Cupcake Picks (and I don't mean flavours)

As a quick preamble, my apologies for my absence as of late. We've taken off on a little vacation to Vancouver to visit friends, and right now we're in Whistler while Dan snowboards and I'm wandering about taking in free concerts and the general ambiance of the Paralympic Games. It's pretty amazing here and it's spectacular to see various athletes walking around Whistler Village in their team uniforms, knowing how proud and excited they must be. We're having an absolute blast! 


Back to wedding related items though. Our bakery kicks some serious a$$. Their cake flavours are out of this world and I can hardly wait to totally pig out at our wedding! I wanted to make our cupcakes a bit more personalized though and decided to make little picks to match our invitations. It was pretty straight forward. First, I bought Avery round stickers from Staples ($18.22). Next, I popped over to Micheal's and bought some wooden sticks, I think they were about 4" long and cost about $1.50 with my 40% off coupon. 

 (This is on the top of our invitations, my inspiration)

Now for the more complicated bit. Because I wanted to make our picks match our invitations, I had to do them in Illustrator. Thank goodness for Google and this guy who created the template and uploaded it to the interwebs for the rest of the world to us. Thanks guy! 

Next, I grabbed my Elevator Buttons font that I'm using on the top of our invitations and started plopping in buttons. I played with the size of the font until it matched the circle circumference. I don't like the actual font inside the buttons, so I had to place a white circle over the font (use the shapes tool on the side bar and make sure to colour match the white of the circle to the white of your background using the eyedropper tool). 

Next, I put in the correct font for the numbers and little sayings matching our invitations.

For the back of the picks, I made a sheet just of our names and wedding date in our elevator buttons using the same template. Pretty straight forward.

And now, print! I test printed a few times, moved the buttons around to try to line it up with the test print circles, and was generally frustrated to no end because each time it printed differently. Then I decided to bite the bullet and print on a sheet of the stickers. Trust me, keep everything aligned to the template no matter what it looks like on your test print. The sticker paper is thicker and while it won't print 100% perfectly, I was willing to settle for 98%. I only needed about 60 of them, and I had 400 stickers so I printed one extra page of each side which worked out perfectly. 


Assembly is simple. Take a stick and sandwich it between your front and back stickers. 

Ta da!!!! Total project price was less than $20 and I have round stickers left over for other projects. Maybe seals for our doggie bags?

I'll drop these off to the bakery along with our cupcake wrappers (more to come on that one!) about a week before our wedding. Hooray! I'm so happy with the results!