Alberta Roadtrip Recap: Part 2- The Main Event

So, I mentioned in my original post about our summer road trip that we were going to be celebrating.    The celebration was because some very close friends of ours were getting hitched.  I've known the bride for years.... like since Girl Guides kinda years!



that's me on the left and the bride on the right

So, when they told us that they were doing a destination wedding, we were like heck yeah!  The location  of the ceremony up on a hill at the groom's family's ranch just outside the National park.  With this as the view from the ranch house

I mean hello! The prairies and the Rockies, with a gorg bride and groom, and the sun shining, it doesn't get much better!

 

Before and after the ceremony we had time to kick back and enjoy the ranch - that's H with the Best Man sitting on the front porch, ain't he the cutest!!

 

The main house of the ranch Hawk's Nest hasn't changed much since it was built in 1923, and looks just like you think a traditional ranch house should look woody and manly.

After the ceremony we all headed back to town and boarded a boat to take a cruise around Waterton Lake.  And boy was it the perfect weather for a boat ride.

  The bride and groom made sure we all got the party started.

 

 

It was a great time to hang out with the bride and the rest of the girls (and the boys too!).  The captains' hats were from the stagette, and were a huge hit!

The final leg of the wedding was the reception at the former school in Waterton, a very appropriate venue as the bride is a teacher!

 

Now I dropped the ball when it comes to pictures of the reception as our friends asked me to be one of the MC's for the evening (yeah, so sweet!), and I forgot to give H strict photo documenting instructions in my absence, whoops... lesson learned!

But,  I did manage to snap some pictures ahead of time of some of the sweet details before things got underway.



I loved the wood votive holders made by the groom's family with wood from the ranch (and may have snuck a few home with me)...

 

And their favours of pickled beans, such a perfect choice for this couple as they are "famous" for their homemade pickles (my non-pickle eating husband devours them they are so good!) - we even broke the rules and snuck home with 2 jars ;)

 

I managed not to trip and fall or let loose with any too embarrassing stories, the drinks flowed and the dancing went late,  a good time was had by all.  We are so happy to have been able to share in their big day, so thanks guys!



Road Trippin'

We're sneaking away to this beautiful place...


source

To enjoy some R&R as well as to celebrate with friends.   I can only hope my photography skills will be able to do it all justice!

See y'all soon!

Our ...iversary

June is a super special month for H and I (yes... I do I know it's the end of July!).  Not only is it my birthday (31 this year!) but 3 years ago this happened:

then this happened 2 years ago:

photos by

last year was marked by this:

And this was wrapped up this year:

Crazy how time flies, I can't wait to see what the next years bring!

Making a runner for it! ..... and my first giveaway !!

Sorry to disappoint, but as far as I know neither H or I planned to do a runner before the wedding... the runners in question were table runners for the reception.

From early on in the wedding planning progress, I wanted to make as many things myself as possible for the wedding- for both the cost efficiency and personalization factor. One of the things that was on my to make list was table runners. Somewhere in the wonderful world of online fabric shopping I first stumbled upon this fabric by Paula Prass- a gorgeous yellow-y lime coloured trellis print, the perfect summery colour to make our wedding "colours" pop (lime, pewter and white for those of you interested in those kind of things).



So, with a week before our house was invaded by 8 of H's family, and 7.5 meters of this print and a plain pewter grey coloured fabric for the border-'cuz I couldn't just do a simple 1 fabric runner now could I!- in tow, my mom and I set about planning the 9 table runners we would need for our 72 person wedding.

After whipping up a test model, in which we tested the measurements, and determined that mitered corners were the best plan, were were pretty quickly able to put together the 5 long runners and 4 square runners for the reception tables. To fit banquet tables for 10 people they were long suckers, thank goodness for ping pong tables!


Our professional pictures are not in yet, but here you can see a sneak peek of them (and H and I) in action.



The leftovers of the lime fabric will be going in the back of my Mondrian quilt to serve as a memory for H and I for years to come.

But, in the meantime... I'm left with 9 table runners. So, I thought to celebrate our big day that sharing the wealth is in order.

If you are interested in winning one of these table runners, leave a comment and tell me the craziest thing you did during your wedding (or other party) planning/preparations, and random.org and I will pick a winner on Aug 14th. Oh, don't forget to include an e-mail address where I can contact you in case you win!

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED !

Commenting with Love

I've been busy working away at a few items on my rather HUGE To Do list. Why you ask is said list so huge? 'cuz H and I have been trying to keep the wedding budget in check (I had no idea how much these things cost, damn they are expensive parties!), and... I'm totally OCD, so doing some DIY was both a necessity and a preference.

