Wednesday, June 29, 2011

of getting dirty and places to sit

today i got off my bum and decided to finally get going on all the chairs for the wedding..... two days too late, but better late than never i guess. anyho i was lucky enough to get the help of the boy however briefly and we got to chatting about what we were going to do with the ones that needed recovering. We have so far picked up just over 20 chairs - a whole wack of old bistro chairs, some pine country-style ones and 7 that we actually like and are thinking of keeping... it is these ones which need recovering.


these are the said chairs or at least one of every style - as you can see I started on one and as I having been playing with the sander all day my hands are still a little shaky....

the first one we picked up off the side of the road, it had grey tweed fabric on it and severly sunken springs but other than that good solid condition. the second one is one of two Parker chairs also picked up off the side of the road (hence why it is so filthy) and the last one is one of four which we got for $10 off Ebay - these last four are a little lower than the others but the back can be easily moved up higher

ideally we would love to cover them all in black leather but that's not going to happen for many reasons, so have been thinking the best option would be white or cream vinyl or cotton/linen. at this point we don't really want a print/pattern.

my favourite show at the moment is Offspring on Channel 10 and I just love title character Nina's dining room, I am a fan on Facebook and after asking for a pic someone was kind enough to put this screenshot up for me


i love her table, her chairs and that wonderful wall and after having a hand-me-down dining set for the last few years can't wait to have a pretty one - i am also in love with trestle tables at the moment so the boy has promised to make us one - might just have to see if it will go with the chairs first....

while looking for inspiration also found the following I love mismatched chairs but like it better when they are made uniform in some way

source: Decor Demon on Houzz

source: Like That One on Flickr
source: Aesthetics of Joy


enjoy!

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

industrial vs rustic

the boy and I love the whole industrial/rustic kind of look and after discussing it today have come to the conclusion that industrial style can basically be defined as taking old crap from factories etc whilst rustic is taking old crap from farm houses/barns etc

either way we like both and have been thinking about a way to incorporate it into the wedding details somehow.... here are a few ideas i have come up with

source: Scissor Variations and Play Each Day

Source: Baylor Says and Randomitus

Source: Julia Hoersch Photography via Decor 8 and Brooklyn to West
 Now as most people who decide to put a bit of an industrial vibe into their wedding day usually choose to simply hold the reception/ceremony or both in an actual warehouse or factory they don't really need much to furnish the imagination. we on the other hand are having our wedding outside, in the beautiful countryside, not at all like a warehouse but I guess kinda a bit rustic. therefore to see industry in the decor might be a bit tricky

decisions, decisions

Monday, June 27, 2011

freaking out!!!

there is currently 87 days until our wedding, my bridal shower/hen's night/girly sleepover is on this Friday, I have sent all the invites out and RSVPs are starting to trickle in, I go up to my future mother-in-laws next week to start making my dress and I still haven't lost any weight.

I am currently silently freaking out.

I am sure this happens to most brides you get to that point where you start going 'oh no what if all these people I invited actually come' our budget only goes to 100 people max (realistically more like 90) I sent invites to about 120 and everyone keeps asking me if they can bring their partner. I said no to my first person the other day. I felt evil. I have already said to many casual 'sure! bring the whole family' and now I worry that we won't have enough seats. What if the benches don't fit on our neatly scooped out terrace. What if I don't restore these 30 or so chairs in time. What if I look fat and ugly on my big day because I have been too lazy to go to the gym. What if all my decor plans turn out looking like some tacky half baked job. I want to have a beautiful and amazingly cool wedding like this one or this one. what if we end up on a site like this

Yep definitely going nuts.

But my biggest concern is money. Yep money. I don't know what we were thinking getting married this year we totally can't afford it and I have a massive credit card debt that doesn't appear to be going anywhere. I need a job. Bad.

But in 87 days I will be getting married and it will be great. Because I love him and he loves me and sometime in the future we can love some babies and that will give me something else to freak out about  

 

Sunday, June 26, 2011

the 'it's not a birthday party' party

The weekend has been and gone and with it one crazy night of bubbly, braking stuff and lots of bad photos. But never fear I did manage to snag a pic or two of the pretty cake I made.

Donna Hay's butter cake (my favourite) with strawberry cream cheese frosting - I can't say it was my best effort, I don't know why but it turned out all airy (but not the good kind) and our tastebuds might have been blunted by the booze but I don't remember it tasting that great.... oh well at least it looked pretty... kinda 

taken by me with our Canon Ixus which I happened to drop and break during the course of the evening oops

I have been to the dentist today, what fun! not, just had a clean and they gave me a new toothbrush and told me to brush my gums more. same old.

