Happy.: You are my Sunshine

Last week Erin texted me and said she needed my help. She was hyperventilating in a Michael's store. She was trying to find a stamp or sticker of a sun that she could use for her sister's baby shower invitations, but she couldn't find anything and the store was closing in five minutes and she didn't really know what she wanted and she didn't know where to look and the store was oh so big and there were rows upon rows of stickers and bins of stamps she couldn't sort through and she wasn't find anything like what she was looking for and she couldn't find an employee to help her and

AAAAHHHHHHH!

She was freaking out.

I didn't know how to help her find what she needed in a store I'd never been to before! I asked when the invitations needed to be sent out and she said just "soon". I told her we could easily find what she's looking for online and we could have it at my house for when she was to arrive here last Thursday. I convinced her she and I could figure it out together.

Her sister is having a baby girl and was decorating with the theme "You Are My Sunshine". Erin wanted to have yellow invitations with a sun embellishment and a ribbon... what she thought would be super easy and simple. It would have been... had things worked out on time! I ordered two stamp sets from Stuff4Scrapbooking.com, both from Stampendous:

Come Thursday, I still didn't have the confirmation email that the order had been shipped. We were going to work on the invitations the next day but before we drove to Wisconsin Dells that evening. I started looking for other options. I went to my craft store, Hobby Lobby, and took pictures of anything I found that was a sun. I knew none of it would work. I found images of suns online - some in color and some that were just outlines - that maybe we could print, cut by hand, and adhere.

Friday around noon she came to my place and I broke the news that the package wouldn't be here in time. She kept her cool as I showed her other options. We worked on the verbiage and position of words in Microsoft Publisher as we thought about the embellishment options. After several hours of perfecting the document and banging our head against a brick wall as we tried to get the mail merge to work for the Kinko's printer, we set off for coffee (for her, I don't drink that Nasty), the printer, and Hobby Lobby.

We spent an hour at Hobby Lobby in the ribbon section and scrapbooking section. She found a stamp in a set (made by Inkadinkado) that she thought would work and I told her I already had the set.

We grabbed some ribbon we thought would work perfectly and headed home to test out our theories. She trimmed the paper so the invitations were postcards while I tested out a few options with the ribbon and the stamp that we decided to emboss.

We spent several hours trying probably a hundred ideas. We kept saying "ehh, I like that," but we weren't "sold" on anything.

Ok, this post is turning out to be a freaking novel so I'll stop there. This is what they turned out like and it took about 4 hours of both of us gluing, stamping and embossing to get it to this. What we thought was going to be a simple quick project, turned out to be quite the hassle!