I bet most of you may have started your online gift shopping already. Why not consider a range of colorful grosgrain ribbons to be added in your gift decorations.

We have a new arrival with premium quality on our grosgrain ribbons in solid colors. They come in 3 sizes of 6mm (1/4″), 9mm (3/8″) and 16mm (5/8″).

Please have a look for some of the colors below :

1/4″ Grosgrain Ribbon

3/8″ Grosgrain Ribbon

5/8″ Grosgrain Ribbon

It has been a while since we last posted since 2009 ad we will be back posting with more products and pictures.

If you stumble upon this website from other links, please feel free to spend some time browsing the many unique items we sell for scrapbooking, invites, cardmaking, papercraft and wedding favor decoration.

Pitfall #1: Rain
The Plan: A good rental company can be your best friend. For an outdoor wedding, find a rental company with a rain policy; this agreement will get you a tent at the last minute (usually for a little extra) in case of a soggy weather forecast. If guests will be walking between different buildings or tents, rent hallways to provide coverage along the way. For venues with a flat front, order a canopy and have valet parking to guarantee dry guests. Rain can also do a number on your hair. Consider weaving in extensions or a hairpiece; they won’t frizz or go flat.

Pitfall #2: Mud
The Plan: Include an instant stain-remover stick in your emergency wedding kit. If your dress does get muddy, wait until the dirt dries (a hand-dryer or blow-dryer can speed up the process) and try to flick it off. Still there? Use the stick. To protect white wedding shoes from mud during downtime, step into plastic bags and secure them at the ankle with rubber bands (included in the kit). Or for a cute photo op, wear preppy galoshes.

Pitfall #3: Chilly Evenings
The Plan: Cooler temps predicted? Post the news on your wedding website, alerting guests, especially out-of-towners, about proper attire. Another gracious touch: Set out a basket of colorful shawls. (Ask a friend from a big city to grab cheap ones from a street vendor.) Keep candle flames alive when it’s breezy by placing pillars in glass hurricane holders, using battery-operated flameless candles that look real (and even flicker), or ordering pre-used candles — they’re romantic and the sunk-in wicks won’t be exposed.

Pitfall #4: Bugs
The Plan: If you’re saying “I do” by a lake, at the beach, or on the grounds of a country club, critters can crash your party (not as funny as Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson showing up). Keep baskets of bug repellant at the end of the aisles, and light citronella torches during the ceremony to scare away mosquitoes. Ask your florist for the best blooms for outdoor weddings (ones that don’t attract bees). If you can’t live without a certain bug-friendly flower, the florist may be able to remove the stamen to get rid of the smell. Have your hairstylist use unscented hairspray and skip the perfume until you’re inside the ballroom.

Pitfall #5: Afternoon Heat
The Plan: Scorchers sneak into spring. Hang parasols along the back rows of chairs for guests to grab. Or buy small cold packs, put them in fabric sleeves imprinted with your monogram, and have your ushers hand out the frozen favors (for wrists and the back of necks) with the programs. Elegant and practical gifts for the groomsmen are personalized handkerchiefs; during a steamy picture-taking session, they can wipe away perspiration. If your cake will be displayed outside, order one covered in fondant icing, which holds up well in the heat. With all eyes on the bride, play with a half-up, half-down hairstyle that can easily be pulled into a bun if you get overheated. When a dress with sleeves is a must, consider an airy mesh material.

Courtesy MSN article by Nancy Rones.

Special thanks to: Laura Bianco and Kara Thorson, co-owners of My Bellissima in Florham Park, New Jersey

Technorati Tags: pitfalls, spring wedding, tips

Wedding favor boxes carry on the timeless tradition established by the early European upper classes, who provided elaborate gifts to party guests. Initially, the gifts were small fancy boxes known as a bonboniere. The boxes were intended to hold bonbons or confectionery delicacies at a time when sugar was quite expensive. A bonboniere was fashioned of crystal, porcelain or gold and often encrusted with precious stones.

Today the box remains a popular means of presenting a small gift to guests as a symbol of appreciation from the newly married couple, for having been apart of the happy event. The wedding favor box will more commonly have a very simple styling and be tied with a ribbon, to complement an elaborate or simple wedding favor hidden inside. The presentation of decadent candies in delicate boxes evokes the spirit of this everlasting tradition.

