DIY decorations?

It seems like a lot of people are getting really hands on and am making their own decorations for weddings, birthdays and parties. There are so many types of garland and bunting featured on various cool blogs. I am so loving with this fabric flower garland that I saw featured on Once Wed last year. How beautiful are these? I'm planning to make some like this for our wedding and shower decor.

This weekend, I set out to make more of my fabric flowers. I say "more" as I started this project back in December and only managed to make about 3 flowers. Knowing that I needed more than 3 to string onto a garland, I prepped more this week by cutting and sewing a few hours here and there. The best thing was that my future MIL also lent a hand! A few of these flowers were sewn by her without any instructions! She looked a few that I had done and figured out how to sew it together herself.

What do you think? It's not strung up yet as I need a lot more flowers. I will probably try to string some of these up for the bridal shower ... just to see how it will look there before I use some of it for the wedding decor. So are a lot of you gals out there doing your own decorations for your wedding?

Our Wedding Invitations!

So this was such a labor of love. I knew I didn't want to just print invitations and stuff them into envelopes to send out to our guests. From looking at all the wedding blogs, I decided I wanted our wedding invitation suite to have a lot of layers and textures.

As I was designing the invites, I did think gosh ... I wish I could have someone design this for me as being a designer, I'm my own worst critic and in took me longer than I expected to design this. Finally after deciding a design that both Rob and I both liked, it also took a time to find a letterpress printer that can do a 2 color run with a blind deboss on a limited budget. Thanks to one of the wedding blogs, I found Classic Letterpress and was so happy to find that the printer was only a few miles away.

I found a great inspiration from a Save the Date feature on 100 Layer Cake and decided to make my main invitation with a patterned backing from Amy Butler's scrapbook paper goods that I got from Michael's (my favourite store right now! ... after Anthropologie). The Amy Butler and KC scrapbook papers went perfectly with my Indochina (Colonial Vietnam) meets England theme for the wedding: modern vintage inspired with flowers, tea cups and birds. From the assortment of scrapbook paper design, all the guests were able to receive different patterned invites.



I decided to have the main invite sewn to the side to the paper. Since the patterned paper was double sided, I also figured I could cut a strip of the paper and use the other side as a belly band to wrap the RSVP, Details/Directions and magnets. On top of the belly band, I tied it with yarn and enclosed a tag of our embossed initials. I also punched the corners of the invites to give it a more classic feel. In the beginning, all of these things sounded really easy to make and put together but it was very time consuming hand cutting out the card backings & belly band, punching the corners (800 corners!) and making the embossed tag. The tag is actually tea dyed then embossed punched with our initials logo, but I think the end result doesn't really show that it was tea dyed. Oh well, I guess I won't be doing much tea dyeing in the future. The real killer from the whole project was sewing the invite to the paper. I thought that would be so easy, but apparently sewing on paper is not that easy when you are trying to make sure you sew a straight line.

Close the end, I was contemplating with also doing an envelope liner which I know would be more work for me, but I really wanted to put the invitation suite into something before putting it in the envelope for contrast. Thankfully I found this great idea on Martha Stewart Weddings about doily envelope lining. So perfect! Though Rob did mention that adding the envelope liner was like "pimping" our invites. Silly boy!



It took few days longer than expected when I started to cut, sew and assemble the invites. At one point, I didn't even leave the house for 2 days! But in the end, I'm very happy with the result. And to know that Rob was impressed with it too makes it all worth it.

Voila! Here are some pictures of our invitation wedding suite. Hope you like them!
(All photos by Our Day in April)

PS: Our wonderful engagement pictures on the Save the Date Magnets were taken by the talented Clayton Austin.

So here it goes!

Gulp! Ok, here we go, my first posting as a blogger. Let me tell you, it hasn't been easy road to get blogging. I have been meaning to do it for a month or so and now and finally, I'm doing it.

I am starting this blog as I'm getting married soon and I wanted to chronicle our road to the altar. So the wedding is in fact in about 2 months! Yes, I am hyperventilating every now and then thinking about all the stuff I need to do.

Right now I'm in London (that's where my guy is from) and working to get some items done for the wedding. I'm DIY-ing a lot of my wedding decorations, in fact, my mom is also working on a major part of the table decorations. Just before I left the Bay Area I dropped off the items for her to start. I was also in a mad rush to get out our invitations in the mail before leaving. In the end, to relieve some stress, I decided to finish last sets of invites and mailed them out of here in London. Thank goodness all the work I put into the invites were well received. When my fiance saw our final invitation suite, I think he was impressed. Though he thinks I did sort of "pimp" out part of our invitation as I wanted to enclosed an envelope liner and added a few extra items. In the end, I am happy with them, though looking back at it, there are probably some stuff I probably would not have done as it probably wasn't that noticeable to our guests.

When I started my wedding planning, I was reading through a lot of my Martha Stewart Weddings magazine that I've collected over the years. Then I stumbled across a few blogs when I started searching for our wedding photographer and found a goldmine of wedding blogs! I never knew these wedding blogs existed and thankfully through them, I have found a lot of inspiration and ideas that I'm using for our wedding, luckily I even found our photographer from one of the blogs.

So with many great wedding blogs out there, I spend an hour or so plus reading them daily to get more inspirations. On that note, I should start my Monday perusing of those blogs.

Hopefully I'll do another post soon!