Paper Source Shower

Sorry that it's taken me a few weeks to catch up on blogging. I'm finally caught up on my thank you cards (57!) and wedding invitations. Thank the Lord! Now it's time to sort through all of the pictures from the wedding whirlwind of the past three weeks. My friend trix wrote a cute little summary of my Paper Source shower.

Image: the mitchells

As I said a few weeks ago, my hostesses did a fabulous job. We had sandwiches, fruits, veggies, and cheese, and cupcakes. My friend VP also made meatballs and baked macaroni and cheese. It was so good.

There were two craft tables set up for the class -- one table for stamping, embossing, and envelopes and a second table for cutting, ribbons, and embellishments. I think that most of the girls enjoyed the stamping and embossing more than the cutting. (Except for my friend Piehole! She made about a dozen cards at the cutting table.) I used some of my new mad envelope skills on the Thank You cards that I made for my guests.

During the class, everyone made me a card on the sly. At the end of the night, they put them in a scrapbook for me.

And all of the messages were adorable. They looked like the cute staged messages in Martha magazines.

We capped the night off with gifts. Everyone was so generous. I received most of the "Glass Accessories" section from my Crate & Barrel registry.

Paper Source provided gift bags with an assortment of letterpressed note cards and free samples from other businesses on Armitage Avenue, including Vosges Haut Chocolates! My friend Alison made customized tags for each bag. Paper Source also gave us nice portfolio-sized envelopes to carry home our cards in.

I loved the packaging for my hostess gifts. (It doesn't take much paper-wise to please me these days.)

Each girl received a small personalized gift, an Environsax bag (my guilty contribution to society for all of the paper I'm wasting this year), and the personalized stationery sets that I mentioned before.

My favorite hostess gift was the flowchart that I made for my friend Balz. It outlines how everyone in our extended social circle met. She and her husband are the "mom and dad" of the group highlighted by the pink ovals in the center of the chart. What's funny is that don't even know a few of the people on the chart that were responsible for me knowing one of my girlfriends who was a shower guest!

(All images are the author and her friends' personal collections.)