Taking a relax day

Its been nuts lately so I decided to take a relax day today and update my DIY instructions with my latest completed project, the wand I made for my flower girl to carry down the aisle.  It was surprisingly easy and Ryan says it doesn't even look like something I made but more like something you'd buy in the store which made me even more proud of it :) There are a couple more pics of it on the DIY page, but I wanted to share one here too since I love it so much.

We met with our DJ yesterday and he is awesome.  He was so receptive to the requests we had and seems just like a genuinely nice guy.  His website is www.djalpha.ca in case anyone is looking for a DJ in London, ON.
Everything seems to be finally coming together.  We're having our contract signing meeting with our cake decorator next weekend which I am excited about.  We met with her originally about a month ago and her cake was DIVINE!  This is the inspiration for our design, although we're going to make it 3 tiers and with green fondant gerberas at the sides where the swag switches directions and our cake topper is a football groom with the bride tackling him

My mom and I were super busy yesterday making all of the adult favours for the reception.  We made 40 jars of mint chocolate chip jelly bean jelly and 48 jars of apple jelly bean jelly which both turned out great!

The recipe for the jelly can be found at http://www.bernardin.ca/pages/recipe_page/51.php?pid=319 and I made the custom labels at http://www.stickeryou.com.

Its only 2 months today until the wedding so I'm starting to get extremely excited and equally extremely nervous about everything getting done!  I really need to bite the bullet and set up an appointment to get my dress altered.  Not that it needs much done, its just a matter of getting the appointment set up!  Wish me luck and pray that I don't lose my mind in the next 2 months!

The last 2 weeks...it appears I've been slacking...in reality I've just been busy!

Well my beads finally arrived, and they are awesome! I can't believe the deal I got on them, especially compared to the $5 strands at Michaels for half the beads!  I ordered the rest of my supplies from The Beading Room, an online beading store from Nova Scotia and they got here super quick so I started on the necklaces for the girls (which took no time at all, I was done in an hour or so) and the earrings, which were substantially more frustrating, hence why I haven't finished them yet...they're on a time out! I did manage to get 2 done and they stayed pretty long enough for me to take one picture before one of them fell apart.  I think I need a way to hold the pearl while I try to hook the loop through the stud...we'll see how those turn out, but I love the necklaces :) That's all 5 piled together btw, not a massively huge one!  The necklaces and earrings will be part of the gift for my girls but I'm a little stuck on what else to give them.  Two of them in particular have been incredibly awesome so I want to do something special for them.  If you have any suggestions please leave me a comment!



I am massively happy with my table numbers as well, although I'm thinking they could use some sprucing up a bit...thoughts?  They're just a little plain but I don't know if adding stickers or something would be too childish.  Also, you can't see it but the frames are double-sided so there will be a picture of the two of us on the other side, for our guests to gaze at fondly of course!

We have all of the ingredients now that we need to do all of the adult favours for the reception so that's going to be our next big project...Jelly Bean Jelly!  The recipe is from the Bernardin Website and we're packaging it in 125ml mason jars with custom stickers on the top from StickerYou that have a green daisy and have our names/wedding date and the jelly flavour.  We'll be making half of them apple flavour and half of them mint chocolate chip flavour, both tinted a different shade of green.  The flavours were the hardest thing to find, but I used Golda's Kitchen which is just an awesome store, they have everything, including the flower mould I used for the crayons.  Once these are done, I'll post a DIY with pics and the recipe.  Thats all for now I think, sorry bout the long post!!

DIY Crayons

In all of my searches for DIY things and what to do with kids at the wedding I kept coming across these awesome DIY crayons that people have made so I decided to do my own.  I found a cute silicone daisy mould at Golda's Kitchen and grabbed 2 64 packs of crayons at walmart and voila, 24 awesome multi colour crayons that I'm going to package them up in sets of 3 with some cute 'from the mr. and mrs' brown and green ribbon and put with colouring books at the kids seats for the reception. They are super cute if I do say so myself :) Instructions are posted on the DIY page.

Rings!

We ordered our rings last night!!  This was by far, the absolute easiest of all of our wedding purchases so far.  We both knew that we wanted just classic 14k yellow gold bands so we walked into People's yesterday and had them ordered in less than 20 minutes! Talk about stress free, the woman was very helpful.  I got a 2mm one so it would match the width of my engagement ring and not make the two of them together too wide.  I've read about some women who only wear their engagement ring on special occasions but I love my ring and couldn't imagine leaving it at home everyday...I think my finger would feel naked.  Ryan's ring is 5mm and I cannot wait to slip it on his finger in 95 days!!

On some more awesome notes...(yesterday was an awesome wedding related day!) the sales manager from the hotel we're having the reception at called to set up a menu tasting (woo!) so we get awesome dinner next weekend, and I also found out yesterday that the date for my bridal shower and bachelorette party have been set!! The shower will be in just a few weeks (18 days!) before my cousins all go back to school and I'm so excited for it :)  On the other hand, my bachelorette is scheduled for October 8th so my sister will be back home from school for Thanksgiving.  I'm told its going to be an all day thing, and that my MOH and one of my bridesmaids will be helping me pick out 'something skimpy' for my wedding night...no other details have been divulged so needless to say I'm a bit nervous about that one! I'm sure it will be a blast though.

I'm going to try to get through all the rest of the invitations tonight and must remember to buy stamps so I can send them all out before Friday.  We're moving into our new place on Saturday and I can't wait to have more time to focus on wedding things!! Eek!

Phew!

It was a busy last couple of week's so I didn't get much time to post let alone do any DIY stuff...we were incredibly busy planning/having our stag and doe and working on finding jobs and a place of our own to live...craziness let me tell you.  We're currently living with Ryan's mom, which is nice, we really appreciate her letting us stay but we definitely need our own space!  Ryan started a new job last week, not a forever type job, but its going to allow us to move out on our own again which is awesome!!! We're moving this weekend and I can't wait!!  The stag and doe was on Saturday and was an awesome success! It was so great to see family and friends that I haven't seen in awhile and a great opportunity for some of Ryan's family to meet mine.  All in all we made a good amount of money that will promptly be put towards our plans! First item on the to-do list is wedding bands so we'll be going out tomorrow in search of those.  Currently I'm working on addressing the invitations, which I've been putting off and putting off and putting off....but it has to be done, we are getting married in just 96 days!

I had an extremely unsuccessful shoe shopping trip the other day, I hate my gigantic feet.  Every time I'd find a pair I like, they either wouldn't come in my size (a whopping 11) or wouldn't be flat (Ryan's already 3 inches shorter than me), or didn't come in a wide width...damn wide feet.  But I've still got time thank god...may end up just going with green chucks haha.

I'm not sure if I mentioned before, but my cousin is doing our centerpieces as part of a project for one of her classes at school which is so totally ok with me lol.  We're doing 3 different size mason jars with a green silk gerbera and water in it and a floating candle.  Next to these, we're doing the table numbers in little frames from IKEA.  99 cents for a two sided frame, doesn't get better than that!  We'll put one of our engagement pics on one side and the table number on the other.  I have some ideas for table numbers (brown scrapbook paper with a green painted wooden letter?) but I might let Ryan have a go at designing them.

I finally found some nice glass pearls on ebay to use to make the jewelry for my girls, ordered them on the 13th of July and they're not here yet which is a little worrisome but I'm hoping they're just stuck at customs somewhere since they're coming from the states.  I think that's all I needed to get off my chest tonight lol I'm hoping that once we're in our own place I'll have more time for some DIY and finalizing plans!

DIY Jewelery Ups and Downs...

So I have these gorgeous pearls that my parents got me for a graduation/birthday present and I love love love them so I wanted to make my girls something that would sort of match to wear on the big day.  I found awesome instructions and I think they're going to look great...only problem is the cost! Why oh why is everything in Canada so expensive!?! I hit up my local Michael's to see what they had and even on sale, strands of freshwater potato pearls were $4 for 12"...just for the pearls alone it costs $24 and then each 'jewelry making accessory' was $5 on top of that...throw in the proper tool for the job and I was out $85 for a project that was supposed to be budget friendly.  I took everything home and after sleeping on it, decided that I didn't even like how the pearls looked (some looked like popcorn kernels or were really bumpy...) so I returned it all and am back at square one.  I think I'm going to get white glass pearls instead which seem to be much more uniform in shape (actually round) and significantly cheaper.  I found some on ebay that I can get a 32" strand for $1.99.  I ordered 4 so we'll see how they look when they arrive.  I think I'm going to try to find an online source for all the other materials as well...hopefully I'll get around to doing all the jewelry in the next week or so.  Wish me luck!

DIY Easles

Ryan and I are planning to make some DIY art to display on the guestbook table at the reception so we've been looking at easles to put it on and hadn't found any that we liked or were willing to pay the amount they asked for.  We hadn't really talked about DIYing them, but when I came home from work yesterday, much to my surprise there was an easel DIY taking place in the back yard! Ryan built a small one (17" legs) out of some scrap wood in the shed and it turned out awesome.  So awesome in fact that we headed to Rona and picked up supplies to make more! So now thanks to my awesome hubby-to-be we have 3 matching easels, 2 little and one big (5.5' legs) to display our art and the cork board that I'm covering with fabric to display the escort cards.  Here's one of the little ones with part of my gift table banner on it as a size gauge (the squares are 3" high).  We're going to stain them all to match the wood on the card box, hopefully we got the right colour!  The supplies to make all 3 came in around $45.  I'll put up a detailed list of materials with instructions on the DIY page.  These were really easy once we got the hang of it!