7.18.08

I spent Friday night watching Ashley Paige: Bikini or Bust and making this card box!

This took a lot longer than I expected it to. What's so hard, cover the box in some paper and be done with it, right? Wrong.

First, ribbon is not easily adhered to things without Wonder Tape. I tried super glue and it just absorbed in the ribbon. I tried the EZ Runner Scrapbook Adhesive that I raved about earlier, but after a couple hours the ribbon started to curl. Wonder Tape was the key! It is double sided and has some magical adhesive formula that adhered to the ribbon.

I also measured the ribbon and cut it on an angle so it would fit together in each of the corners. Since the ribbon was fraying and looked crappy, I dipped the edges in some super glue to make a workable edge.

I used spray glue to stick the paper to the box. The spray glue was similar to rubber cement in consistency and workability in that it is semi-permanent when working with it. That was handy when I put the paper on the box off kilter a couple times.

Finally, I lined the bottom with a very small amount of packing tape so that the paper wouldn't rip or crinkle in transportation. Since packing tape is so transparent, you can hardly see it.

So what took so long? I don't know! It was just a tedious job. Getting everything to line up and to get the ribbon to look presentable took a lot of time. After I was done, I realized the design on the paper was upside down too. But there was no way I was doing it over again, so it is staying that way.

As for Ashley Paige: Bikini or Bust, it might be one of my new favorite shows. Her life/business is interesting and confusing to me. She is a super famous bikini designer with no money. Like she literally can't pay her rent. I was kind of uncomfortable watching it at times, but then I couldn't help but root for the girl. She is so sweet and artistic...and all she wants to do is make bikinis, darnit!

bachelorette party revisited

This weekend was my bachelorette party. I still have to get pictures from the event and do a proper post. In the meantime, I thought I would revisit the bachelorette party I helped throw for Meghan back in '05 in honor of it.

We had a pink themed party where everyone was required to wear something pink, everyone brought a "romantic" gift for the bride (and people interpreted that any way they wanted, which I thought was nice) and had a pink drink that we served.

My most favorite part was how I had everyone's drinks dressed up in dresses and veils. To do this, I bought a bunch of white Barbie dresses from the dollar store and glued a ribbon around the waist so I could tie a name tag onto it. To make the veils, I sewed some tulle onto a piece of elastic that fit around the neck of a bottle. It was so cute and a huge hit.

thankyouverymuch

Jon's mom just got a Cricut and let me borrow it. She owns her own crafty business where she will use this machine, but I have often wondered how much the regular person would feel the need to die cut...so much where they have to buy a $200 machine. On top of that, buy the cartidges for extra die cuts at $90 a pop. (I think these are the average prices anyway. I just Google'd it and the prices greatly vary) People go crazy for this stuff too. They have the cartridges under lock and key at Michael's and on one of my last visits, I overheard people feverishly asking the employees when they would get the Disney Cricut cartridge back in stock. Regardless, I welcomed to opportunity to spend the weekend with the thing, see what all the hype was all about, be crafty and cut stuff. And cut stuff is what I did.

I had bought some blank note cards at Micheal's a while ago in their dollar bins and I decided to spice them up with the help of some leftover paper I had and the Cricut. I will be having to thank people a lot in the near future, so I figured thank you cards would be a wise choice. I made 60 of these babies.

centerpieces

I made a little mock up of what our table might look like with a sheet and a black sash. Yup, I'm resourceful.

Idea #1 - Baby's breath. It's inexpensive, goes with my color scheme and would fill a vase for very little money. The downside is, it stinks! Seriously, baby's breath does not smell nice at all. This could be done with Queen Anne's Lace probably though. How does that smell?

idea #2 - Limes. This idea was #1 in my head before doing this test and it quickly went to the bottom after I tried it out. I didn't have any vases that fit them very well, so it was kind of hard to get a feel for what it would look like if it was packed full...but it still isn't my favorite and I won't be persuing this idea.

idea #3 - Apples. This is a front runner. I love how bold the colors are and that they would be consumable after the wedding.

pomanders

There were many things I never knew existed before planning this wedding, that seem to be every day vocab these days. Por ejemplo:

Chivari chairs. These things are highly coveted and go for about $8 a piece to rent. They are very fashionable and probably transform a room beautifully. I, however, will be using the freebies our venue is supplying.

