Claire's Announcement

I love stationery, particularly personalized stationery. I love the thick card stock, the crisp, professional printing, and the way I feel when I put pen to paper to drop someone a little note. (I also love writing thank you notes, but that's a different topic.)

And for as much as I love stationery, I love formal announcements and invitations even more. Picking out our wedding invitations took me hours even though I knew I wanted something very simple and traditional and my budget was very limited. I struggled over the font selection for days. I love getting a heavyweight envelope in the mail and seeing what friends have selected for their own wedding. Birth announcements are even more fun because you get to be more creative and they involve pictures of itty bitty babies and proud parents. I also love the archival nature of all these things- they commemorate very big events in your life and putting them on a page of a wedding album or baby book makes me very happy.

(Side note, my mom keeps my baby book up in my old room at home and I love flipping through it when we visit. It's so fun to read about the early years I don't remember from my mom's perspective. I feel like I get to see a version of her, and a version of me, that I wouldn't otherwise know. My birth announcement is also in there, a little card with my name and birth information hand-written on the inside page and a picture of me, wide-eyed and brand new with a bonnet on my head, on the front. That baby book means a lot to me.)

One of the things I was so excited about while pregnant with Claire was designing her birth announcement. I knew I wanted something nature-inspired (based on her nursery), I wanted it to do our much-anticipated professional pictures justice, and I wanted to hire my friend Ally to do it. Her company is Little Bears Designs and I think she did an amazing job. She was extremely patient with my back-and-forth emails saying things like can we move this box a little this way? or change this color a little bit? or add some vines, no take away some vines, no wait never mind I like them how you had them before. And when I finally gave her the okay at about 10 pm on a Tuesday night, these gorgeous cards, in a heavy card stock with a linen finish, were at my door 36 hours later:

(front)


(back)

One sits proudly in a frame on a wall of Claire's nursery and another is taped to a page of her baby book. I just love them!