Like Mario Loves Luigi

The Hungry Workshop sent over these fun letterpress valentine's this week. The first one, a floral woodcut illustration with vintage–styled sans serif typography is offset by your sweet, silly or serious handwritten message.What's your favourite combination? Our's is "Like Mario Loves Luigi".  And (below) for all those bearded men, the perfect card to proclaim your love.  Both can be found here.

Forever Banner

We love Caitlin Holcomb's handmade take on the throw-away party store letter banners. Not just for Valentine's Day; hang it above your bed, on an inspiration board, amongst your art collection. Delicate and dreamy aqua colored fringe hangs from a shimmering cord secured with a floral sequin on each side. The letters are hand-cut and sprinkled with the tiniest silver rectangular shaped glitter. Click here to see more or here to visit her table at Poppytalk Handmade.

http://www.nice-etc.com

Destination Guest Book Ideas

I am seeing some hugely creative ideas on the internet for guest book ideas, from vintage typewriters set up on tables, so let's hope all your guests will type out a personal message and hopefully despite their drunken haze be able to hang this from a beautifully decorated wishing tree or be able to assemble scrabble pieces in a cohesive form :)

I of course love all these ideas as they are hugely creative, but let's be honest, they are not practical from a European wedding point of view.

Let's face it most of your guests by the time they are presented with a guestbook to sign would have downed the best part of a bottle of champagne or sangria and will not have any co-ordination to test their keyboard skills on an old typewriter or delicately hang perfectly formed cards on a tree.

A destination wedding as well also poses the problem of getting everything home. It is all very well to make up a park bench and have your guests write on it and put it in your garden, but if you are getting married in Spain or Italy it is going to cost you a fortune to get this creative artifact to your homeland.

Having been working on this idea with some of our brides for our weddings this year, by far the better options are to have a photo or video booth, this can be set up for you here in Spain by our wonderful Becky Sharpe, she created an amazing video booth last year for a wedding here.

Or to have a wishing well such as a birdcage where guests can post their messages into this (hopefully!) and you can take them home and mount them into your wedding guest book, a normal shop bought guest book just set out or another lovely idea I have suggested this year for our brides is to go onto a site such as Blurb and create your own personalised guestbook.

This is a fabulous idea, and if you take a look at the Blurb site, for example, you can create and design you own book.

Upload photos of you and H2B, some fabulous photos of the country and venue you are marrying in, in our case Andalucia, perhaps photos of your guests as well could be fun and leave blank pages for them to leave their messages.

You can also add in questions for them to answer such as, where do you see us in 25 years time, any tips for a happy marriage, etc and see what messages and replies you get!

I love this idea as it is creating something truly unique for your wedding day and such fun to look at afterwards, you could even follow this book up with another one about your honeymoon and the first year of married life, a sequel!

This is also an easy option to get everything home and to be practical, as much as us creative divas love to think we will create a fabulous scrapbook after the wedding, there are many of us that will become bogged down with work and back to a 'normal' life and this will take a back seat and may never get done.

By creating this personalised book with photos and fun questions plus the guests comments it is already done and dusted will save more time and effort when the honeymoon period is over and normality returrns.

You will have a wonderfully personalised guest book on your coffee table without any effort on your part apart from having created it in your wedding excitement and another lovely part of building up to the day!

I have certainly got some of my brides thinking about this idea which is very simple and not expensive and yet fun to do so I hope I have given you some inspiration too for your wedding day by creating your own personalised guest book idea.

Real Wedding No. 4 Greg + Melissa

The wedding of Greg + Melissa took place at Sweetwater Farm which is situated in Glen Mills, PA on 50 acres off a quiet country road in the Brandywine Valley just outside of Philadelphia. The stone mansion was built in 1734 and has been restored to its' Quaker Farmhouse tradition. The ceremony took place on the back lawn followed by serenaded sounds of Appalachian fiddle tunes and jazz of Marc Silver & The Stonethrowers.

Many of the elements of the wedding were handmade and created by the couple along with her talented family members and friends. Photographs at the wedding were taken by Vantage Pictures. Melissa explains:

"I made my fascinator from vintage milinary snippets found in antique shops. My dress by Marisa.

We had my sister's peacock feather headpiece made by an artist from etsy, Mikiye http://www.etsy.com/shop/Mikiye.

My sister's teal dress was from banana republic--we had it shortened to the knees from floor length. My niece Megan wore a dress and headband I made her after we struggled for months to find something that existed only in my mind."

We had a farmer drop off 65 hay bails for ceremony seating. Friends arranged them into rows around the beautiful old tree behind the bed and breakfast, and we recruited all the kids to cover the hay with cut up plaid woolen blankets.