The wedding favor box can be very ornate like the bonboniere, or be very simple gift boxes. Elaborate wedding favor boxes can be found in porcelain, crystal, stainless steel or pewter. Designs available from each medium, vary extensively to accommodate the personal taste of the bridegroom couple, or of the individual wedding guest. Porcelain wedding favor boxes can be found that emulate romantic love with hearts and cupids, or fun experiences with replicas of everything from golf bags to cruise ships.

The wedding favor box, though traditional is anything but boring. Boxes designed specifically for use as a wedding favor box, offer an unlimited range of sizes, designs and shapes. Larger boxes can be found to accommodate stylish yet utilitarian favors such as bottle and letter openers, to glassware and bottles of wine. Three dimensional boxes made of die cut chipboard and printed with fascinating designs provide charm and whimsy, in addition to the secret held inside. Dimensional boxes add a decorative element to the reception table and provide for an interesting conversation piece. The designs of the dimensional boxes can emulate a single flower to a full bouquet. These cleverly engineered creations depict a wide range of everyday items including cottages, tea pots, delightful animals and light houses.

Variations on the wedding favor box have evolved over time to include bags, envelopes, decorative tins and transparent plastic tubing. Prior to mass produced wedding favor boxes, a bride and her maids or other women in her family, would crochet little boxes or drawstring bags. Today small bags are produced with organza, velvet and silk fabrics. Decorative tins can be printed with traditional wedding designs or be personalized to express the heartfelt sentiments of the couple. Miniature baskets adorned with ribbons are transformed into a delightful cradle for holding candies, cookies, teas and coffee samples.

Wedding favor boxes provide a means to blend tradition with a couples’ personality, allowing them to assemble a thoughtful show of appreciation to their wedding guests. The selection of a wedding favor box reflects the newlyweds’ desire to commemorate the day for a moment or for the lifetime.

Technorati Tags: bonboniere, wedding dress boxes, wedding favor, wedding favor boxes, wedding guest

Matting – By simply matting your wedding photos, you can instantly change the look of your picture and make it stand out on the page.  Double matting is even more effective to making a picture stand out. Use white or light colored mattes first and a contrasting color to matte the picture in last. For the contrasting-colored matte, use a color that’s in the photo to really make it pop.

Pre-made designed pages – If you’re not comfortable designing your own pages for your pictures, then buy some pre-made scrapbooking pages from any hobby store. You can simply attach your photos on these pages however you want and add any extra things – like stickers or content.

Rubber stamping – Consider using rubber stamps to add a little spice to your themed scrapbooking pages. Take a day at the zoo and bring more life to the scrapbook page by rubber stamping zoo animals periodically throughout the page.

Don’t forget the words – No scrapbooking page can be complete without some text scattered here and there on the themed page. You can use your own handwriting to write what you want or print something off of the computer and cut it out to place on your scrapbook page. Words can help keep the memory of that special day alive.

Something old, something new, something special – To make a scrapbooking page more personal and special to you, add some sort of physical item from that day. For example, a wedding scrapbook page could use something like one of the flowers from the bouquet or a wedding napkin to immortalize that day in your life.

Get others involved – Recruit your children or friends and have them design their own pages for their photos. It can be the perfect way to pass the time on a rainy day when you can’t get outside.

If the kids aren’t old enough, you can do the cutting and pasting, but let them add stickers and choose the colors they want. They can even add some of their own artwork to the pages if they want!

Use stencils – If you want to add some little graphics to your scrapbook, but can’t draw, consider using stencils. There are many stencils out there that have all kinds of shapes you can trace onto your scrapbook page.

Technorati Tags: scra, scrapbook page, wedding scrapbook album, wedding scrapbook ideas

Your Creativity Can Save You Money
No matter what style wedding you are having, it is appropriate to have wedding favors for everyone. Since rarely does someone show up without a gift for the newlyweds, it is in good taste to show your appreciation by giving out wedding favors. If you have a pretty large guest list, wedding favors can get very expensive. That’s why a lot of people are now taking advantage of cheap wedding favors that look great.

Presentation is everything. If you can make the cheap wedding favor look good, no one will realize that it was cheap. For example, at my wedding I bought a big bag of inexpensive mints to use as favors. To make it look nice, I found a bunch of small cheap wedding favor fold up boxes and put some mints in them with tool placed nicely around the mints. Then I printed out questions about my significant other and have it printed on clear labels and pasted them on the side of the box along with pasting our names and the wedding date on the other side of the box. With about twenty different questions created, each box had one question on it. Then inside the box I put a card with the answer to the question. This cheap wedding favor not only had good presentation, but it also worked as an ice breaker for people at each table as they asked each other what question was on their box.

