New DIY in the Works

I haven't officially started on this next DIY, but my fiance and I have decided to try and take on the task of baking and decorating our own wedding cake. My fiance is a baker and we have been talking for months now about trying to tackle decorating cakes. So starting tomorrow, we are heading to Hobby Lobby and picking up the materials needed to do a miniature cake mock-up. I'M SO EXCITED!! We have a baker booked right now, but we never signed a contract with her, so if we were to cancel it wouldn't be an issue. We wouldn't have thought about doing this, but our baker called yesterday and invited us to come to the Bridal Expo in my hometown that I had no idea was going on today. She said she airbrushed daisies onto a white cake for us to come look at and see if we liked the look of it. Here is what we want our cake to look like..

 

We want her to use fondant for the flowers, but she insisted that we come look at her "stenciled" work. Her stenciled work consisted of her taking a flower cookie cutter, holding it up to the cake and airbrushing inside the cutter on the cake. To be honest, it looked awful. She could tell we weren't happy with it. It looked splotchy and runny. So I told her we want fondant instead. I asked if she was going to use the same flower cookie cutter for that too and she said yes. We weren't crazy about the cookie cutter at all. It looked like a wavy funky flower stolen from the 1960's, and not modern at all, like we want. So chances are if things go well with our mock-up, we are going to cancel our baker and do it ourselves. I'll be sure to post pictures as soon as we finish our mini mock-up! Wish us luck!

Not A DIY.. But Wanted To Share!

My fiance and I decided to walk around our mall today since we were both pretty bored. While in Macy's, we ended up finding my earrings for the wedding! They were regularly $300, and I got them for $135!

Emboss Invites - Check!

Hello! With having MLK Day off from school and work, I decided to try my hand at another DIY project. My invites are without a doubt my biggest DIY because I have so much I want to do with them. I printed them all and cut them all with my brand new paper cutter (which rocks btw!), and now wanted to emboss them with a stamp design. I looked and looked online for months for potential ideas of what to add to our invites to dress them up a little, but since they're hot pink, we didn't have a lot of options. That was until, I learned about embossing. To be honest, I was pretty nervous to attempt it, but after a few months of trial and error, I was finally ready to tackle our invites. Now I want to share with you how to heat emboss!

Materials Needed:

• Paper/Cardstock
• Embossing powder
• Embossing ink pad
• Heat gun
• Rubber stamp
• Embossing buddy (optional)
• Stamp-A-Ma-Jig (optional)
• Miniature paint brush/duster
  

1. Getting started, you want to start out with your cardstock on a flat surface.

2. Optional Step: With your embossing buddy, rub the area where you place to emboss. I found the embossing buddy to be very beneficial because its purpose is to keep the embossing powder from sticking anywhere else other than on the embossing ink.

3. Collect your stamp and your embossing ink. Tip: The embossing ink will work best if left upside down when not in use.

4. Apply the embossing ink to the stamp.

5. Optional Step: Using your Stamp-A-Ma-Jig, line the cardstock/paper up and place the stamp inside the Stamp-A-Ma-Jig. I found this tool to be very helpful since I was able to line up the stamp perfectly each time.

6. Press the stamp on the cardstock/paper.

7. Pour the embossing powder onto your image.

8. Spread the powder out with your finger to cover the entire image.

9. Shake off any excess powder into a container.

10.  Optional Step: To remove any left-over powder and to clean up your image, use a small paintbrush or duster to remove any powder not wanted. Once removed, blow off any powder.

11.  Once you have your image the way you want, turn on your heat gun and heat the stamped image. Once the heat gun is fully warmed up, the powder will begin melting and rising.

12. All done! Pat yourself on the back for a job well done!

Embossing is such a great additive to add a little extra flavor to any paper project that you are working on. Just make sure to practice with your stamp and the technique plenty before jumping into embossing any invites, programs etc.

WARNING: Your working area may look like this while working. Big mess!

Centerpieces.. Changed my mind!

So I know I blogged earlier about how I want my centerpieces to look, but I have changed my mind and made my final decision! I want to incorporate my tissue paper flowers that I've been making for pomanders a lot more, so here is what I've decided to do:

These will be my escort card table's centerpieces..

Now these vases are a tad bit taller than what I plan on using, and I bought similar looking strings of beads like this black one except I bought them in my colors. This is also another way that I can incorporate my tissue paper flowers. I can't wait to show everyone how they turn out!

