A couple of weeks ago, I was honored when our friend N asked me to be her bridesmaid. Now I haven't known N long, only for as long as Jake and I have been dating. But over the last couple of months we've grown very close as we've bonded over wedding planning and life in general.
N is getting married in September so I was launched right into the middle of the shower planning and bachelorette party planning. It's a good thing I've been following along since the beginning, so things weren't too much of a shock. The shower was a laid back BBQ style Jack and Jill shower. I decided to suprise the bride in multiple ways. Her favorite color is green, specifically lime green. I found cute lime green polka dot cupcake liners from The Bakers Confections on Etsy. When N first started wedding planning, I had put in her head that she should have a monogram to brand her wedding. She become inundated with work, school, and wedding drama, so the monogram was left behind. N is marring N, thus N^2 was born. I took her original ideas and concerns and whipped up something with the help of the bridesmaids. Details on the cupcakes and monogram can be found on my cupcake blog.
If you've been following along, you can count 2 suprises so far, the cupcake liners and the monogram. I had one more surprise up my sleeve for the to-be-weds. I ran to Michael's on a quick run to get supplies to make the monograms. But of course I do a quick walk around of the clearance bins to see what treasures I can find. I struck gold this time. They had double sided scrapbook paper that normally retails for $0.99 per sheet marked down to $0.14/sheet plus I had a 20% coupon in my hand. That's a whopping $0.11/sheet (pre-tax)! Oh, did I mention one side of the paper matched the cupcake liners? Oh yea, lime green with white polka dots. I didn't know what I was going to do with the paper, but I went through every bin and found as many sheets as I could. I managed to scrounge up 17 sheets.
In the end, I decided to make some bunting (or banner). Apparently, I can't do anything the easy way. This was a lot of fun to make, but a little bit more time consuming than I had originally thought. Good thing for Illustrator. After figuring out sizing and how to get the shadow effect (so that I wouldn't have to print and cut 2 sets of letters), I printed each letter on white cardstock and then cut them out with an exacto knife. Each letter was then glued onto the green cardstock.
The bunting reads "Natalie + Nelson = N^2". Yes, all the math whizes and nerdy geeks pointed out that the math should have been N x N = N^2, but N + N made more sense.