Another good thing to keep in mind in having cheap wedding favors is to avoid purchasing wedding favors that have a wedding theme to them. For example, buying a little box shaped like a wedding cake will cost more than another really cute box. Great things to use are candles. Right now everyone is on the candle craze so they are perfect for favors considering how cheap they can be. Another wonderful thing about using candles for cheap wedding favors is that they can double as decoration during the reception. By cutting the light a little and having candles burn on the tables, you create a much more romantic mood, making everything look more beautiful. Simply decorate the candles really nice and make sure to add your names and wedding date to it in a creative way and they will work great as cheap wedding favors.

Technorati Tags: cheap wedding favors, great wedding favors

Wedding favors have become a big trend as an appreciation for the guest that contributes to the guest who attends the ceremony and reception making it a special day. Although this is not required, it has become expected at the reception, adding to the social graces that are observed. This has become a small part in the wedding planning process but the type of gift is not been stereotyped thus giving the couple a free hand to be unique in their choice. This gives the happy couple the ability to do the unexpected.

Unique wedding favors can be many different things; the key is to choose something not the norm. These gifts can be decorated to go with the theme of the decorations and add an air of personal flare unique to the couple’s special day. This one of kind keepsake will always help bring back memories of that air of fun and happiness shared with family and friends on their special day for everyone who attends the ceremony and reception.

Unique wedding favors come in many shapes and styles like a heart wedding invitations with butterfly engraved on the handle or a heart shaped “Heart-y beginnings “pancake and egg mold. Then there are the less practical like coffee scented candles that come in elegant glass and chrome coffee cup shaped holders and place card holders shaped like grapes made of glass. There are many other gift items that are vey unique and different from the normal and they can add a little touch of class and fun yet different from the normal things seen at other ceremony or receptions.

 Shopping for the wedding favors can be a fun thing and relaxing task for the couple giving them a break from the tedious and complicated planning involved in making every wedding special. Online shopping gives a larger variety because it is not limited to the shelf space or storage capacity of local stores thus giving a more fun, relaxing, and rewarding shopping experience. In addition this also tends to save money due to lower prices because of the amount of worldwide marketing found online. This level of competition lowers prices and offers an extraordinary variety to select from.

When following with today’s tradition of giving wedding favors as a “Thank you” to guests, certain things are expected as are what you give. Some couples like to be unique and surprise their guests with the unexpected. They use this as a break from the norm, adding just a taste of their own unique flair to their celebration of love and life, making it a special and memorable way of celebrating to be remembered as being uniquely theirs. Wedding favors are a great way to surprise your guests and a wonderful way to say “Thank you” to friends and family.

Technorati Tags: unique, wedding favors, Weddings

No matter whether you’re a brand new bride or you’ve been married for some time, you may want to make a scrapbook about your wedding for a remembrance. Perhaps you’re waiting impatiently to get those pictures back from the wedding, or maybe you’ve had some setting around for some time that you’ve been thinking about using for your scrapbook. Either way, it can be so much fun to create a book about your wedding using great scrapbooking ideas for wedding books. Not sure where to get started with your wedding scrapbook Well, here are a few scrapbooking ideas for wedding scrapbooks that will get you started.

Idea No.1 – Get Expressive with a Page on How You Met – Of course there had to be a point in time where the two of you met, and no doubt you have some pictures around of that time when you met, this is one you definitely will want to include. Not only should you pick out some pictures to add to this page, but also consider having you both express how you felt about the first meeting on the page as well.

Idea No.2 – A Page of Advice – Another of the many scrapbooking ideas, is to allow everyone at the wedding to offer a bit of advice. Pass around a page for everyone to add their advice to, and then you can add it later to your scrapbook. While asking for everyone’s advice may sound a bit scary to you, it can be a great way to include all your family members and friends in your wedding scrapbook.

Idea No.3 – Use the Wedding Memorabilia – Do you have a nice collection of memorabilia from your wedding? If you do, then you may want to use them for your books. You can take pressed flowers, confetti, favors, and more and use them throughout the entire scrapbook instead of having to go out and purchase embellishments for the book. Also, you may want to have special pages for the invitations, the lists of guests.

Idea No.4 – Don’t Forget to Journal – It’s a great idea to journal about your thoughts, feelings, details, or ideas. Later these can be used as scrapbooking ideas. You can take all the thoughts that you have written down and add some journaling to the scrapbook so you’ll remember how you felt and what you were thinking on your big day.