For weeks now I have been plugging away at a few wedding items, and one of them is finally ready for its big reveal... our comment cards.

For the wedding we are going with a vintage modern vibe to go with our location, a 1920's villa overlooking the sea. As I am Canadian, and my future hubby is Belgian. We currently live in Belgium but will be getting married and starting our married life in Canada, our Save The Dates were a way to excite our Belgian/foreign friends and family for their upcoming "adventure". Instead of a book for people to sign, thought that sticking with the vintage postcard idea would be a fun way to continue the theme.

Buying real vintage postcards was an option, but even on Ebay, the cost to buy and ship the cards quickly added up- not mention trying to find enough blank vintage postcards with images we liked! So, it was quilckly dismissed. Instead, I decided to recreate my own.


We wanted our guest comment cards to be something fun and memorable, both for us and our guests, as well as being one of the few wedding souveniers that we will keep with us long after the wedding is over, we wanted it to be special and reflect our journey so far. So, we scoured the internet for vintage postcard images of special places to us...

Vancouver, Canada (my hometown, our wedding location, and future home)

Leffinge, Belgium (H's hometown)

Oostende, Belgium (where H's family are from)

Dartmoor area, the UK (where my family come from)

Brussels, Belgium (where we live now)

the Ilse of Skye (where we got engaged)

I then found some blank backs of vintage postcards and as easy as copy paste I set up in MS Illustrator four postcards per page- 10cm x 14.5cm per postcard (in Europe we work with different paper sizes so I am not sure if four would fit on a letter size piece of paper).

Then, via a lot of layout work and manual alterations of the postcard backs to suit my needs (because I am a perfectionist)- conserving as much space as possible for comments, adding a spot for their names, and removing/hiding plenty of unwanted details of the postcards, I finally have come up with my masterpiece.

It was a bit of a fiddle getting the two sides lined up so I made a guide and then used the same guide on all pages to match everything up. on the backs I added two lines perpendicular to the card for them to write their names and thus freeing up more space for the comments than the original cards (no addresses required!).

H and I went to AVA (our local paper and party supply store- kinda 1/2 Michaels and 1/2 Staples), and found some great thick slightly textured paper to really make them feel like vintage postcards (FYI- I'd recommend no less than 200g paper to get the "postcard feel").

After a nervewracking few minutes worrying that my printer would cooperate or not, these babies are finally ready to get put away in a box until June!

Tip- when I am printing off a large number of pages, I always print in small batches so if there are any printing problem only a few sheets are messed up.

At 64 cards we now have enough unique cards (no front image is repeated) for all our guests to leave us a little note on our big day (I calculated the amount we would need based on the assumption that most couples will write a comment card as a couple so we will actually only need about 40 cards plus extras for "do-overs", and a few that we will mail to family who can't make the big day). After the wedding the cards will be kept in an antique art deco wooden box that I inherited from my Grandparents (by making the cards myself I was able to custom size the cards to fit the box) and I think it'll be wonderful to not only read all of the loving comments but also enjoying the historical images of our and our families past.

I probably could have hired a professional to do the work for me, but as I wanted each card to be unique I think the cost would have been astronomical. Doing it myself was definitely more time consuming, but flipping through them 20 years from now I think I will still feel a great sense of I made that accomplishment, which I think is priceless.

But, as we all like a budget breakdown, and I think the numbers are pretty impressive:

• Software: free (part of standard MS office suite)
• Paper: 200gm ivory paper at 0.54€/sheet= 9.72€

Total per piece: 0.15€ (including the 2 sheets that my printer decided to eat!)

You can see my other DIY wedding projects here and here

T Par-tay with an extra surprise!

As I mentioned before, I was hoping to rope some of my lovely girlfriends into helping me out in making our Tea Towel wedding favours.

Being the amazing troopers they are, they were totally not intimidated by the idea of a making a huge pile of tea towels, so with irons in tow we got to business.

And, what had been giving me sleepless nights due to stress, was quickly completed by my awesome team.And it was a great chance to hang out with my girls :)

A few hours (and a yummy dinner prepared by my awesome future hubby) later, and we were done, one more wedding project off the list

But hey, you're probably wondering, what was the "extra surprise"?! Well, that would be the crazy stomach bug that everyone got that night. I guess for us the new saying will have to be, those who craft together...

Booty-licious

So, we are now 1.5 weeks into my holiday and my time has been filled up with a lot of this...

visting our wedding venue, for the first time ever!!, luckily it's even more gorgeous in person :)

debates over the merits of square vs. round centerpieces, dress colours (yes, I've found my dress!), etc., as well as Christmas shopping, Christmas parties, Christmas... seriously mind boggling in such a short period of time-- and soooo much left to do!!

