James' Family Lines

(the names are blurred out just a little bit. in the real print, they are in black and really easy to see. they look great.)

p.s. if you love these family trees (the circle or the lines) and would like one for your family, contact me. I’ve decided to sell them. They’ll make a great Christmas present and if you contact me soon, I’ll be able to get it to you in time for Christmas.

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers…

Malachi 4:6

I love the idea of having a family tree in the home to always remember the wonderful heritage we come from. However, I don’t really like how family trees often look.

Then one day, I came across this cute shop: My Tree and Me and I fell in love. I loved their modern take on the family tree and wanted to do something like it (but not pay $120).

So I decided to make one of my own. Originally, I had thought that I was just stealing the idea straight from them (I saw the site, forgot to bookmark it, made one of my own, then found the site again), but it turned out that my idea was different that the specific trees they sell.

Here it is:

I love love love the way it turned out. I found a frame at Ikea that is 20×20 so I just need to get this printed and it will be a great addition to my living room. (I thought it was a little bit weird to post the first and last names of all my family on an open blog … I try to be safe about what I put up here … so I changed out the names for this post, but in the real tree it has all the first, middle and last names for James’ five generations.)

I toyed around with the idea of including more information like birth and death dates for each person (as applicable) but decided not to for right now. I just love how clean and simple it is. Maybe in the future I’ll expand it a little bit more, but for now I am very happy.

Now I just have to come up with another idea for baby #2. (who still doesn’t have a name. Guess we shouldn’t have used up all our grandpa names with james…)

i redesigned my blog. check it out. you'll like it

This beautiful sage green couch for my loft area. It’s so soft and will be great for when I have more kids and they are older for that room, which is going to eventually be a play room.

This is also for my loft area. This is a children’s chair. I think it is so cute! I don’t think the color will match the couch exactly, so maybe I should get a different color. They come in single chairs and little love seats! Check them out here.

This is a CIRCLE CHAIR! I have been in love with circle chairs since Bryan and I were very first married and buying a couch for our apartment in Idaho. I found one at a store in Idaho and wanted to buy it instead of a couch. I didn’t, but it would have been cool. I think this would be so great for a little reading corner. It’s really big so more than one person can fit on it. And recently on our search for a couch (the green one above) I found another one here in Utah. HOORAY!

The next couple of things on my wish list are for my front living room. Our house came with three rooms that require couches of some kind, and since we only have one couch the other two rooms are completely empty. We currently don’t use the rooms anyway, but as our family grows it would be nice to have furniture in those rooms. So this chaise will go in the front living room, I love the pattern on it. It’s at Ikea. I don’t know how I feel about building my own chair though… that’s the one problem.

At Ikea, I found this couch and chair, but it said that they came in a really pretty baby blue color. So that’s actually what is on my wish list, it’s the same blue as in the pattern on the chaise above. So in my living room I’ll have a blue couch and chair with the pattern chaise. It will look great. And perfect for when home teachers come over.

Look! Something on my list that isn’t furniture. This one I am still debating a little bit between the Circut Expression and the Silhouette. I have read a review that the Sihouette cuts cleaner, and it cuts directly from Adoble Illustrator. But the Circut cuts bigger things so… hmm.

I absolutely love this alphabet carving. After I finally have furniture in my living room, I’ll hang back up all my letter pictures and this will go in there too! I will look amazing with the other typographically beautiful wall decorations I already have.

More letters? YES PLEASE! These awesome little guys are 25 inches tall and they are beautiful. They have smaller friends that are only 8 inches tall that I would also love (and are soooo much more affordable). I’d get a 25 inch P and a K, B and & in the 8 inch size. Get it? Phelps, Katie&Bryan. It would be great. Right now my letters are sold out. I hope they come back in stock or this will never actually get off my wish list.

On this watch you see what time it is by deciding how far between the two dots the black circle is… for example, if it were 12:30 the black circle would be exactly between the 12 o’clock dot and the 1 o’clock dot. Bizarre, but I am loving it.

I don’t think this scarf from Veer would keep me too warm, but it sure is pretty, and who doesn’t love Helvetica?

Life is fragile, and therefore, should be handled with prayer.

I did change the quote just a little for my handout, so it’s more a paraphrase than a quote, but I think it turned out pretty cute.  So cute in fact that I printed a bigger one off for myself and framed it.

It matches my office!  I’m pretty into that font lately.  The one thing I don’t like though is the E.  Specifically the middle post of the E.  Whatever though. It’s a fad, and I’m sure I’ll get tired of it soon. Kind of like at one point my favorite font was Gill Sans, it’s a nice font, but really?  Gill Sans.  Oh well. And, my handsome, handsome husband says that I should share my talents, so if any of you love it and would like a copy, I would be more than happy to share.

(Because some of the events that I designed invitations for, haven’t happened yet–and I don’t feel that it’s my place to post the dates and times on my blog for just anyone to go and crash the events–I have blurred out the dates.  It wasn’t part of the design, but it’s probably safer since I’m not entirely sure who reads my blog.)

First: My friend at work is getting married soon and she asked me to design her wedding invites.  She was great to work with, she knew exactly what she wanted them to look like.  Her style was really simple and elegant.  Because it was a wedding invite, there were a couple of pieces, the invite, the temple invite, the luncheon RSVP card and a map.

Second: Also for my friend who is getting married is a bridal shower invite. The girls at work are throwing it for her and asked me to help with the invitations. They wanted to do a lingerie party, so that was the theme of the invite. I did two different colors, pink (because it’s so Victoria Secret) and purple because she loves purple. We printed the purple ones, but I loved the vibrancy of the pink, so that’s what you get to see.

Third: Back in April, over spring break we had a Young Woman retreat. I made invites for our event that included the two day agenda and what the girls needed to bring.  I designed it in one long sheet, but so that it could fold into three panels.  I’ve shown the full view and the individual panels.

Enjoy!

(And, this is my 100th post!  Happy 100th post to me.  I’m not sure if this is the most exciting post for my 100th post, but it works, right? For how long I’ve had this blog, 100 posts isn’t really that many, but an exciting milestone, never the less.)

I thought they turned out pretty good!  Rob and Ali’s invite was a 6×4 inch invite printed on photo paper.  Then we slipped them into elegant black envelopes.  Melanie’s invites were 10×4 inches, the picture of Mel and Tyler on the right hand side folded over the invite to leave 2 inches of swirls on the side and made the invite a final size of 6×4 and we slipped them into beautifully textured white envelopes.

Rob and Ali

Mel and Tyler

So there we go. If you ever need any wedding invites designed, let me know… I’d be glad to help. ;)

Another exciting thing:

The last couple of days at work, I have been creating a special VIP invitation to an event we are putting on for the President of our company and a couple of other important people.  I was talking about the invitation with some of the other designers and we came up with the idea to do a pop up card to invite them.  So with Andrea’s help we came up with some options. We had some big plans for out of control mountains popping up out of the card, but we took a little different route. So today, I finished it and I think it turned out really cool. We only need to make five.  We cut out all the parts today and will put the cards together tomorrow. I’m pretty impressed and was very pleased with the final results. (the pictures aren’t the best… sorry)