Wedded Wednesday: Flowers Favors and fantastic friends

I hope you have all had a wonderful week thus far. We are getting some rain and grey weather over here in California but it is a welcomed change for me, especially on my days off like today when I get to lounge around with tea all day :)

So today I am going to be talking about a few different things that were DIY for the wedding. The first three I was pretty hands off in but I want to make sure these things are mentioned and seen. Because they were awesome! The first thing I am going to talk about are our invitations! They really set the stage for our wedding and I could not have been happier with the way they turned out. I did not make them and cannot take any credit for them. Noah's wonderfully talented aunt made them (I guess she is also my wonderfully talented aunt now too (: ) I said what I liked and didn't like and she made all our invites. Here are some pictures, although I am not sure that they do the invites justice.

(Notice the heat embossed tree on the envelope and return card? more wedding heat embossing at the end of this post!)

Second and super important topic, flowers (including the boutonnieres on the men!). My Mamma is a wonderfully talented woman who loves not only growing flowers but also arranging them. So, here is what we did for flowers.

We first and foremost set a budget! (that was Noah and I deciding how much to spend but my lovely mamma was asked for advice on how much what we were wanting might cost). The next big thing is finding pictures that you like and you would love to replicate on your own special day. This part was easy for me as I have been looking at wedding things since I exited the womb ;) . Then came the fun! We (we as in my Mom and I....Noah doesn't have a passion for flowers) went to a floral supply place and walked around and took pictures and notes of flowers we liked that would go far and last well. At a floral supply the bunches are sold by number of stems so what we did next was go to a grocery store and just bought a few bunches and did a little test run to see how many stems we would need for a centerpiece here is a picture of the practice we did (pardon the coffee pot and such in the background)

Really the most difficult part of doing the flowers yourself is having an unseasonably hot wedding day making it hard to keep them cool and stop wilting! Once the flowers were purchased I had nothing more to do with them. My wonderful wonderful bridesmaids and Mamma did them all! The wedding coordinator at Taber Ranch, Kim also was a massive help (again, I cannot say enough wonderful wonderful things about her and the entire staff!!)

(photo by Brian Ganyo)

(Photo by Brian Ganyo)

There are plenty more pictures of the lovely flowers but I will be posting just some pictures of our wedding at the end of this series and you will see more there :)

The third thing is really special to me because I am a self admitted Daddy's girl. 100% no doubt about it. So it was not an easy day for either of us to get through without tears. Like my Mamma, my Dad is one of the most talented people I know. I am very spoiled by all of his skills. For the wedding he made a wonderful arbor for us to get married under. It was absolutely perfect and I loved it! For this I have no way of telling you how it was made because all I did was pick out the color of the wood and the fabric piece that covered it. But seriously, how beautiful and perfect does this look?? Thanks Papa Bear! :)

(photo by Brian Ganyo)

And Lastly here are the favors we did! Since the wedding was outside on a Ranch and the reception was held inside a barn we thought that the perfect (and practical) favor would be Mason jars for them to use as their drinking glass for the night!

(photo by Brian Ganyo)
Here is a little DIY for you on what we did for these. I will tell you now that it is an incredibly time consuming task but it was a detail that I loved. Because the drinking glasses served as the escort cards too.

What you will need

- Heat Embosser (mine is a bright pink Zap!)
- stamp pad (you can do white with colored embossing powder or colored with clear powder)
- rolling alphabet stamp (I got mine here)
- Custom rubber stamp (Names & date. I got mine here)
- Shipping tags (mine are Avery 2 3/4" X 1 3/8")
- Embossing powder (colored or clear depending on your stamp color or preference)
- time and patience ;)

I know many of you already know how to heat emboss, however just incase you do not here is a quick little picture tutorial for you. And just to clarify how I did this, I did one side with the guest name and the other side was the custom stamp with 'Noah & Whitney September 4, 2011'. All of the guest names I used a white stamp pad and purple opalescent powder. All of the'N&W' stamps I used different stamp pad colors that coordinated with the wedding and clear embossing powder. I hope that makes sense :)

1. get your stamp ready (in this case mine was rolling so I needed to roll it to the person's name.)

2. Stamp the shipping tag carefully so you don'y smudge the ink (speaking from experience!) and you will have white ink on the tag (I like color box ink pads because they tend to give some time to sprinkle on the embossing powder without the ink drying too quickly)

3. Sprinkle on your embossing powder and pour off the extra

4. You will be left with this

and then you will use your fancy pants heat embosser

5. You will be left with something like this! :)

I know this was a pretty big post, but it is hard to try and explain how awesome your wedding day was in a short post ;) I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe it sparked some of your own ideas for a wedding or a party you might be having!

Look for a little rainy day DIY coming some time later this week or early next week!

With love from Burlingame,
Whitney