Now, for my reception centerpieces. All I've know for sure is that I want to incorporate fruit and gerber daisies, but I've googled and searched until my face turned blue.. and all I can say is that.. I FOUND IT! I've found exactly what I want to do and here is it:

I found these bubble bowl vases (8 inches) at Hobby Lobby. They were $5.99/each, but they were 50% off! So I was able to buy 15 of these for $3.00/each. WOO HOO! Now for how I plan to incorporate my tissue paper flowers.. another thing I've been doing is researching wholesale flowers online for months and I've found my daisies, but now I need to find mums like the green ones shown in the photo. Well after some thought, I realized that I can make these myself out of tissue paper and they will look just to same. If you've seen my tissue paper pomander tutorial, then you've seen how large the flowers turn out. I plan to cut the size in half for the centerpieces. You'll see what I mean when I do my first trial! Which will be VERY SOON! STAY TUNED!

Envelope Liners - Check!

I'm so excited to share this DIY with everyone! As you previously saw in one of my posts, I wanted to line our invitation envelopes with one of our engagement pictures and here is how they turned out!

I absolutely love the way that they turned out. I inserted the photo into Microsoft Word and enlarged it to the width of the template that I made. This photo that I took of it certainly doesn't do it any justice! It looks much better in person!

Now for my instructions for making these!

Materials Needed:

• A heavy piece of cardstock, plastic, cardboard 
• One of your envelopes
• Glue stick (or some kind of adhesive)
• Ruler
• Pencil
• Scissors
  

Instructions:

1. You'll need a heavy piece of cardstock, plastic, cardboard etc. to make your template since you will be tracing around it many times in the future. I chose to use 110 lb. cardstock. You'll also need one of your envelopes to begin your template. 

 

2.  I began by lining up my envelopes with the piece of cardstock in one of it's corners (less cutting!). 

   

      3.  Trace the envelope onto the piece of cardstock.

       4.  Next, you'll want to measure how wide the adhesive portion of your envelope flap is. You want to do this to determine how much to cut off your template, otherwise you'll overlap the adhesive on the envelope flap and won't be able to seal your envelopes once finished. For me, it measured 1 cm.

         5.   From your now traced line on your cardstock, measure that width inward on your template and mark it with your pencil. Continue to do this along the sides. I did about three marks on each side.

(You can kind of see my marks here.)

      

         6.  Place your envelope on top of your cardstock at the marks that you just made and trace the envelope flap again.

 

          7.   Cut out your template. Cut on your SECOND traced line.

         8.   At this point when I tried to put the template into the envelope itself, it wouldn't on the side very well, so I decided to cut off 1 cm on each side of the template.

          9.  Insert your newly made template into your envelope to see how it measure up and make any adjustments as needed. For me, I decided to fold my template in half vertically to make sure they lined up evenly. There were a few places where I decided to cut to little more off to make sure the sides were even.

VOILA!

My Upcoming Projects

So while I'm in the works of some new projects, I wanted to share with you my inspiration for my future projects!

How cute are these? I CANNOT wait to get started on this project. I plan to type up some directions for anyone interested in completing this DIY. I will be starting on this in the next couple of day so it won't be long!

I want to utilize my pomanders in more than one area of the wedding, so I want to put these (in my colors) on our escort card table to give it a little height.

I love these for our escort cards. I'm the type of person that wants to go beyond the norm and do things that people haven't seen, especially since all of the weddings we've been to have been very traditional and very much the same. So small details like these will make our wedding more unique.

I found this idea on The Knot's Wedding Obsession Blog. This would serve an entertainment piece at the reception so that guests can get a better idea of our history together.

This is one of the first DIY projects that I found when I first began idea shopping for the wedding. I want to try and make my table numbers very similar to these and also put on the bottom  a little fact about us.

I can't wait to get started and share my projects with you!

The Paddle Program Saga Continues

So my latest project has been my paddle programs. I've created one side of my programs and I am currently working on the second half. I'll be sure to post pictures once I'm done. But until that time, I want to share the website that I'm using to create my programs. Here is the website that I found my template for creating my programs: Program Templates If you scroll half way down, you will see find the paddle program templates! I'm using the "Classy Program" templates. If you're interested in doing program fans, but don't want to do the paddle fans, there are also Panel Fan Program templates if you scroll all the way back up to the top!

Happy New Year!

Happy 2010! Here's wishing everyone a wonderful 2010!