45 Days!!!

Today I had a minor freak out.  I leave for training in a week and a half, and I have a wedding to-do list at a page and a half and growing, and we only have 45 days until our wedding!!!!!!  With so much to accomplish, Cameron and I were on a war path this afternoon.

Our wedding invitations finally got sent out!  Check off the list :)

We next moved on to the many wedding craft projects that I still need to finish, and I am going to share one of them with you tonight, but first here is a cute picture of Cameron working to finish some items off of the wedding list:

I have seen so many cute ideas of how to make the guest "book" unique, and my favorite idea is a wedding tree where guest "leaf" their thumb print and sign it.  By the end of everyone signing the tree and leaving their thumb print the bride and groom are left with a beautiful piece of art to remember their special day.  Here are some cute pictures I found on the internet showing the wedding tree guest book:

And now for our wedding tree.

I started with acrylic paint in pewter gray and a basic 16x20 canvas.

I sketched out a tree design that I liked first with pencil and then went over it with the pewter paint.

Here is what the tree looked like after I finished painting it:

Then I added our names and our wedding date in the empty space at the bottom and I was finished!

When we were out picking up supplies for wedding crafts we found a great deal on ink pads and were able to pick up six pads in varying shades of yellow and gray for just a dollar a piece!  I cannot wait to hang our wedding tree in our bedroom as a forever reminder of our special day :)

The Green Hutch

I'm linking to Primitive and Proper :)

I finally finished the hutch!  If you remember back about a month I posted about finding a hutch on craigslist for $20.

It needed a lot of work, but that work is done, and now the hutch is happily located in the kitchen helping me to keep our house a bit more organized.

First step was to sand the entire hutch, which was a lot of work!  I ended up caving and buying an electric sander because my arms were so tired. After sanding the whole piece I worked with my future father-in-law to make sure that the piece was structurally sound.  It was made without adequate support in the back and over the years had begun warp and lean backwards.  Dana and I pulled off the bottom supports (which were falling apart and did not look cute) and attached a solid piece of wood along the bottom to help support the entire piece.

Then we lifted it off the ground by  adding feet made of two bundt feet from Lowe's stacked on top of eachother.  This is a picture of me drilling holes in the feet so that we could attach the two together (and then to the hutch) with a really long screw

Once the piece was structurally sound, I began the cosmetic improvements to the piece.  We chose Tumbleweed Green from Valspar in an oil-based paint to achieve nice even coverage.

And then it was just painting everything... which took a bit of time.  It ended up taking two coats to get good coverage, and it took a while to dry in between each coat, but the look is well worth it!

After painting the green, I decided to do a dark, rick brown for the inside and shelves of the hutch.  I went with a buckeye brown latex paint that came in the small sample size.  It took three coats to get nice even coverage, but the look is worth it!

And here is the final product all set up in our kitchen!  It is so nice to have the extra storage space and the splash of color in our townhouse :)

Hey There Good Lookin'

I am so thankful for amazing friends!  I leave for training in two and a half weeks (ahhhh!!!!) and there is still so much to be accomplished for the wedding.  Tonight my lovely friend Mina came over to help me with wedding crafts and catch up :)  It was great to get so much accomplished as well as catch up with a good friend :)  I just love her!

When we started the night she worked to finish up the bridesmaid bouquets that I still had to finish, and I worked on sewing more fabric flowers (they are the death of me!  easy but take so much time).  When she finished with the bridesmaid bouquets that I had on hand we were at a crossroads of going to buy the items necessary to finish the bouquets and make the boutennaires or sew some more... we chose to go buy flowers!!!

I had already picked up a bouquet of small yellow roses to match the bridesmaids bouquets, but I just wasn't sure how I wanted to use them.  Here are a few ideas that I was working off of from around the internet:

Okay enough of the examples... it's time for me to show you what we came up with!

First here is an adorable picture of Mina excited to work on boutennaires :) (sorry for the blurriness)

And a lovely picture of the mess of fabric flowers strewn all over my living room :)

And here is what we created!

I am so happy with the final product!!!!  It is pretty, delicate, vintage yet contemporary at the same time.  Everything I was hoping to create!

Here is Mina wrapping the stems with the pewter ribbon (to match the bridesmaid bouquets).  And please take a moment to look at her rock!  Absolutely gorgeous!

And here is a picture of Cameron's boutennaire.  I wanted his to be slightly different and match my bouquet, so I added a calla lilly.

I was really intimidated to start this project, but I am so glad that I took the plunge.  They turned out exactly how I wanted them to and I saved so much money by doing them myself.  I got the best of both worlds: cost effective and perfection :)  This is a happy bride!