But, over the weekend, my family H and I headed up for a much needed wedding free "time-out", filled with skiing and boarding for the boys, and a relaxing few days for my Mom and I sleeping in and wandering around Whistler.

During said wandering we stumbled across a florist who was throwing out some Christmas stuff that I guess he didn't want to store until next year... Not opposed to a little bit-o-dumpster diving (well, since it was in plastic bags just outside their closed store I don't really consider that dumpster diving...), we started rifling through the bags and picking our loot... What did we find you ask? Well... this!

Only 13 garlands of real pine cones, cinnamon, berries, and greenery (front left and behind the garbage bag on the floor)... 16 garlands of berries, faux pine greenery, and pine cones (sofa left) , about 40 pre-wired real pine cones, about 15 green glass ornaments, and white faux berries (in the garbage bag on the floor), 1 faux pine garland, and 2 sets of working white outdoor LED Xmas lights with extension cable (sofa right) .... (Seriously, that picture totally does not do it all justice!). We estimate at least $200 worth of stuff, for ..... FREE! Merry Christmas to me!!

And don't worry, the next day we checked with the florist if they were okay with us taking the bags...

I can do that... I think?!

So... in this whole wedding planning process I was determined to DIY as much as possible. And although I have absolutly no training as a graphic designer, the list of Wedding DIY's include

• Save the Dates (done!)
• Invitations (eek!)
• Monogram
• Favours for Guests

I've been busy at work on the last two items- I seriously heart MS Publisher, it makes life so much easier.

For the monograms I've been up to my eyeballs in this... so many choices (this is still the first round for the general concept.. .we haven't even got to colour selection yet!

In case you didn't figure it out, our wedding colours are grey, black,white, and green!

H and I decided ages ago (long before we were even engaged) that a perfect gift for our wedding would be customizes tea towels. What... tea towels??! Yup you heard me right- he's a chef... tea towels go in the kitchen.... get it?! Yeah anyways, we think it's brilliant! As the computer savy of the two of us, I've been tasked (well I tasked myself really!) to come up with the customized part of the towels...

This weekend while visiting family I'll be picking up a hundred unprinted tea towels -- thank goodness for cheap local delivery rates, family living in the UK, and a job that gives me an excuse to visit said family on their dollar... well ... Euro I guess! :)

The plan is to get the towels over to Canada at Christmas, and to then guilt trip persuade friends and family to help in the great "Tea Towel event". Until then, I have a several designs up my sleeves, but I'll leave you with a few tid bits.

and

Scrap Busting Christmas

Sorry my faithful three readers that things have been so quiet around here. In the real world things have been a bit more hectic... I've been tracking down places to buy bulk tea towels (a crafty future project for the wedding), and pretending to be a graphic designer( for said tea towel project, gotta keep the budget real people!) amongst other wedding prep.

In actual physical crafting, I've been working on the hand quilting for my big ole' sampler quilt (I'm on the final border woohoo!!), and in a crafting day with Dallas I made some scrap busting (thanks for letting me raid your stash Dallas, hugs!) microfiber and hand towels that I thought would make some cute decor for my house xmas gifts/housewarming gifts/etc.

I have gotta admit I have a serious crush on Dallas' sewing machine... I was like a kid in a candy store playing with all her stitch options... maybe one day Santa will get me a fancy shmancy machine. Or wait ..... could I put one on my wedding registry??..... hmmm, probably not, darn!

I've gotta admit that I'm not a huuge orange person, but I'm loving this orange and teal combo, I think it may be a future baby quilt colour scheme (especially if my friends and family keep to their annoying trend of keeping the baby's sex a secret 'till birth!).

Saving the Date

So as you know H and I are getting married next summer (9.5 months to go eeek!!). We've been beavering away on our Save the Dates (STD's for short, heheh!).

With the cards safely in the hands of their recipients, I can let you in on what we've been working on. As they are for the Belgians and other out of towners, we decided to stick with the vintage vibe by making postcards using art deco travel posters and old pictures from Vancouver.

The project was a team effort, we designed the cards in MS Publisher (we decided to have 6 different versions), I was in charge of cutting (Sorry other quilters if I've offended your eyes by using by my quilting roller knife on paper... shame, I know!) and H was in charge of quality control and stamps.

We used a thick silver coated paper which I think gave an extra touch to the postcards, and really gave them that deco feeling we were going for. 1 wedding project down.... only about 99 to go!