As you can see, there are many great scrapbooking ideas for wedding scrapbooks that you can use. No doubt you’ll enjoy using these ideas for your very own scrapbook. Of course these scrapbooking ideas for wedding books are just a beginning of what you can do with your scrapbook. Consider coming up with more of your own creativity to add to the book as well and you’ll definitely have a book that you can cherish for years.

Technorati Tags: Ideas, Scrapbooking, wedding scrapbooking, wedding scrapbooking idea, Weddings

Matting – By simply matting your photos, you can instantly change the look of your picture and make it stand out on the page.  Double matting is even more effective to making a picture stand out. Use white or light colored mattes first and a contrasting color to matte the picture in last. For the contrasting-colored matte, use a color that’s in the photo to really make it pop.

Pre-made designed pages – If you’re not comfortable designing your own pages for your pictures, then buy some pre-made scrapbooking pages from any hobby store. You can simply attach your photos on these pages however you want and add any extra things – like stickers or content.

Rubber stamping – Consider using rubber stamps to add a little spice to your themed scrapbooking pages. Take a day at the zoo and bring more life to the scrapbook page by rubber stamping zoo animals periodically throughout the page.

Don’t forget the words – No scrapbooking page can be complete without some text scattered here and there on the themed page. You can use your own handwriting to write what you want or print something off of the computer and cut it out to place on your scrapbook page. Words can help keep the memory of that special day alive.

Something old, something new, something special – To make a scrapbooking page more personal and special to you, add some sort of physical item from that day. For example, a wedding scrapbook page could use something like one of the flowers from the bouquet or a wedding napkin to immortalize that day in your life.

Get others involved – Recruit your children or friends and have them design their own pages for their photos. It can be the perfect way to pass the time on a rainy day when you can’t get outside.

If the kids aren’t old enough, you can do the cutting and pasting, but let them add stickers and choose the colors they want. They can even add some of their own artwork to the pages if they want!

Use stencils – If you want to add some little graphics to your scrapbook, but can’t draw, consider using stencils. There are many stencils out there that have all kinds of shapes you can trace onto your scrapbook page.

Technorati Tags: pictures, Scrapbooking, tips

However, the right wedding invitation need not cost an arm and a leg. It is not wise to spend a fortune that can be used somewhere else. The range of kinds and styles of discount wedding invitation is vast.  Choosing a particular one can be very confusing. There are discount wedding invitations and if you follow the guidelines below you will definitely never go wrong in choosing one. The key is to be prudent and not letting yourself get carried away.  You can even save more money if you follow these guidelines.

Choose wedding invitation style well. As mentioned earlier, your primary consideration in choosing a wedding invitation style is the theme and motif of your wedding. Is your wedding grad or simple? Will your wedding be light or formal? Other than that, it all depends on personal taste and budget. But whatever your taste or budget range is, you will definitely be able to find a good wedding invitation. If you want, you can even buy some cards and design your own invitation by buying a printing kit which is offered by some wedding service providers.

Determine the kind of wedding you’ll have. Your type of wedding invitation will largely depend on whether you will have a traditional or modern wedding. Traditional weddings would require a more formal invitation. On the other hand, a modern wedding will call for a more modern kind of wedding invitation. Traditional wedding invitations would only contain texts. It wouldn’t contain any graphics. Traditional wedding invitations are usually upright and folded with the words engraved on the right side. Cards used in traditional wedding invitations are usually white or cream and the letterings are in silver and black.  If you are having a themes wedding then choose a wedding invitation that is appropriate for your chosen theme. For example, you can have a sixteenth century scrolled parchment wedding invitation if the theme of your wedding is Tudor.

Choosing a supplier. Wedding invitations can be obtained by mail order, printer, stationers and stationery designers or you can buy online. Choose a supplier hat provides value added services and features so you will get real value for your money. Some suppliers will help you right the wording in your wedding invitation. Some will even help you with wedding etiquette rules and would help you if you are confused about all the etiquette rules involved in sending out wedding invitations. It would also be nice if the supplier has trained and experienced wedding etiquette and social correctness experts.  Choose a supplier that offers personalized service so you can be sure that you are not getting run of the mill wedding invitation.

A good discount wedding invitation supplier will also respond to your inquiries and requests promptly either through email or by phone. But your privacy must always be requested so make sure that any personal information you provide to them is used for the sole purpose of processing your order. Your order must be transmitted across a secure server, so your billing information is kept private.

Technorati Tags: saving tips, wedding invitations, weddings theme