Icing Designs: May 2010

Yellow and Grey Wedding Inspiration

We love, love, love weddings, oh the details!!! There are so many amazing color palettes to choose from, where do you begin! Yellow is one of our favorite colors, it is so versatile. It can be paired with aqua to create a flirty, summery palette or white to create a clean, fresh palette. Yellow is even gorgeous paired with shades of purple, to create a modern, sophisticated look or gold for a rustic feel. Lately, we have been so inspired by pairing yellow with grey! It is such an unexpected color combination that portrays such a timeless elegance!

Photo credit: The Little White Book

Photo credit: stephaniewilliamsphotography.com, wedding.blogdig.net

Photo credit: theknot.com, brides.com

Photo credit: etsy.com/shop/allisajacobs,jcrew.com, brides.com, etsy.com/shop/houseoftelsa, thebridalexpress.co.uk, etsy.com/shop/butteredtoast

Photo credits: Photography: Studio CastilleroFlowers: Manzanita Designs, Jose Villa via the knot.com

Photo credit: found on the Brides Cafe, Style Me Pretty

Photo credit: theknot.com, Stephanie Williams photo blog

Photo Credit: My Sweet and Saucy

Munchkin Tables

We are absolutely in love with these Munchkin Tables! When adults have a party one of the most important details is the fabulous table setting! Why should a child's party be any different!?! So much attention is put into planning and creating the most perfect children's parties these days! We have to say adding a table setting like this to your child's party would just be the cherry on top! Just look at those sweet flowers on the back of those little chairs!

Check out Munchkin Tables to see all of thier sweet table offerings!

Vogue Girl

We came across these lovely photos a while back and we just had to share them with you. They are from a Vogue Girl photo shoot. Isn’t it almost a cross between Marie Antoinette and Alice in Wonderland?! We just love the soft, fanciful color palette and child like innocence of the model! These photos are just so charming, hope they inspire you!

Photo credit: Vogue Girl Korea

Cupcake Couture Part 3

We wanted to share with you the final product of the first of our ladies in our new Cupcake Couture line! After we have our perfected final illustration we start formatting our illustration into invitations, cards, cupcake flags and gift tags. We print all of our products right in our mini office at Kellie's. (Ahhhh to have a shop of our own...one day...one day soon!) After everything is printed, the magic happens. This is when we start hand-glittering. We are always amazed at how much the glittering really adds to the illustrations. When we have a new illustration that we are really happy with the first thing we always say is, "we can't wait to see it glittered"! So here is the invitation, card, cupcake flag and gift tag! Stay tuned...three more lovely ladies will be joining her shortly!

Giveaway Winner

And our winner is...comment number 7, Genevieve Le Bel! Congratulations Genevieve! Email us at icingdesigns@hotmail.com with your favorite design from our "Ode to Paris" line and your address and we will send you a out a set of note cards! Thank you so much to all of you for entering! We will be doing more giveaways on our blog in the future!

Sweetly,
Melissa and Kellie

Cupcake Couture Part 2

We hope your enjoyed the inspiration for our new line! We really do all of our work completely by hand, starting with pencil sketches. So here is one of our four girls from our Cupcake Couture line!

There are literally times where we will re-illustrate over 20 times to get it just perfect! After we are happy with our pencil sketches we will go ahead and do a pen illustration.

When we start illustrating we usually have a color palette in mind. After we are happy with our final pen illustration, we actually layout a color palette to use.

We may not use all of the colors that we lay out, but it is a good base to work from. Sometimes we will make a few copies of the illustration so that we can see which colors from our palette we are going to use in our final draft.

After our illustration is complete we scan it in for formatting. We will share more of this process with you soon!

Cupcake Couture Part 1

Last winter Kellie and I started talking about creating a really posh line that we could kick off the summer with. Kellie came up with the idea of Cupcake Couture! I immediately fell in love! We love our “Candy Brides” and “Sweet Baby Mommas”, but we really wanted to create a line with some high fashion cupcake lovin' ladies! Of course, to keep in our style they had to have both a French and vintage flair to them!

We didn't want to just show you our new designs; we thought it would be fun to walk you through our work process as well. So today we are just going to show you some of the inspiration we found before we started illustrating and creating our "Cupcake Couture" line. Hope you enjoy!

Photo credits: French Blue, L'Officiel Brasil x2, ilovelolliblog.com I believe the first two in the second sequence are Merci New York, if anyone needs to correct me please do so, French Blue, Elizabeth Messina (kissthegroom.com),Vanity Faire Magazine, kissthegroom.com (Twigs and Honey headpieces), Merci New York

Don't forget to enter our giveaway; we are going to extend until Wednesday!