Friday, June 24, 2011

fun fridays...

Not that Fridays are really that different to any other day for me being that dreaded breed which is the uni student. I had my last exam yesterday WOOHOO!!! no really it's awesome, uni is over for another semester and I am still in the same spot as last semester thinking 'please please pass everything!!'. you would think that I learn, maybe try and do some work during the semester and not just at the end before the exams.

anyho enough with that droll stuff, I have a cold but I am not going to let it stop me having a spectacular night on Saturday. in fact I have just finished putting up what will be the backdrop for our 'photo-booth' and printed some lovely pictures of Fabio to act as masks. I have decided to give the lovely lady who the party is in honour of a photo album filled with lots of lovely pictures of us all having a great time - and as her birthday is not for another few weeks tomorrow is the perfect opportunity to take these said pictures.
I'M SO EXCITED!!!

   this is the back-drop i 'made' - our house is horribly ugly but luckily they have these crazy archways in between some rooms so after my plan A didn't work out (due to my sheer laziness)  this plan B came into fruition - basically its just a bunch of white curtains on a piece of string and then two more curtains i had laying around wound around the arch thing. I doesn't look amazing but i think the draping of the curtains is kinda romantic.... you know like a romance novel.... i hope

on another note i was putting together a mood board for this competition over on Portobello Bride and became blinded by all the pretty gold....

Source: Ornate Frame, Wedding Invites via 100 Layer Cake, Daily Cup of Couture, Sarah.Wandering, Pretty Stuff via Pinterest and Debbie Cronin Design via Pinterest

and on my list of things to do:
1. Become a better photographer
2. Become amazingly talented with power tools like this chick here

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

of birthdays and romance novels

it's my friends birthday in a couple of weeks and as she will be going away we decided to have a little get-together this weekend. but apparently i am not allowed to call it a birthday party. she doesn't like birthday parties, strange i know i think they are the greatest.

anyho so we are having a party and since she loves reading romance novels so much i thought we could maybe have a romance novel inspired party. one of my other friends noted that there aren't very many of us so it would more likely be a small get-together of weirdo's drinking while in ridiculous costumes but i think that's just fine.

my brain can't really translate ideas into words very well so i will try and demonstrate with pictures

but if i had to buzz words would be romantic (obviously), rustic and ruffles

source: Mary Carroll Photography via Flickr, EMP via the found blog, lime sorbet margaritas via Real Simple and the great unknown that is Flickr via Pinterest but also on we heart it

Monday, June 20, 2011

love is in the air

i can't help it there is just something i love about picnics ... or at least the idea of them, you know the whole vintage coca cola advertisement perfectly dressed mother, sweet looking sandwiches and a cute gingham mat. image taking your honey for a little bike ride, settling next to a river and eating out of a cute wicker basket.....

source: Johner and Snippet and Ink

source: beauty, and Etsy - Mrs Pomeranz

Saturday, June 18, 2011

pretty in pink, glitter in gold

I dreamt of having a beautiful bridal shower with a palette of pink and gold, unfortunately brides aren't supposed to plan that kind of thing but that's ok I am sure I can find a place for it :)

Source: Martha Stewart - The Crafts Department and Aaron Snow Photography via The Wedding Chicks

Source: Inspired Creations Contest Winner via Elizabeth Anne Designs and The Cherry Blossom Girl
Source: Poppies and Sunshine and Rose Martini via Escapade

Thursday, June 16, 2011

fighting your way through it.....

sometimes we just need someone to reassure us that we are not alone in feeling a certain way. someone, somewhere has been in our exact same position and they got through it and guess what it was generally considered NORMAL

the other day i found this great quote from Ira Glass on Pinterest, it struck a major chord with me. For years i have been doing all sorts of creative things but would never continue on as i didn't think my creations were good enough.

source: Tom, the Piper's Son
it sounds silly but now i think i will persevere with my creative side, it's been fighting it's way to the top for a long time and i think the wedding has finally given it a chance to grow.

i will continue my studies because as my good friend and hairdresser has noted it will be possible to combine what i have learnt with what i enjoy doing 

wish me luck it's going to be one heck of a fight!

