Recycled wedding card box!

Wow, sorry for the long hiatus...again. It's tough to post when the hours in each day just seem to fly by! We have bout 45 days left until our wedding day! It seems unreal that it is this close! And a little scary since I still have a long list of things to do for that day! Well, let me update you on our last little project!

Our wedding card box! I wanted to make this simple and follow our green theme, so I saved a bunch of boxes from the mail, a couple large pizza boxes and grabbed a few brown paper bags from my mom's house. This box is nearly 100% recycled! Here's what we did!

1. My live-in architect helped create a stable box structure and lid with his amazing modeling skills!


2. I crumpled the brown paper bags and ironed them with wax paper to get a neat effect! Then I wrapped the box and lid with the paper.


3. I used paints and ribbon leftover from our boutonnieres to put the finishing touches on our box!


It definitely looks different, but I think it fits us!


Our invitations have been sent out! Hopefully the mail does not eat them like it did some of my shower invitations! I can't wait to see everyone! It is going to be a great weekend! Check out our wedding website that Derek and I designed! That's all for now! Check back soon as we start to design our wedding programs! :-)

Eco-friendly, Homemade Boutonnieres!

I've been googling and estying around to find a simple, yet catchy homemade boutonniere style. One that I easily make 30 from without ripping my eyes out at the last minute! Flowers are nice, but not very environmentally friendly if your flower choice is not in season or grown locally, not to mention by the end of the night they are wilted and mangled from dancing! My mother is growing the flowers for our centerpieces and we could have used those flowers to make the boutonnieres, but I had a dream of chaos erupting the day before the wedding when the floral boutonnieres fell apart because we did not know how to make them!

So, instead of using the traditional flowers from a florist for boutonnieres, we decided to make our own sans flowers! Using clearance ribbon from a craft store and old buttons from my mother's button jar, we came up with these! The buttons are hand-painted to correspond with our color theme and each design is simply sewn together (with the help of a little double-sided tape too! haha!)





I'm excited to see how these look on everyone! They turned out spectacularly! The great thing about this is that I can get all of them finished ahead of time and we do not have to worry about refrigeration, or putting them on too early! I recommend hand-making boutonnieres to anyone planning a wedding! It's a special touch and you get to see your craftiness on everyone throughout the night! Plus, it's a little sentimental gift for each person who took part in your special day! What could be better?! :-)

Wine Charm Party!

I recently had an "OH SHIT" moment when I realized that this past weekend was the last free weekend I have until August 29th. Our Sept 26th wedding is coming up VERY QUICKLY and I seem to be getting more DIY ideas as the days go by! So I sent out a party invite to my lovely Chicago women and they all came over for a wine charm-making cocktail party! IT. WAS. FABULOUS!
I cannot thank them enough! We made over 250 wine charms! Charms ranging from old clip on earrings, keyboard keys, puzzle pieces, fishing lures and seashells! I'm storing them on clothes hangers for now and 100 fit nicely per hanger! It's a great way to keep track of the numbers! Here are some of my favorites that I quickly picked out. The charms will be on the wine glasses and the entire set-up (glass + charm) will be the wedding favor for guests to take home with them! All the charms were made from recycled items, things that normally would have been thrown away, or found at a garage sale/thrift store! Thank you so much ladies! I know it was last minute but it was tons of fun! You were so helpful! And the free beer at Duffy's definitely made the night even better! I can't wait to see all your shiny, happy faces at my wedding! It's going to be quite the party!

Wine Glasses & Invitations

GARAGE SALE WINE GLASSES
I mentioned in a previous post that my family & friends agreed to help me search for garage sale or thrift store wine glasses. Well, I have had EXTREMELY good luck with this search and Craig's List has become my new best friend! Last week I found 138 wine glasses for 50 cents each from an art gallery that went out of business and yesterday I found possibly 100-200 glasses (again 50 cents each) from a recently married couple who did not end up using all of them! So total I have 238, possibly 338! I can't believe how easy this was!

Thank you so much to all my friends who have collected wine glasses for me! I think we finally have enough! It wasn't as hard or painful as I originally thought this search would be! One thing to cross off the wedding to-do list!