The boy's and men's outfits were all mix and match with loose color and texture suggestions involving tweed and corduroy, mustard yellow and all shades of brown. We were shooting for a casual country aesthetic.

Two days before our wedding we filled our pickup truck with buckets of mix and match flowers that florist George Baker gathered from the market. Dear friends (Kohli, Ania and Marilena) spent the morning of the wedding filling and arranging the vintage tins and toy trucks I had collected from flea markets and antique shops throughout the year. These amazing friends also made the bouquets and boutineers-- primarily using natural cotton, fresh yarrow, crespedia (billy balls), and chamomile. My sister, Aimee, assembled the vine and natural cotton wreath to welcome guests through the front door, and my dad carved the table numbers into the small orange gourds.

My mother's husband inflated all the giant weather balloons with rented helium tanks and the help of his son the night before the ceremony. Then my friends hot glued textured paper circles down the strings. We hung our own twinkly lights throughout the tent and provided sparklers for each guest.

I hosted 2 crafternoons to solicit help from all the amazing talent of my family and friends... We felted small balls and collected fallen acorn caps to assemble the felt acorns. They adorned the favors (photo booth strip picture frames). We put together the sparkler cards for each place setting, and assembled s'mores packages for the fire pit. The overnight guests' gift baskets were old fruit crates outfitted with fake mustaches, Philly soft pretzels wrapped in custom printed vellum sleeves by Bird & Banner http://birdandbanner.com/pretzel-bags/ and other sundries.

My brother in law, Mike and friend JP cut a fallen limb into mini tree stumps for the name place setting flags (top photo). Unfortunately the limb I found ended up being an extremely hard wood-- they broke about 10 blades cutting through it!

Greg and I worked on all our mailings together. I designed the save the dates and invitations, while Greg designed the printed bits. Another dear friend, Elizabeth, helped us cut, fold and sew each invitation. We sealed them with initial stamped wax and I wrapped them in kraft and waxed papers and sewed them closed for mailing.

Our baker friend, Rebecca Michaels Torpie created an amazing assortment of cupcakes in exchange for some interior design work I did for her shoppe:

http://www.dailycandy.com/philadelphia/article/75517/Flying-Monkey-Deuce-Bakery-Opens

We decorated the dessert table with a bunch of vintage bride & groom cake toppers gathered from years of antiquing.

Sweetwater has since remodeled their old barn into a gorgeous event space. Our wedding was one of the last outdoor tented events they would allow. We hope to have an anniversary party there in 8 years. Having all our friends and family stay with us the entire weekend really extended our celebration. We hosted a rehearsal dinner barbecue on the back patio the night before our wedding which really set the laid back rustic tone for the weekend. We carved pumpkins to place around the property and watched movies projected onto the patio wall.

We were so fortunate to be able to share the joy of wedding planning with our family and friends, as the creative preparations were as much a part of the experience for us as the ceremony itself was.

Thank you so much Melissa & Greg for sharing your special day with us!

UPPERCASE 8!

The next issue of UPPERCASE looks pretty special. Each copy comes with an authentic vintage matchbox label (while supplies last) plus a randomly inserted letterpress print, card or other promotion as part of the UPPERCASE Letterpress Sampler. (Front cover illustration by Lab Partners). Click here for more info.

Dispatches From Sweden by Fine Little Day

Contributor post by Elisabeth Dunker of Fine Little Day

"A great pleasure when I'm abroad is to visit supermarkets. Actually it can be the highlight the whole trip in my opinion. The best ones are those who have a genuine local range, with odd, exciting packaging. Extra interesting is to check out how the candy looks. I do get happy when I find nice looking candy like these cute crocodiles, which I found when I was in Vietnam a couple of years ago.

Here at Poppytalk I will to start with, blog about good looking candy and packaging that you can find in Swedish stores. Not necessarily all Swedish but what I associate with Sweden.


Between age 4-10 I lived in the same house as a Kiosk in Sandviken where I grew up. I remember how I dreamt of having my own candy kiosk and what kind of candy I would keep in there. If I would get my own candy store today I would pick the candy range primary with my eyes, and here is some of what I would choose.

The licorice pipe "Skipper´s pipe", a classic from Leaf.
Malaco All Sorts from Malaco.
Foam animals from Grahns Konfektyr.
Licorice cats from Bubs.
Chocolate pretzels and ice cream cones from Ert godis.
Salta Katten (The salty cat), also a classics, from Fazer.

Next time, more candy :)

It's Here! Our Valentines & Wedding Lookbook

With Valentine's just a few weeks away, we have curated an inspiring collection of handmade and vintage goods from our Valentine's and Wedding Market (exhibition) at Poppytalk Handmade this month; including them in a 25 page lookbook. Each image links to each individual's online shop. Click on the image to enlarge to fullscreen or click here to go directly to the link.