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

you are what you eat

weddings and other such events are notoriously bad for the diet, especially the cocktail portion of the evening. how could something so small and so tasty have so many calories? keeping trim is a nightmare for me and pretty much every woman in my family and after so many years of losing and putting on weight you realise that truth 'you are what you eat'.

so why should we not put it into practice on one of the biggest days of our lives? eating healthy makes you happy and when guests are happy they will have fun. obviously some people will be a bit hesitant at the idea but maybe its time we all took another standpoint.

if you are what you eat then i would much rather be a yummy fruit skewer than a greasy pastry

source: everything fabulous and quick dish (and yes its a horribly bad for you recipe)
source: Culinary Cory on Flickr and White on Rice


and not only are they good for you but the simplicity of ingredients means they'd be a snap to make!

Monday, June 13, 2011

nothing is original anymore....

while doing my usual perusal of wedding blogs this morning i came across an image that well, mortified me.

source: the Not Wedding

 why why would this beautiful image mortify me? well like any other bride-to-be who trawls the internet, i believed my idea to fold a million origami hearts was an original idea and even more so to include them in a kraft coloured envelope. yet i should have realised that no idea is ever truly original anymore.

i wonder how many more brides-to-be have experienced a similar moment of heartache in relation to planning their big day

Sunday, June 12, 2011

wilderness but a bit more luxe

we are struggling with a miniscule budget for our very own day of love and when it came to talking about what we would do for our wedding night and subsequent 'honeymoon' we were a little stumped for ideas.

i looked into all the hotels in the region they all sounded good but reviews were horrible and pricing exorbitant. with the wedding being held some way out of town we also weren't keen on traveling on our wedding night. then i found glamping. sounds silly i know but if you haven't heard of it before 'glamping' literally translates to glamorous camping. but pictures speak a thousand words so....

source: ecosalon and J. Morgan Puett

the general idea is to get a tent big enough to stand up in (like this one) furnish it with a rug of some sort, a lovely big bed perhaps, make the walls look not so tent like (maybe some sheer curtains) and voila! a relatively cheap hotel room and much more homely and apparently better for the environment
source: Alkemie and Houzz

 In our own special case the tent we will buy will afterwards be used by him to paint his car in (i think i will get him to put some plastic on the walls though in case we want to re-sell it) we will probably use some Wilma sheer curtains from Ikea which we already have to smooth the walls out and the ground will have a large tarp with our massive grey high-pile rug on top. not too sure what our bed will be possibly a spare taken from the house or maybe we will grab a cheapie from Ikea.

yes i love ikea

the only thing we will be missing will be a bathroom.... we will have to go up to the house for that

but it will be for one (maybe two) nights only as we are then planning to take a small trip camping along the way to Brisbane maybe further... we have two weeks off and just want to see where life takes us

we do however have one night in a hotel planned as i entered a competition on the holidays for couples website and WON!!! how amazing right? just shows you should enter as many as you can :)

Saturday, June 11, 2011

inspired

so i am again supposed to be studying and again i am not, instead i am sharing wedding inspiration....
sources: engagement shoot by Sarah Becker found via Modern Wedding, Beth Helmstetter Events via Style Me Pretty

source: fairy tales are true, everything fabulous

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

invitations, check

Over the weekend I finally got all our wedding invitations finished, with 106 days to go I think it was about time.
  
The origami heart idea came from the boy, on Valentines Day we had a sweet brekky planned but as he had just done a night shift he came home pooped and fell straight into bed but not before he crafted me this sweet little heart.

I swear he can be so goddamn cute sometimes.

I don't know where he got the instructions from but I found this website to use. I looked up the size of a bank bill and cut my book pages to size (though I believe I scaled it to be slightly bigger). My Mum suggested using an actual book to make them so we went to Vinnies and picked up a copy of Great Expectations and T.S. Elliot Collected Poems for under $1. I only ended up using Great Expectations and still have plenty of pages left but I think there will be more book related paper projects in the works.

I must admit it took a fairly long time (I made about 50, pressing them in my heavy tax textbooks) but our housemate sat and talked to me while I folded and after the first 10 I got a pretty good system going. The strips left over from cutting the pages to size ended up being the band on the inside of the card.

I got all my cardstock from a shop called Typo which is an offshoot of Cotton On, the first lot I bought was $5.95 for an a4 pack of 20 but when I went back to get more they were on clearance at $2, so I pretty much bought the lot.

We bought a Fiskars cutter from K-Mart for $19.95 and I swear it's been the best investment I ever made as I am the world's worst cutter of straight lines. Unfortunately K-Mart don't stock Fiskars anymore but you can get the same cutters from Spotlight.... but for almost double the price.