Gocco. Pronounced go-co. This is a screen printer that many brides decide to use to print their invites. It is not cheap and is actually discontinued in the US. The only way to get one of these babies is on ebay, etsy or if you are traveling in Japan. Apparently they are big there.

the machine---

Miss Penguin of the Weddingbee's Gocco'd invitations---

Pomanders. Who else but MS would come up with this idea to make a tissue paper flower so beautiful? First she changed the tissue paper flower from being an elementary school project, to being a beautiful accent that you would be proud to display at a classy event.

But do you think Martha stopped there? Of course not. She took these precious little flowers and made them into a pomander. I wasn't so sure I wanted to have these at my wedding though. They would be great at a wedding shower, baby shower or decorating a present, but I wasn't so sure if they would be nice enough at a wedding....

...and then I saw VintageGlam's knot bio. Here she is...

...and here are her pomanders. Beautiful, right?

(VintageGlam's photo's by Jessica Johnston)

I figured since she executed the look of this tissue paper pomander, I should give it a shot also.

I bought the MS tissue paper flower kit a while ago, so I know the key to a beautiful flower is to zig zag the edges. Of course, the kit has perfectly symmetrical zig zags that result in a perfectly domed flower. for the pomander, I didn't think it would really matter if it was perfectly domed though, so I free handed a zig zag.

Then I accordion folded it like a normal tissue paper flower, tied it off with some floral wire and separated. (The quality of the this picture is horrible)

When I was done, I just stabbed them into the styrofoam ball. I tried to get them as close together so it would look really full.

And the finished product...Ta-Da!

(again, please excuse the horrible pic quality...)

The cost of this pomander:

Styrofoam ball - $2.25

Tissue Paper - $.03 cents per flower. ($1 per pack. I used 2 packs, which made 40 flowers.)

Floral wire - $2.50 for a ton of wire.

Time - Probably a total of 2 hours? I made the flowers while I watched TV and recruited Jon to fold paper.

I realized I got 2 different color green tissue paper after I left the store, so your eyes are not doing tricks on you. This pomander is in fact two-toned. It also is not the color green I am going for. I found a great apple green color that I think will look much softer and more in keeping with the colors we have going on. I was thinking of decorating the pews at church with them ala VintageGlam. The ceremony is only going to be about 25 mins though and I can't think of any purpose or place for them at the reception. So are they worth the time and energy to make? Kind of leaning towards no...but they sure are cute. We'll see.

fonts

I have been a little hesitant posting actual things we will have at our wedding because there are people that read this blog that will be at the wedding and I would like the details that I have been working so hard on to be a surprise. I then realized that there are probably only a handful of people (that I know of) out of over 200 who read this and I needed to get over myself. So I decided that I could compromise. I will show things I am debating about, but not the finished product. Of course I will post things after the wedding, when the cat is out of the bag, but for now, I'll only be teasing...

Back to the fonts: A couple weekends ago I stumbled upon urbanfonts.com and dafont.com and I officially wasted away 2 days downloading free fonts. It was a little ridiculous, but I got some great ones that I knew could be contenders for our invitations and other paper products. We are hoping our wedding will have a classic, fun and laid back feel (duh. who doesn't?.), so we didn't want our invitations to be too formal. With that in mind, I wanted to find a calligraphy font, but not a real stuffy one. We narrowed our options down to 2 different font combinations...

We have made our final decision and I made up an mock invitation that we are super excited about. I had made one a while ago that we thought was definitely the one, but now that one seems so gross in comparison. I'm glad to have this done with plenty of time to get them printed and everything also. Having the design down for the invitations is also making everything else super easy to envision. The escort cards, programs, table numbers, etc seem to be obvious now that we have made this decison. I am having so much fun creating these things! I can't believe some people don't love this stuff and would rather pay someone to do it. I think I missed my calling.

O Christmas Tree

This Christmas had special meaning...with the engagement and all. We put up the Christmas tree together on the night we got engaged and last night we took it down. awwww.

We also sent out a Christmas Card for the first time together this year. I thought it was appropriate since we wanted to announce our engagement anyway. I had an idea to do a photo booth type greeting. I thought this was a unique idea, but then as I was looking at different wedding blogs, it turns out a lot of other people have done this also. Oh well. So way back in the beginning of December, I set up a photo shoot in our living room and we took a ton of pictures. This was the end result:

...and here are some of my favorite outtakes