Pinwheels and Pearls

We have recently gotten to know Vicky from The City Cradle a little bit over the past few weeks! Let us tell you not only is she so sweet, but she is also amazingly talented and creative...and she has twins too!! The first party we saw of hers was this whimsical Pinwheels and Pearls party that she created. We first saw it featured on The Sweetest Occasion and then again on Amy Atlas!!! Although, you may have already seen this party we just had to share it again!

We love the pinwheel and pearl food tags!

All the little boys got these little bow ties and all of the girls got necklaces....so cute!

Be sure the visit The City Cradle and see all of Vicky's other adorable parties and ideas!

All photos were taken by Michael Chan from The Image is Found

Don't forget to enter our giveaway it ends Monday!

Thank you and Giveaway Time!

WOW! What an honor to have been featured on Amy Atlas's blog yesterday! It was so much fun to see our party on such an amazing blog and among so many other fabulous parties! We are so thankful for all of our new friends that have joined our blog. Thank you to everyone for your sweet words too! We have a lot of amazing things to share with you and can not wait for the coming weeks!

P.S. One of our new friends asked if we would share our French macaron recipe....yes!! We are actually going to be doing a step by step tutorial for you in the coming weeks! French macarons are a tricky little cookie, but when they are done right they are amazing!! If you have not had one yet, you will be addicted once you try them! See our previous macaron posts to learn more about these little sweet treasures!

Could macarons be the new cupcake Part 1
Could macarons be the new cupcake Part 2

Giveaway Time!

So, in honor of our Paris party we are giving away a set of our hand-illustrated, hand-glittered note cards (of your choice) from our "Ode to Paris" line. To win...become a follower of our blog and leave a comment on what your favorite card in our Etsy shop is! We will be picking a winner at random on Monday! Good Luck!

Happy Birthday Maia and Sophia!

Three years ago today two little precious girls were brought into this world, 37 minutes apart! It seems like just yesterday we were caring for their every need, we blinked and now they are little ladies. They are both such free and gentle spirits with the biggest hearts. It's the little moments when no one is looking that they are so protective of each others feelings and so caring toward each other...those moments melt my heart! Happy Birthday baby girls, may every year be sweeter than the last!

P.S. Aren't the flower clips in the girl's hair the sweetest! They were made by Mia from Dolce Vita Mia! Mia is so sweet and she makes some of the cutest hair pieces for little ladies! Please check our her Etsy shop you won't be disappointed!!

Paris in the Springtime Birthday Party

This weekend was my twin daughters' third birthday party! (which I can not believe...where does the time go!) With our love for all things French, we choose a "Paris in the Springtime" theme. It was so fun preparing for this party, my girls kept saying we are having a Pawis pawty with the Apple Tower!

This party was almost entirely DIY. We created everything from the decorations (except the pom poms....thank you Prost to the Host!) to the desserts (except for the Eiffel Tower chocolates...thank you to my fabulous aunt Gail the Craft Diva) ourselves!

We choose to use a pink and champagne color palette. We created this "Paris" glittered letter garland to go across the gold mirror that was hung above the table.

We created another garland to go across the table that said "Ohh LaLa"!

We set our DIY rosette lollipop topiaries on separate table with the plates, napkins and utensils! They added a really fun and sweet touch to the lace covered table.

We also made a variety of rosettes to hang on the wall.

We covered small glass vases with large lace ribbons and tied them with pink bows. We used these to put the utensils in.

We fell in love with this chalkboard when we saw it! We knew it would be perfect to write the food menu on! We just hot glued a little silk flower on the side to add a little "French" flair to it!

For thank you's everyone took home the candy poppers we made inspired by the girls from Posh Paperie!

Now for the dessert table! This was our favorite part of the party! We were so pleased with how it all came together! We used a white table cloth with a pink lace overlay to set all of the goodies on. We made all of the dessert from scratch starting with mini cupcakes with mini rosette cupcake flags to compliment the ones on the wall. We also made pink French macaroons filled with French buttercream, cream puffs dusted with powdered sugar, a strawberry napoleon, pink shimmered Eiffel tower chocolate lollis (thank you craft diva!!) and palmiers drizzled with pink chocolate. We also filled apothecary jars with pink and white salt water taffy. Finally, our centerpiece was an amazing gold glittery Eiffel Tower!