Oh How I Love the Nash

Happy Sunday, which also happens to be Father's Day!!!  Happy Father's day to my daddy!!  I love you :)

In honor of my soon to be father-in-law, I thought I would share our get-away car from the reception, which also happens to be one of the loves of his life.  It was also love at first sight between myself and the Nash, and I am super excited to share with you some pictures of our cute get-away car!

The Nash Metropolitan started out like this:

I wasn't part of the family for this stage in the Nash's life, which makes it even harder for me to believe that at one point in time the lovely Nash Metropolitan that I drool over looked like that!

After lots of hard work on Dana's part, the Nash Metropolitan now looks like this:

I love the houndstooth fabric :)  SO cute!

Today Dana took Cameron and I out for a drive to teach Cameron how to drive it (so that we do not stall out while leaving the reception... which would be embarrassing)

He did great and I have full faith that we will leave our reception without a hitch!

Thank you Dana for spending time with us today, for letting us use your beautiful Nash to make our wedding day even more special, and for being a great soon to be father-in-law!  

For fun I am going to include some cute wedding photos I have seen with old cars in an attempt to get all of you as excited as I am for the Nash to be in our wedding photos :)

From Postcards and Pretties :)

And this set from our very own Abundant Life Photography!

And I will throw in a silly prom picture from my senior year of all of us girls in Mercedes's dad's car :)  We were really cool..hehe!

Here's a little nibble for you

We had our engagement photos yesterday with the absolutely amazing Adam and Wendy of Abundant Life Photography :)  It was so much fun to work with the two of them, and they took pictures that made Cameron and I look like models (which we are not).

Here is a little teaser that they posted on their facebook page that I thought all of you would enjoy :)  Have fun!

Wedding Errands :)

Yesterday I ventured to Joplin to meet with wedding vendors and nail down several aspects of our wedding :)  Along for the ride was my beautiful soon to be sister in law Joy!

First stop was the caterer.  It has been a bit of a ride to find a caterer that is willing to provide what we are looking for out of a meal for our wedding without being crazy pricey.  I didnt want bbq, but I also knew that whatever meal we served had to be easy to transport out to Springhouse Gardens (which is a bit of a drive) and stay tasting yummy :)  I think we have finally settled on using the catering department at Missouri Southern.  They had a large selection of food to choose from, they set up and tear down everything, their services include linens (!!!!) and they were very reasonable for what they are providing.

Next stop (this was impromptu) was to visit with Cameron's aunt who has volunteered to make us a yummy cake for our wedding :)  You may remember this post from a while back where I talked about ideas for our wedding cake.  Yesterday we narrowed down the direction that we want to go in and it is a combination of the pictures below:

From Jess Hill Cakes

From What's Cakin

See if you can guess what our cake will look like with those hints ;)  It will be lovely I promise!

My last meeting of the day was with the DJ.  We have chosen A Sound Event as the DJ for our wedding, and my meeting last night went pretty well.  He was late (which annoyed me at first), but when he explained that he was in a job interview run late I calmed down :)  I understand long job interviews that you have no control over!  Our conversation went really well and he was very open to us controling what is played rather than tell me that he knows best.  I'm excited to see how the music all comes together.

Cameron and I both enjoy music, so most of what will play at our ceremony and reception is hand picked by us because it has sentimental meaning within our relationship or because we like it.  I am excited to get a CD will all of the wedding music on it as a great memento of our day, and it will be even more special because we took the time together to pick out the music :)

To end this post I have a question for all of you: what songs do you love to hear at receptions?  We want our wedding to be fun and lively so I want to make sure that people are up dancing to music that they love!  Give me your suggestions!

Stunning finish to the manzanita branches

The manzanita branch centerpieces are finally finished!  If you remember back a ways I wrote about finding the perfect yellow pails to place them in, but I am just now getting around to finishing the project.

Cameron and I enlisted the help of our amazing friend Victoria to help us with the messy plaster of paris step :)

At first we did not know how much plaster of paris to mix with a small amount of water, so to solve this problem we just made a large batch that we could scoop into the individual pails.

Warning: It sets up quicker than the box will tell you!  By the end we were all rushing around and trying to fill the pails before they hardened to the point that we could not insert the branches.

After all of the branches were in their pails, I knew that I wanted to add a little bit of embellishment.  Cameron and I made a quick trip to JoAnne's and picked up fabric flowers for 50% of and I proceeded to hot glue them to the branches.

The final look is exactly what I wanted and it is very reminiscent of this look that I showed you in my original manzanita branch post.

I am so excited to see them on the tables at the wedding!