the Yellow Beast

Our new chair in addition to Alice (the pink chair).
Donated to us from people on the move.
The yellow beast is sporting a newly sewn pillow for outside,
and the stack of books are the from an awesome sale at the library,
.25 cents a piece!

Lovely......

Sometimes you stumble upon images on the web that make you stop and pause. These three wowed me today. I can't get over how amazing this dress is. The texture is so rich. It looks like seafood. or like a yummy organic sculpture of textile richness.

The second picture find was just plain cute and creative. I think they used post-it notes to stick to the branches, or it's photoshopped I can't tell.  I might have to steal the idea for a photoshoot. 

The third picture of the day, I stopped because of the color  ( i guess i'm into muted colors today) and the curiosity  of the picture. The photographer or camera is not reflected back in any of those mirrors...I guess because of the angle...but i expected he/she to be there so I looked. I just recently pondered buying a old ornate mirror at Olde Town. Antiques..but alas, too pricey.

Roman Shades

Thank you Little Green Notebook!

http://littlegreennotebook.blogspot.com/2009/02/make-shades-out-of-mini-blinds.html

I made a roman shade for our kitchen window, although I was a little lazy and they aren't perfectly as straight as they could be. Baah, well...atleast they're behind the hutch.

The newlywed diet

My wonderful husband is a fantabulous cook. He is fascinating to watch in the kitchen. I just look from over the counter and stay out the way. My best dish is probibly an omlette or spaggetti. He flips, dices, crafts and pinches with concentration. If I ask, he'll explain why he's doing it that way or why the recipe calls for something. The best part is, he's humble, and doesn't complain when I try to cook something, even when it resembles a mutilated tire with blood sauce and the fork lets out a little scream on its way in.

men's shirt covers

a few years ago, my dad was throwing some shirts in a goodwill box, and i took them instead. Voila.

the Wedding is OVER ! Hallelujah!

Therefore I will attemt to blog the decoration ideas.

Michaels had their after christmas clearance out, and they had these wonderful frosted birch branches for $2.00 a bundle. They had wierd green sequens sewn through them, but they were ripped out. Also they came rather squashed together, so they had to be carefully unwoven. They were a little broken afterwards but decent enough for use. These went in the tall borrowed maestro vases that went on the food tables.

We had six tables on either side of the room. On each was a white table cloth. A little bunch of green fabric and then a big glass vase filled with what we'll call "various foliage". Underneath were mixmatched antique silver trays or mirrors. I spent the week before filling the vases and then packing them up so they could be put on the table as is. Mostly I stole from the backyard (and possibly the neighbors tree that had conveniently grown into our yard). There was an assortment of branches, pinecones, green wheat, a waxy evergreen, dried flowers and berries.

 And here are some pictures from the day itself:

My Bouquet was done by Magnolia Designs

Preparing

my room is so chock full of wedding stuff. I can't decide whether i like that or not. I will hopefully put up the details later on, but for now, why spoil it?

Christmas morning lacks sleep, so I paint trees instead.

Here is the start of a huge painting...the stretched canvas is actually a little warped...so this one won't be going anywhere.....My gesso was a little chunky, so i think it might have been a little dried out in places. None the less it did the job, but there was more sanding to do than I would have liked. I drew on the trees with charcoal and then just went at it. I didn't have a picture in mind, but I want something to sit on the fireplace at the wedding and our colors are green and black. The "bokeh" looking blobs will eventually be the light coming in throught the branches.

Goodbye, pretty girly room....

I'll miss you

Candles

Candles are great for so many things....staring at for ideas and for clearing the gas in the bathroom. Charley and I scrubbed the grout in the kitchen with a cleaner that smelled like old socks. Candles to the rescue.

finale'

So the invitations eventually got sent out, with few days to spare. Their major flaw was that on opening the recipient usually didn't notice the response card. Only 60 people have RSVP'd so far...we are counting this a blessing, unless more people decide to show up after all. We'll cross our fingers and find out when we get there.

Progress of invitations

I didn't think this would be so hard.....boy was I wrong. For starters, I really wanted something unique and untraditional. I started pulling images together and finding what i liked. This vintage Ad was one of the pictures. I then realized that I loved the look of old lables and things.

I tried using a vitage decorative border at the top, but that was too frou frou for my tastes. Then i made a french wine lable an invite just for kicks. I made a tree monogram, hated that...moved on. As much as i liked the old lables and vitage tags, it was time to steer around that idea.

Next i found this bird invite. The bird theme however felt a bit overused. Scratched that idea

Then I found these folk's invite, and was like sweet! Its cute, non traditional, and handrawn. Charley and I looked over our "theme" of sorts and liked the idea of it "advertising" what the wedding would be like. So we tried incoporating trees, nighttime, our pet hedgehog, with a retro border.

 Then we tried a handrawn version of the woodsy theme. It was too hard to read and scan in.

Nex idea came from this couple who did a letter styled invite with a typwriter. Charley used to do his homework on the typewriter in the libary  and i loved the old look of antique typwriters so we decided to try that. I took the typwriter below and made a black and white of it and it was going to sit at the bottom of the page while our invite scrolled out of the top of it. This idea was cancled when my mother saw me working on it and protested....thus started the battle between our two tastes. My mother wanted uber traditional with uber traditional wording. I wanted the opposite.

SO we went back to the bordered idea........... but play around with some new ideas first, including a couple of monogram doodles before I realized that wasn't us at all.

One of the ideas was entering into a contest to see if i could win these invitations. I got a nice email back saying they had picked another winner..which is a shame, because these were my favorite invitations that i had seen available for sale on the internet. I wasnt a fan of getting the packs at michaels either.

At this point we were getting very desperate to get something, anything, out so people would actually know when and where the daggone thing was. We contemplated writing on napkins and mailing those.

Next I tried these, but after much argumentation on whose name got to be on the invite, one of our groomsmen pointed out that it looked like a book title. I'm glad he said something, because I didn't see it at first and then I realized he was absolutely right.

The last idea involved printing out the words on copy paper and painting on a tree with our initials on it. This idea came from an invite that I initally wrote off as corney. Okay, so it's corney, but it's us. We are using birch branches and pinecones for the decor at the wedding so it works....except to point out that I think I painted an oak tree and then paired it with a pine cone? Works for desperate people.

First i drew it on with pencil and made a copy. Next i painted on top of the copy.

I had drawn this in my sketchbook as a thumbnail during brainstorming. We are going to have christmas lights all around. Next i painted the teeeeny tiney little pinecone for the RSVP with a little Teeeny tiney brush.

So this idea was a GO from the parental's, meaning it fit  the requirements of being simple, and yet a little different. Its truthfully not my favorite, but I needed to be decisive! and we were in a hurry, and I am entirely too picky about that sort of thing. IT'S A PIECE OF PAPER! Whew, there had be some tears of joy at the opening of these things in the mail. Next I took the origional to Kinkos (or Fedex). They scanned the sucker and gave me the proof shown here: