Countdowns and Paper Upcycling

Alright here are the long promised photos of the "Wedding Bells" banner I made last weekend:

Pretty cute right? I think next time, I will go for more of the color variant letters if I have double letters in a word.










If you remember that I said I saved the paper scraps from cutting the wedding invitations, then you have a really good memory. If you didn't remember, now you know that. :) When it comes to more expensive paper, I want to use as much of it as I can.

A long running joke during our engagement was that there would be a paper chain countdown to the wedding. Mr. Fiance thought it was just that, a joke. Well, yesterday he was rather surprised to find that part of his Valentine was a paper chain..

That's right, I re-used the scraps from the wedding invite project to create a 100 days Wedding Countdown. Each day will feature something that will (likely) only happen on our wedding day. Our My plan is to take a picture of us with that day's piece of paper and then use a digital photo frame or the digital projector at our venue to cycle the photos through - along with our engagement photos - during our cocktail hour.

 This is the same hallway where the wedding bells sign is... the paper chain extends from the front door to about a foot and half into our living room. Essentially about 20 feet long.

Here is what is essentially on each of the slips:

    #   days until insert wedding day event

You can see I started off with "100 days until I am Mrs. _______"

Generally I usually used our first names on the slips so that they are written in the first person and will make sense to our guests when they see them. So the list below has the title of the person in our wedding and not their actual name, in case you want to borrow the idea.

-Mr. Fiance is no longer a bachelor
-(insert name) is no longer a bachelorette
-MoH gives her Maid of Honor Speech
-Bride's parents walk her down the aisle

Yes, you read that right. My parents are walking me down the aisle. A job that traditionally in Christian based ceremonies is reserved for the father of the bride, I decided to challenge. Mom and Dad always made a point that they attempted to the best of their ability to raise their children together, that one parent was not above the other. They even made a point of telling Mr. Fiance and I this before we ever got engaged; if Mr. Fiance wanted to ask permission, he needed to sit down and ask them together. They later revised that and said he didn't need to ask, that he did not need to ask. That the decision to become engaged would be entirely my decision. Regardless, I took this matter to heart and ask them to walk me down the aisle together. That they would both be helping me transition into this new period of my life.

How did you celebrate or will you celebrate your 100 day countdown?

"Wedding Bells" Pennant Display

On top of our wedding this year, Mr. Fiance and I have been asked to attend at least four other wedding so far. With all the papers that come with that (you know - the save the date, the bridal shower invite, the bachelor(ette) party invite and the wedding itself) there is a lot to deal with.

Rather than just simply put it on our fridge or stack it on our dining room table, I decided to display it. The inspiration for this came from actually something similar we did at Christmas time. We had put a ribbon along our entrance way walkway and then clipped using clothes pins the various Christmas cards that made their way to our house.

Using the same idea, I simply replaced the Christmas stuff with wedding style things (i.e. white ribbon) and then pinned our wedding festivities to the ribbon. However, against a white wall it looked rather dull and not very eye catching. To spice it up, I found those love printables on line from Ruffled and went to town. I printed out the following letters in color on some thicker paper I had laying around:
W-E-D-D-I-N-G B-E-L-L-S

When I had a spare moment I just took a paper cut and cut the letters down to the triangular shape with very little edging. What got me thinking was the best way to attach the paper to the ribbon I had wanted to use. I thought of my trusty hot glue gun but I didn't want to see the glue on either side of the ribbon or the paper. So my next bet - Tacky Glue.

I simply took Tacky Glue to the top of the bunting letters and then laid the tan/gold ribbon I had over it with spacing between letters that would allow people to read what was on the wall.

Its still drying currently so when its complete and hung, I will take a picture of it. I am excited to spice up the white walls in our house with a bit more color. This bunting project will come in handy for the next several years as more of our friends get married. I suppose I could have saved myself the trouble of making another one of these for other occasions (babies, moving, etc. etc.) by simply having the lettering spell "happy notes" but that thought is two weeks too late.

What have you crafted lately?

Invitations: Reactions

Our wedding invitations went out almost two weeks ago. Needless to say we have had some great reactions.

One of Mr. Fiance's co workers came up to him and the conversation went something like this:

Co-worker, "Hey man. I am surprised you can even afford to do anything!"
Mr. Fiance, "Huh? What are you talking about?"
Co-worker, "I got your wedding invite! I opened it and had to keep opening it because there was so much stuff in there. It looks like you and your fiancee are spending a ton of money on the wedding. That's what I mean."
Mr. Fiance, "Dude, she designed those at home, had them printed at a copy place and then she, her mom and her friend put them together. It cost like $250 total..."
Co-worker, "Really? She did a nice job. I thought you had ordered them professionally and cost like $600. I feel like sh** now because our wedding invite was a single sheet of paper..."

Not that I meant for others to feel that way but from this particular co-worker, I feel its the highest compliment possible.

Most females say that the invites look "cute" or "adorable" which is also nice.

The best compliment so far came from a friend of mine in Colorado who is also getting married. I hope she doesn't mind that I directly quote her from our Facebook conversation.

"It looks amazing. You could do it professionally. You blew mine out of the water. I didn't really want to put mine together like yours, but now i regret it!"

To those of you who are weary of doing your own invites, these are the reasons why I loved doing my own. If you do them well, put the time and energy into them, people will appreciate them beyond the typical "Oh, that looks nice."

Coming later: the long ago promised wedding wall update! Its coming tonight while Mr. Fiance is out with his potential groosman. Yes, that's right - we are four months out from our wedding and we are still waiting to ask the last groomsman. Proof that while we are pro-active, somethings still slip through the cracks.