Up, Up and Away!

Finally some sunshine today! Hoorah! And with such a glorious bright day pouring through our windows, I couldn’t help but re-look at our wonderfully bright wedding ‘guest’ print (instead of a book) on the wall in our hallway.

Our wedding was mildly themed around the fantastic film ‘UP‘. If you haven’t seen it – why not?! Stop what you are doing (although maybe finish reading this first!), hire it out, watch and enjoy! We didn’t want the whole full on Disney theme, but just little touches here and there – with a nod towards the film. The bright colours, our first dance music, and this print.

I like to think of this as a ‘live craft’ project! I bought the original PDF via Etsy and The Inked Leaf, which was personalised with our names and date, but blank and ready for the ‘balloons’. I slightly tweaked the colours of the house myself in Adobe Illustrator once received to suit our own colour scheme (although I could have easily left exactly as it was!) printed out at our local printers, and it was good to go!

We set this up in the ‘Cow Shed’ of the Tythe Barn, an ajoining side room, with colourful ink pads, wipes (to make sure no wayward fingerprints on best clothes!) and people throughout the early evening added their own finger print ‘balloon’ to create this new masterpiece to hang in our home. I did actually print two copies, just in case wine/water/champagne/coffee headed in that direction – it wouldn’t have been ideal, but we could have ultimately started again if necessary! As it turned out, there was absolutely no need, and a few months after the wedding, I finally got around to getting it professionally mounted and framed at Right Angle, Brackley. The final result, is utterly gorgeous, and looks particularly bright and happy in the spring sunshine!

This print is particularly touching, as amongst all our beautiful friends and family, our nearest and dearest – my dear Grandfather’s print is in there somewhere. He passed away at the ripe old age of 98 – around 7 weeks after that wonderful day. We, and all the family are so lucky and grateful that he was there to be a part of it all, he really was a guest of honour! And I even told him that on the day – as caught on camera by our fantastic photographer Mark Lord.

So, if you are looking for something different to the not very traditional ‘guest book’, why not look into doing something with fingerprints instead! A quick Google or Pinterest search will soon lead to all manner of fingerprint art ideas 🙂