DIY WEDDING INVITATION
It has been a while since my last post, so I thought I'd give everyone something to read/look at and post our wedding invitation that we finally designed! We're having them printed at a local business in Carroll and using 100% recycled paper. The only issue is color since Derek and I do most of our work for web, we've become unfamiliar with all the print options such as PMS colors. The test print looked like red and green instead of teracotta and peridot! It may look different on every screen too, but we'll get all that figured out soon. What do you think?! We've changed "family" to "families", but haven't found any other spelling/grammar errors. We wanted to include our parents names, but the spacing seemed too cramped for the 5 x 7 size we are using. Our wedding website sort of follows the same design, but we've been so busy with work that we haven't had a chance to finish it! There's a lot of content to think about! I will post that link as soon as we get it finished.
Heading out to Iowa this weekend for one of my best friend's weddings! So excited to see everyone (and take secret notes of how she does things! haha!)
Thanks for reading!

DIY Wine Charm progress!

Hey All!
Over memorial day I visited my grandmother and she pulled out a huge jewelry box full of goodies and told me to go through it and take what I like to use for the wine charms! It was a TREASURE BOX! She does not have her ears pierced, so there were tons of pairs of clip-on earrings, old broken necklaces and pins! All perfect for wine charms! So, this week whenever I needed a break from the computer work, I wandered over to my workshop (aka the living room, the only other "room" in the apartment!) and started making the jewelry into charms!



I'm starting to get a nice collection going. I've had friends send me the most random of things like the plastic tags on toddler clothing! (Kudos to Erica for those!!!) But that's the point! This project is all about recycling the random objects found around the house that would normally be thrown away and creating a new item out of them!

I'm not actually putting together the whole charm right now, just getting it ready so it can easily be strung on the wire. I am going to plan a charm-making party in Chicago soon, so all of you who are in the area, clean out your jewelry boxes and get ready for a fun night! I will provide the wine and food, if you provide the broken jewelry/random objects for charms! :-)



I'm also still hunting for thrift store wine glasses! Some stores in Chicago are charging an awful lot for mis-matched glasses. I was thinking no more than $.50-$1.00 but some are marked as high as $3.00 per glass! That's a little outrageous for me since we need to find over 300 of these. So the hunt continues! If you see a deal at a garage sale this summer, grab 'em for me and I will cut you a check and make a personalized charm for you! :-)

Reason #1 why I LOVE photoshop!

Compare the images below and see if you can find what's missing!


If I can remove shadows, zits and strengthen a jawline, imagine what I can do with those extra 10 pounds I've been trying to get rid of! :-) Just some fun with Photoshop on the engagement photos we had taken. We probably will not use this one for anything, but it was fun to see how it could be cleaned up! I'm VERY glad we hired a professional wedding photographer-- Sara Jayne Weitzel is AMAZING!-- She has such great ideas and I can't wait to see the great photos she takes of us!

Ok, the next post will be our wedding invitation design. I'm still waiting to get the test print from the printer, but I'm pretty sure we won't be changing the design. Programs are next on my agenda! Derek is putting together the wedding website today! Maybe I'll throw in a sneak peek of that too! Thanks for reading!! :-)

Sneak Peek: DIY Save-the-Dates!

Our original green plan for Save-the-Dates was to be electronic and send them through email, however my mother has expressed a sincere interest in sending a few to friends and family members. So, we have decided to print a small quantity to mail. Here's the scoop:
- We created our own design using photography courtesy of my wonderful mother!
- We will use 100% recycled PCW paper from a local store.
- We will mail them as postcards to avoid the extra paper in envelopes
- EMAIL the rest to those of our guests who have publicly shared their emails. :-)

So, here's the design!



The website at the bottom is not active. It is a placeholder until we get the real website up and running (which Derek is designing and developing!) So exciting!!!

Oh, and one question I have for all of you in my teeny-tiny blogosphere. Is it noticeably odd that I am not wearing my engagement ring in this photo? It was being re-sized when we took these photos, and for all of the other shots I turned a ring around on my ring finger with intentions to photoshop in the diamond (haha i know i'm such a nerd). But this photo was very spontaneous and I forgot to change my rings around! Do you think it's a big deal? I can spend some time photoshopping the rings, but I want to know if it's worth it. Let me know what you think!!