few tweaks here and there we nailed it. There will still be a lot more to come - invitations, menus, seating charts and more. Stationery is a much bigger deal these days, and personally I feel it can add so much to your special day. With my sister it's almost like a hint as to what the theme will be and what the guests can expect on the day. There's nothing more personal than splashing your ideas and your wedding onto a piece of card to shout out to your family and friends.

It's quite clear from the save the dates that they've opted for an alpine theme. Each guest has been supplied with a lift pass, either for the whole day or just the evening. A lovely little snippet of what's round the corner. Let me know what you think...

They've been printed onto brown card to connect better with their alpine theme and overall colour scheme, but this shows the design!!

grace xox

Friday 2 January 2015

this is my year

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Happy new year to all my followers! Usually my new years resolution is to eat healthy and exercise (which I always plan to do), but this year I have some big goals set for myself.

Firstly I'm on the reserve list to run the London marathon for MacMillan. If I get in, I hope to be able to run the marathon and raise money for Macmillan.

But, my big goal this year is to start my own business. It's something I've wanted to for a few years now and now that I've finished university and I have my degree I'm ready. It's extremely daunting, but I feel ready to start my new journey. I have a lot of work to do, but I'm prepared to work hard and hopefully by next new year I'll have a successful business with a client base. If you don't dream big, you may as well not dream.

grace xox

Wednesday 17 December 2014

wedding cake inspiration

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Today I'm doing a quick post on some of my favourite wedding cakes! There are hundreds and hundreds of different styles, flavours and colours to choose from, but for me there are some that stand out from all the rest. I've never been much of a fan of really bright wedding cakes and I naturally lean towards very soft pastel tones. Something that I've seen a lot recently is hand painted cakes and in particular, gold cakes - which are just gorgeous!! One tier painted all gold with another tier in a bright, rich colour is so simple, but looks extremely high end and elegant. Something even cheaper than this is half naked and naked cakes - these seem to be a real big craze at the moment. Traditionally a wedding cake would be covered in marzipan and fondant riding with some flowers and piping, and don't get me wrong I still love this style of wedding cake as it is a complete classic. However, the half naked and naked cakes have such a lovely and relaxed effect to them, and I'd imagine they are very low cost as there isn't as much work to do on them. A lot of them have some fresh berries spilled onto them or some fresh flowers added, but this isn't essential as the effect of the scraped icing is enough to make a rustic and natural looking cake.

Possibly the coolest cake I've seen is the tiered cake with a black board tier!! Absolutely amazing. The whole thing is cake, but one tier is covered with a black board and written on with chalk. They can have doodles from the couple, or have their names written nicely. Just something different to the popular cake toppers and mini bunting, which are still lovely to add something to you wedding cake, but if you want to be completely unique this is a great idea.

Take a look at my wedding cake board on Pinterest for my ideas and inspiration.

grace xox

Saturday 13 December 2014

logo designs

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Now that I have my new gadgets to play with, I have been playing around with design ideas for my own future business. Initially, I had thought that my company name would be Elizabeth Grace (something I came up with with a friend), but thinking through this name I don't feel it will suit my business that well. Ultimately, I want to be a wedding planner, but to begin with I'm going to design stationery. In particular I'd like to focus on wedding stationery, but I also want to do birthdays, baby showers and any other stationery people might like. With this in mind, the name Elizabeth Grace felt a little too high end and luxury and it screams weddings. I don't want to be limited to just weddings, or to just the higher end of the market. So ... I have been playing around with names in my head and I really like 'Pretty Please'. I think it's fun and friendly and hopefully it doesn't limit me to just wedding!

Today I have been playing around with some logo designs for my new company name, take a look ...

I drew my designs on paper first and found this to be my favourite design. I then used Illustrator to produce the logo, with some help from my new Wacom tablet. I've always loved experimenting with fonts, so I used my tablet to write the word 'pretty' myself and put this into the logo. At first I thought i would stick with a monochrome theme as you can't really go wrong with this. However, there was no harm in playing around with the colours to see what would happen. Some of the added colour looks horrible, but on others a bit of colour actually looks quite nice. My favourites are the monochrome, the mint green with black font and the dusky pink with white font. Now I just need to choose my favourite one, although I'll probably end up playing around a bit more! Let me know which one's your favourite - and I shall be updating my blog with my new style soon. (Sorry for the changes recently, I just want to perfect my blog and aim it at what I want to do in the future!)

grace xox

Monday 8 December 2014

personalised stamp

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One of my favourite things is being creative, and over the past few days at work I have been having some fun. During the christmas period the lovely tipis from Beautiful World Tents (my place of work) are creating a unique space for christmas parties at The Three Crowns pub in Wisborough Green. As there will be a lot of locals attending the events it i a great opportunity for our company to promote itself. So we decided to do some crafts to produce some effective and cheap decorations for the tents. We wanted them to look rustic and obviously promote us, but we didn't want anything to big and in your face that would take away from the tipis. So we trawled the internet for some ideas and found some simple wooden hearts with two holes for string. We then ordered some christmassy tissue papers and the best part - a personalised stamp with our logo on. So I sat and decoupaged hearts for hours on end, and then some hearts I simply painted white and stamped our logo onto them. With a bit of rustic hessian string, we tied them up and they looked perfect. Such an easy and cost effective way to decorate a venue and promote yourself. This could also be a fab wedding idea. These days we are all becoming much more creative and a lot of couples choose to have a logo designed for their big day. This can then be transferred onto a stamp for anything from £15 - £60 (in some cases it may be less or more) and then this can be reused on anything you want. Another great use for a personalised stamp is wedding favours, and in particular seed packets which are extremely popular at the moment. Make your own slogan for the packet and stamp them all yourself - you'll find it much much cheaper than paying someone to do them all for you! Also, I actually had a lot of fun!!

grace xox

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