wine labels for home vintners (mean hermit edition)

My "spirited" family is full of home brewers and vintners, a hobby many seem to have inherited from my grandpa. Late in life he developed an interest in making his own alcoholic concoctions; if you knew him, you know this was just one of the quirky and amazing things about him from a field of thousands.

This year my aunt and uncle made both wine and beer, and phoned in to ask me to do a little run of wine labels like I did a while back. I riffed off of the "Mean Old Hermit" sign that has hung on the gate of their rural property since time immemorial. This is what I came up with (the names here have been redacted for privacy):

A Google search turned up an old 1920s (copyright free) image of an old bootlegger simultaneously smoking a pipe, brandishing weapons and holding a liquor bottle. Perfect. I wasn't there to see my aunt and uncle open the package, but they tell me there was much laughter.

To make the two-toned sketched image, I used a very fine-lined drawing tool in Illustrator and, with my pen/stylus and drawing tablet in a separate layer, I drew over the highlights. When I was done, I dropped in the black background and added typography (fonts are 1942 Report, Rustic Regular {from Dover}, and Cavalcade).

Once I'd printed them out on label paper using my ink jet (because the local print shop took five days to return my e-mail), I gilded the 2012 using a gold paint pen and sprayed the labels with Mod Podge acrylic spray. I let them dry and air out for a couple of days before cutting them apart and packaging them up.

A note: I've been told by my aunt that labeling is done according to the year of the grapes, so 2012, not 2013, is the correct vintage in this case. The wine aged for a year before being given out as gifts.

I call the wine "house red" on the labels because the grape vines grow on the front of their house. Not accurate by wine industry standards, but not an issue for their friends and family.

I hope if you're a beginning Adobe Illustrator user, you can make sense of the above description of my process (specifically the part where I sketched over the image highlights). If not, and you're interested in learning more, drop me a note and let me know if I can make things clearer. Please remember to respect my copyrighted work (anything on this blog), but feel free to use any methods as a springboard for your own designs.

And if you want wine or beer labels of your own but don't want to learn a new program to design some, I freelance! Just contact me and I can work you up some wine labels of your very own for a really reasonable rate. Better yet, after an initial design fee, I can even send you digital files for five years worth of dated labels to print from.

Thanks for reading! 

golden book baby shower invitations

I recently offered to throw a baby shower for a good friend of mine, and because this will be her second child and she already has a house full of hand-me-downs, she requested that the gift giving be kept to a minimum. Partially because of that request (and partially because she's a book lover like me) I settled on a "vintage / classic kids' books" shower theme.

The invitations went through an extensive brainstorming and planning phase, after which I finally decided to use vintage Golden Books as the base.

This may not be a new idea entirely; since landing on the concept I've seen a few different versions of Golden Book baby shower invitations. A few use just the covers, discarding the pages.

Yikes. As a book lover throwing a party for a book lover, that idea makes me throw up in my mouth a little. Admittedly, I have that response to pretty much any project I see people blogging about when it involves chopping up vintage books, even having worked in bookstores and witnessed what happens to mass market paperbacks. Or maybe because of it.

Anyway, I trolled St. Vincent dePaul's section of kids' books to find some classic titles in older editions with a bit of age to them. Because the guest list was small, I didn't mind that each of the books was different, but this project might be a little extreme for a guest list of more than a dozen.

Of course, Baby Animals was pretty perfect for this project, but really, nearly any Golden Book can be altered to make the perfect invitation (as shown above).

Using my YA Library Book Slips fabric design as a base in Adobe Illustrator, I designed and printed out some library check-out slips on manila card stock using the family's last name (Geisel, in this case, is a pseudonym) in place of the author and "The New Baby" as the title.  These were the "registry" info cards, except in this case they included language inviting people to forego traditional registry gifts in favor of vintage kids' books or small handmade items.

The little envelopes to hold the cards inside the books are made of the same card stock trimmed, folded, and held in place with GlueDots. (If you can't find manila card stock, do what I did and cut some manilla file folders down to 8.5 x 11" sheets using a paper cutter.)

I scanned the front cover (inside and outside) to alter slightly in Photoshop.

For the fronts, I added on each book the words "& Baby Geisel" to the title, matching the the title font and wear pattern as closely as possible.

For printing on the reverse, I moved up the bookplate and made the endpaper pattern fully repeat, before layering on the text in a font similar to the Little Golden Books font. (Click to zoom for detail.)

Printed and trimmed . . .

. . . then scored along the spine and ready to attach . . .

. . . with three glue dots.

I used washi tape tabs to indicate where to open the books . . .

. . . and used more washi tape (white and yellow, so the golden spines still showed through a bit) to cover the spines. Then I tied them up with baker's twine and put them in some shipping envelopes to ready them for mailing (complete with logo for the Geisel Family Library Foundation).

Repeat for all titles.

This project is, admittedly, a bit labor intensive and requires some knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Like the look but want to skip the work? I can put some together for you, too! Contact me for pricing and scheduling by leaving a comment below, or by e-mailing (whoamillie (at) thenightgarden.com).

Thanks for reading!

p.s. you can make these photos larger simply by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that.

Linking up to:
I'm Crafty!

zelda invitations featuring our hero, link!

It's very difficult to find Zelda birthday party invitations, or anything to do with a Zelda birthday party, for that matter. For some reason, Mario is EVERYWHERE, while our valiant hero, Link, languishes in kid party obscurity.

So I made these from scratch. Or rather, from Adobe Illustrator, and paper, and my inkjet printer, and some foam mounting tape. But mostly scratch.




I found a few images of Link from the original Zelda game on-line, and, using the grid lines in Illustrator, drew out Link one little box at a time (using the copy/paste function and the eye dropper tool). Because I drew Link in Illustrator, a vector art program, Link can be sized up or down infinitely without added pixelation or distortion. Which means I can use this same image for the invitations, or t-shirt transfers, or stickers, or large character cut-outs, or posters . . . pretty cool, and one of my favorite things about using Illustrator over using Photoshop.




Next, I laid out my text, using two free fonts I found on an on-line font website (dafont, I think). One font looks like a vintage video game font; the other strongly resembles the font from the Legend of Zelda box. Love it!






I'll spare you the details; assembly was pretty straightforward. Let's just look at some more photos!
















(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)





Of course, party details have been changed or omitted for privacy reasons. Now accepting clients for custom party invitations.

Pin It