Project - Engagement Puzzle

So back in high school, my fiancee became friends with a wonderful young woman named Hitomi who was an exchange student from Japan. She's a lot of the reason we went over for a visit a few years back, and when Carla and I announced our engagement, Hitomi was awesome and made us a personalized Japanese Kit Kat box designed with all kinds of images from our engagement and Facebook.

A little while ago, Hitomi announced her engagement to Zac, a mutual friend of ours who was also in Japan, and we immediately started thinking about what we could do for them. Always wanting to push for a new project, we eventually came to the puzzle idea and I set forth!

This sort of project is always interesting because it really flexes the networking muscles: I had to source out a new printer to create the actual puzzle (most places couldn't print to such a thick stock), I had to contact Zac's dad to source high quality images of their engagement, and I had to put the whole thing together on a tight timeline.

In the end, I'm extremely happy with the results, as were the happy couple. Thanks for reading!

Project - Rustic Wedding Card

So I believe in my last post I commented that I was working on a few little projects that I couldn't necessarily name because the final recipients of the designs read this blog.

Well the dates have passed, the projects are finished and in hands, so I no longer need to protect the innocent! With that I bring you - HOLLYWOOD WEDDING REDEUX!!

*explosion* *screeching tires* *Wilhelm scream*

*cough*

So my sister commissioned me for some decorations for a wedding party a few months ago and the wedding was on the 13th. From what I hear it went beautifully. After the fact, she also wanted to give the bride and groom a special congratulatory card that spoke to the down-to-earth, rustic theme of the wedding, and asked me to step in and produce something.

This was around the time that I was experimenting with moving cards, and I had two ideas right off the bat for this card: a pop up birdcage and a scrap booking look to the outside. My sister agreed on both, and I set to it. Amazingly, Canon paper offers a neat template for creating a pop up birdcage, and it was the cleanest one I was able to find online. (I modified mine a little because it was A LOT of small pieces needing to be glued together)

From there I worked a sort of found object look to the front, including dollar store jewellery for some wedding bands, and the rest is history:

As always, thanks for reading!

One For The Road

Good morning gentle readers.

I just wanted to drop a line to say that the Intelligent Designs blog is still up and running. September was a little slow for business, but picked up in terms of side/personal projects that keep me busy but don't necessarily make money :P

Many of these projects are actually almost over as well, and I will be creating posts surrounding them. I can't really go into the details of these posts at the moment because some of them are gifts or surprises for people who may or may not read this blog, so yea...

Moving on...

September was good for networking and building business contacts. Hopefully October picks up but if it doesn't, I'm going to put some thought into more of my personal projects (that are for nobody but me) and see if they can make some money.

I'll probably blog about that later. Until then, thanks as always for reading!