The Save The Date we sent out earlier I don't think I have pictures of but it was a postcard printed on kraft card with the tandem bicycle graphic offered on Wedding Chicks here.


This is the unfolded card with RSVP and belly band, unfortunately we moved house after I had printed all the RSVPs and we had to reprint them all .... but had no more kraft card left (I was actually kinda relieved as I wasn't happy with how they turned out). So I ended up using white card each with a page from Wuthering Heights glued on and the bicycle graphic printed in one corner and as the band didn't really go with book page I found some more kraft card at Spotlight for a whopping $12.95 for an a5 lot of 20 and printed an information card to go with it.

For some reason I decided to make the card an abnormal size and had great difficulty in finding some envelopes especially in kraft brown so we ended up making our own. I first looked into making conventional type envelopes but then found this awesome idea through Pinterest (on a side note Pinterest is my addiction).

My fiancee's grandmother was a seamstress, she died suddenly several years ago and left a wealth a sewing and crafting materials behind including a roll of kraft brown paper on one of those great old dispensers complete with guillotine type thing. So the envelopes ended up costing nothing except my time.

  this is how I put it together:
1. I measured a piece of paper which was wide enough to accommodate 3 'cards' across and length long enough to go over both sides (you can make the gap as wide or small as you want), we folded the corners in to create a less bulky end result
2. fold opposite corners down as shown
3. fold and secure - this last step is a little tricky and involved what I like to call 'spider fingers' you have to spread your fingers out and fold in both sides at the same time making sure all bits lay flat

I also glued the flap down with glue tape (my other best friend) as I didn't want them to come undone

and voila! finished

Costing:
Save the Dates - 1 pkt kraft brown card $5.95
RSVPs - failed ones 1 pkt kraft brown card $5.95 and final ones 1 pkt white card $2
Information card - $25.90 2 pkts kraft brown card (I do have plenty left over though...)
Invitation - 3 pkts white card $6
Envelopes - FREE!!
Books - around $1
Stamps -   50 at 60c = $30
Misc. - cutter $19.95, glue tape x2 $8 approx., ink about $30

Total $134.75  

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

dreaming of living in Paris

it is a week yesterday until my French final exam and I somehow can't quite get myself into gear to study for it. this morning i have found myself stuck on Oh Happy Day! reading about the joys of blogging and *sigh* living in Paris... but not studying the language as I am supposed to be doing. I think there must be a little voice in the back of my head saying 'reading the limited French in her blog post and understanding it will be helpful for my test' .... probably not. But you who must also be procrastinating go and look it's an awesome blog. Thank me later. or not.

Monday, June 6, 2011

the big share

In the nature of sharing.....

I have finally found a well-designed cute Australian wedding site! It's called Portobello Bride and features weddings and interviews of industry professionals and all sorts of fun stuff

And another lovely Australian share is The Design Files a blog dedicated to all things design - home, prints etc etc

 and finally this amazing US Woman and her company Found Vintage Rentals; it is amazing and exactly the type of thing I have been thinking about getting into she formally began in 2010 and now has a massive warehouse absolutely chockas with goodies!

Brisbane Trip 2

to resume where we left off
8. Sizzlers
9. Chermside - bought some Bundt tins (yes Bundt not Bum, Bundt)
10. continued debate on hire of wedding 'minions'
11. ate cheese for dinner - blue the best kind
12. drank some more red wine while watching 'How to Make an American Quilt'
13. went to Southbank for tea with an old friend
14. more antique shopping this time to The Woolloongabba Antique Centre there were a few interesting things here and there and I even found a great paper display in one of the 'stores' excuse the horrible iPhone photo

 and also this great collection of ornate picture frames....


15. i liked the smaller shop over the road better
16. then went to The Paddington Antique Centre which was definitely more relaxed
17. had some more tea
18. had some more wine
19. hitched up the trailer
20. headed back to NSW





Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Brisbane Trip

Spent the weekend in Brisbane with my belle-mere and her sisters we saw/did some wonderful things including:

1.  looked at antique shops
2. ate some yummy beef bourguignon and creme brulee
3. drank some red wine
4. had a yummy Ikea breakfast

$2.99 for a brekky of bacon, eggs, sausage, 2 hash browns and a tomato - looks a little greasy but the perfect thing to start a day of hard-core shopping

5. freaked out about money
6. sold my car while away
7. became relieved and proceeded to buy up the whole of Ikea
Photos courtesy of Ikea


8. Went to Sizzlers

Part 2 to follow... I really need to study eek