Creating Memories

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My parents flanked by my brothers

This past weekend I had the great privilege and honor of seeing my parents renew their wedding vows in celebration of their 60th wedding anniversary. Given the divorce-riddled society we live in nowadays, such a milestone is rarely achieved. Such an occasion deserved nothing less than a tremendous effort on my part and I'm happy to say I delivered.

I chose a theme of butterflies and flowers in spring colors of

Matchbook favors in spring colors.

peach, blue and green and carried this theme throughout all the items. The favors, in spite of being the smallest of these items, turned out to be the most intricate and labor-intensive. Each matchbook was comprised of 15 individual pieces, all of which had to be cut one at a time. The butterfly alone is made up of four separate pieces. Although there were only 22 matchbooks, it took over a week of creating a prototype, tweaking it, then going into production. Once they were complete, I needed a means to carry them so they wouldn't be crushed or soiled. For this I used a bakery box and

A peek inside the favors

decorated the top to match the predetermined theme.

A decorated bakery box to hold the
favors.

There was one other thing I had to do last minute and that was to arrange and decorate my mother's bouquet. She didn't want to go through the expense of buying an expensive floral arrangement from a florist so she chose to purchase a dozen roses and some baby's breath from a local supermarket flower shop and handed them to me. She also gave me some silvery ribbon from which to fashion a bow. Inasmuch as I'm not a floral arranger, this prospect had me a little nervous but I'm happy to say that turned out beautifully as well. Unfortunately I neglected to photograph the finished bouquet, with its full, silvery bow, long sheer streamers and tissue paper wrapping hand stamped with watermarked images of hearts and butterflies.

The card I made to present
to my folks.

I then had to make a card for the occasion because, let's face it, Hallmark just wasn't going to cut it. Since I couldn't do any work on this project during the day, everything had to be done at night. I lost many hours of sleep but managed to finished everything in time AND managed to get some shut-eye before the big event.

Here are some of the materials I used to create the projects you see here. If you have any questions about how any of these was made, feel free to send me an email at gypsiwoman55@yahoo.com. 

• Bazzill Basics cardstock - Glass Slipper
• Colorbok Glitter Paper Pack - White
• Michael Miller Memories Fabric Paper (discontinued)
• Cutting Dies: 
• Paper Artist - Viney Swirl; 
• Spellbinders Nestabilities - Floral Ovals; 
• Spellbinders Borderabilities - A2 Scalloped Borders One
• Spellbinders Borderabilities - A2 Curved Borders One
• Spellbinder Shapeabilities - Butterflies Two
• Memory Box - Vivienne Butterfly (for butterfly body)
• Embossing folders:
• ProvoCraft Cuttlebug - Swiss Dots
• Sizzix Textured Impressions - Elegant Lines
• Distress Stickles (Ranger Industries) - Stormy Sky, Wild Honey
• Inkssentials (Ranger Industries) - Glossy Accents
• Aleene's Fast Grab Tacky Glue
• Miracle Tape (double-sided super sticky tape) - various widths
• Martha Stewart scoring board
• Fiskars 12" SureCut Deluxe Craft Paper Trimmer
• Assorted scissors and craft knives
• Assorted bling and fabric flowers from my stash

This is by no means a comprehensive list but it does represent most of the materials I used for these projects. The length of the materials list alone should be an indication of how much work went into these items. Nevertheless I would do it all again in a heartbeat. For my mom and dad, anything.

Ballo ergo sum
 - Gitana, the Creative Diva