What happens when four stationery designers obsessed with all things paper join forces? A can’t miss PAPERPALOOZA! Our studios are overflowing with luxury envelopes, rolls and rolls of ribbon, fine papers from India, Italy, and Japan – and so much more!

This is a great opportunity for DIY brides, scrapbookers, crafters, and paper lovers to get some fantastic goods at prices far below retail!

NEED TO KNOW DETAILS:

Date and Time: Saturday, July 11, 2009 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Location: Real Card Studio 117 First Avenue North, Seattle (enter from the alley between 1st Avenue and Queen Anne Avenue North)

pssst… The first 20 people to email sale@mmmpaper.com will receive an invitation to our EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW HOUR from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM! Get first pick of all the goodies! Coffee and yummy treats will be served.

Hosted by Brown Sugar Design, Ephemera Custom Letterpress, mmm…paper, and Real Card Studio

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After settling into our new studio, we hosted a small open house to show off our great new space! Jodi and Arianna from Woodland Flowers provided gorgeous floral arrangements for the event and we thoroughly enjoyed mingling with friends and colleagues!

Jonathan and I had so much fun creating invitations for the open house – a vintage inspired design that we then had letterpressed on chipboard. The invites were either hand delivered or mailed in gorgeous chocolate or papaya envelopes with wrap-around labels.

I promised I’d share photos of our new studio and here they are! We share the studio with a wonderful floral design company, Woodland Flowers (the beautiful flowers in the photos below were designed by them). Some of our favorite details about the studio are the large open size, the exposed brick walls, and the vaulted ceilings. The room gets a lot of natural light and feels roomy and warm.

The paint color took some trial and error – we wanted a warm and cozy gray, which proved more difficult to find than we expected. But eventually we found the perfect shade, and I can’t be happier with the results! It works nicely with the brick and with all of our white furniture.

The chairs were a find from a vintage furniture resale shop here in Seattle. Once we brought them into the studio, we discovered they are a dead-on match to the existing green carpet. At first we weren’t too sure about either the carpet or the matchiness with the chairs – but we’ve decided to like it for now. Maybe eventually we will be able to change the carpet.

We’re looking forward to many wonderful meetings with our clients in our new space!

As we mentioned a while back, we had bid farewell to our old studio a few weeks ago. It served us well for a couple of years, but after the initial move we went into serious studio set-up mode.

Above is just a quick sneak peek into what we were dealing with as we started to get things together. As you can see, there are some good bones to the room: exposed brick walls, vaulted ceilings and windows with great sunlight. Stay tuned for a in-depth before and after shots of our studio setup that Whitney will post next. We’re excited about the new studio and the chance to meet our clients here as well as all our industry friends.

We have some big news!

This weekend, we will be moving to a new studio! While we’ve loved our location in downtown Kirkland in the Brooks Building, we’re very excited to announce that we’re moving to a new, larger space! We’ll still be in downtown Kirkland – only a block away from our old location. (Literally – old address: 613 Market, new address: 730 Market).

We’re moving to a second floor studio and will be sharing the studio space with the talented ladies of Woodland Flowers. More details to follow, including before and after photos!

The move is exciting, but somewhat bittersweet, since we’ll be leaving the studio we’ve been in for the past 2 years. It has served us well – but we’ve very excited to be moving on to new digs! MORE DETAILS COMING SOON!

Just a quick update to the little challenge to ourselves – and possibly others (if you’re not sure what we are talking about check out this post):

Well, Whitney and I did it. (Personally, I did fall behind with my commenting on Friday, but caught up on Saturday.) Both of us noticed that there were a couple of days that when we went back and thought about it, we ended up commenting more that three times without even realizing it. We’ve also both found new blogs that we suddenly can’t live without – both of our google readers are even more loaded up now than they were before. Up next: week 2!

In the words of our friend Keith – Viva Communication!

I’ve been rethinking our studio recently – I think it is due for some new, fresh changes. I’m thinking lots of white (combined with the some of the dark brown furniture we already have), clear acrylic accessories, succulents, and some new storage.

left to right, top to bottom:

ikea docksta table | succulents photo from brides.com | cb2 lumiere pillar holders | west elm scoopback chair | cb2 sidecar high dining table | west elm canvas storage bins | cb2 beaker glass pitcher | cb2 zombie tumblers | cb2 format tray

Here is another sneak peek for another custom wedding invitation order we’ve been working on, this time in shades of purple, grass green, and bright white. The invitation is foil-embossed on metallic purple paper and is absolutely stunning in person (the photos don’t do it justice!) The additional pieces are offset printed in deep purple ink on thick white cardstock and the entire set is packaged nicely in a grassy green inner envelope.

More photos to follow later, but for now, here’s a taste!

I finally got around to taking some photos this week of some recent work, so I will be posting a few little peeks of what we’ve been up to this week!

This invitation suite is so much fun! The invitations won’t go out to their guests for another couple of months, so I can’t post too much yet. But those of you who follow us on twitter might remember me tweeting about an invitation suite in gray, canary yellow, and aqua. This is that set – and it’s so cute and fresh – I can hardly wait for those to be mailed out!

I have been so excited to share this beautiful event! Katie and Andrew came to us with some beautiful and stylish ideas and we had so much fun turning their ideas into reality!

One of their biggest needs was to make sure their guests – both locals and out-of-towners – could get around easily. Most guests needed to be able to navigate ferry schedules as well as driving directions, so the invitation turned into a “travel packet” of sorts – all necessary information was included in a pocket style invite that was then tucked in a handy, organized folio pocket.

Katie and Andrew worked with us on their day-of items as well, including unique accordion-style programs, table numbers, and escort cards. The escort cards were black with white print, and were arranged on a bed of white hydrangeas – stunning!

The wedding and related events were beautifully styled by Stacy Kvam of SK Wedding and Event Design, who was right there with Katie and Andrew through every step of their planning. All of these gorgeous photos were shot by Kim and Adam Bamberg of La Vie Photography (thank you Kim, for sharing these photos with us!)