Oh my goodness, I'm not even sure where to start with this post. Last week was both a rough and an amazing week, all in one, and so many things have happened in such a short amount of time. First things first, thank you all SO much, from the bottom of my heart, for all of your love and support around my first
newsletter. I cannot believe how many of you signed up and showed your support. The emails were pouring in, and it sounds like you're all almost as excited as I am about my new business name and logo! In fact, you all showed SO much support that my subscriber list doubled in the 12 hours after I sent the newsletter! I ended up sending a second email to everybody that signed up late and missed the first one. Wow, I am just so overwhelmed, thankful, and excited to be starting my new business chapter!
And in fact, the newsletter leads me into this here post. I wrote in the newsletter how I had submitted a special design to
Oh So Beautiful Paper for feature, and that I had my fingers crossed that the design would be picked. I've submitted plenty of things to
OSBP before - it's THE blog for stationery design, and it's also difficult to get a submission featured - so I know better than to get my hopes up. However, I was really hoping that the custom birth announcements I created for baby Emma would get picked.
Anyway, after the newsletter went out, somebody
tweeted me to congratulate me on my
Oh So Beautiful Paper feature. To be honest, I was mortified - I didn't mean for the newsletter to sound like I had actually been featured, and I was afraid my friend has mis-interpreted what I wrote in the letter. So I quickly
tweeted back to her that I was not featured, but keeping my fingers crossed for a future feature. She quickly
tweeted back with
this link. I swear to you, I had NO idea that the design was picked up for the feature, and the timing of it couldn't be better/more ironic! I nearly fell off of my chair when I saw it!
My very first
Oh So Beautiful Paper feature, and I am so, so, so excited - not only about the feature, but to share the design and story.
So without further adieu, please meet Emma.
These sweet announcements were inspired by both my
Aerial and
Falling in Love designs, and they were printed on shimmer paper and paired with lovely pink metallic envelopes.
Aside from how beautiful the invitations came out, the story behind them is even more beautiful. If you look really closely at the design, you'll see two dates, the date Emma was born, and the date she was brought home from the hospital. I asked Emma's mother to share her story, and here's what she wrote to me:
Emma Claire and her identical twin sister, Gabriella Hope, were born 16 weeks premature at 24 weeks gestation on Friday, July 13th, 2012. Gabriella’s lungs were too immature to survive and she passed away 2 hours after she was born in our arms. We were told it was not likely that Emma would make it, but she continued to defy all odds with each day she spent in the NICU. After 6 months in the NICU, Emma came home on January 11th, 2013. Since we were so consumed with having her in the hospital when she was first born, we didn’t get a chance to send out birth announcements. When she started getting close to coming home, we decided we would send out a coming home announcement. It was important to us that the announcement illustrated how far she had come in her first 6 months so we knew we wanted to include her birth stats as well as her coming home stats. Jackie took our ideas and created the perfect announcement to celebrate our brave little girl! - Karen, Emma's mother
After hearing little Emma's story, I sincerely think we created the perfect announcements
. I'm not sure if Karen selected the
Falling in Love design for this reason, but I absolutely love the way the top of the design starts out with teardrops, which slowly fade into falling hearts. I think it's such a sentimental and special way to really capture little Emma's journey and both the sadness and joy that the family has been through over the past year.
Please join me in sending lots of love and hugs to baby Emma!! And thank you, Karen, for letting me take, even just a small part, in little Emma's journey!
