diy Paper Stockings

In getting gifts for some extended family that I don't know very well and not having a huge amount of money to spend, I ended up with simple, useful gifts. I wanted to spruce up the wrapping and presentation to make them a little more fun so I came up with the idea of paper stockings. They are simple to make and, I think, turned out just adorable!

I got this craft paper from World Market and used an oversized needle with some deep red yarn to see them together.

You will need:
Heavy weight paper for a stocking template of your desired size & shape
Craft paper
Yarn for sewing and to make pom poms
Large needle
Scissors
Patience

Step 1:
Cut a template from the heavy weight paper of the desired size and stocking shape. Make sure you have plenty of room for the things you will be putting inside without stressing the seams and ripping the paper of your completed stocking.

Step 2:
Trace stocking shape onto craft paper, twice. If using pattered paper, be sure that once you put the two halves together, the pattern will be the right direction and facing out. Cut out.

Step 3:
Sew craft paper stocking together (with pattern facing out) with the yarn and needle.

Step 4:
Make pom pom and gift tag.
Here's a great tutorial for making several pom poms at a time: Making Pom Poms In Bulk

I'm excited about giving these out!

Merry Christmas!

Decking The Halls: diy Wreath Instructions

As I mentioned, this is my first married Christmas and the first time I've had my own space to decorate. I have finals this week so I've been going nutso getting papers written and projects finished so my hall decking is coming along slowly and intermittently. Our beautiful tree stood bare for at least a week before I had time to decorate it.

I did make time to make a wreath out of the scraps I snagged from the Christmas tree lot! So maybe I should have been doing homework but a girl's gotta have priorities!

I was inspired by this wreath that I found on Pinterest and figured out how to make it happen with what I have.

In addition to the cuttings from the tree farm I gathered some sticks and stole trimmed some holly from the bushed in front of my office building.

Supplies:
Wreath frame (if desired)
Florist wire
Greenery of choice (it uses more than you may think so get plenty!)
Sticks
Heavy duty scissors or wire cutters

Step 1: Lay down a sheet or newspaper for a work area and clip greenery to smaller pieces that are ready to be wired on to your frame.

Step 2: Start with wreath frame or wire some sticks of roughly the same length together. Do your best to make sure the frame is very secure.

Step 3: Begin wiring greenery pieces onto your frame. It is best to keep all your greenery facing the same direction, rotating your frame as you make your way around it.
This step should be where the fullness of your wreath is determined. I didn't make mine as full as I wanted here so I had to keep adding greenery later which was much harder to make look good.
The more your greens overlap, the thicker and fuller your wreath will be.

Step 4: Wire on sticks.
Lay the sticks on your wreath and play around with placement so you know where each one is going before you start wiring them in place.
This was a little tricky to find a secure spot to wire them without smashing the greenery. It should be secure but, unless your wreath needs to stand up to heavy winds, the sticks can be a little wiggly.

Step 5: Hold up wreath and examine from different angles and fill in any thin spots with more greenery.

Step 6: Add berries and other accent greenery or additional adornment.

At this point you can use wire or string to add a hanging tab on the back. I have a wreath hanger that I just hooked onto the wreath frame.

Happy Hall Decking!

Mark Your Calendar!

My (now husband) hates the term 'Save The Date'. So we didn't have those to prepare people for our wedding, we had 'Mark Your Calendar's. :)

I was going to do away with them all together because everyone that needed to know our date early for travel plans, etc. already knew so I considered it an unnecessary expense. However, my darling had such a good idea and was so excited that I liked the idea as well that I felt we had to send them.

My husband could be termed, what I refer to as, an Über Nerd. He has extensive knowledge of space travel, past and present, listens to lectures and podcasts on astro physics for entertainment, enjoys tinkering with legos on a regular basis, reads comic books (Marvel not DC... heaven forbid you should confuse the two), etc. I love all of these things about him and encourage him not to hide his 'nerdy' interests. (He also is an avid mountain biker, has his private pilot's license, and has other more active (and expensive) hobbies. I love a very multi faceted man).

With that explanation through, he suggested using a comic book cover with likenesses of us as our Save The Date Mark Your Calendar. I had him pick a cover he liked and my art school sister went at it in Photoshop.

I had it printed on post cards with our wedding date info on the back (I used Alphagraphics and picked them up locally) and we received a huge amount of positive feedback! And my husband was so excited that I used his idea. Win win!!

Here is the original cover that we chose:

The Defenders #4

And here is ours:

Pretty good for amateur work, no? (notice the ring detail)

Here's a pic of us for reference:

Wedding Update

I was in a friend's wedding last week and put this Emergency Kit together. There's a few things I want to add for my wedding but this was rather spur of the moment so I think I did quite well. I put it all in a little bin with a handle for easy transport.

A few items were asked for and I was happy to have it all in my little kit! It feels great to be prepared.

Here is my Emergency Kit Ingredients list:

Sewing kit

Buttons

Fasteners (snaps and hook & eyes)

Safety pins

Body tape/double stick tape

Stapler

Febreeze

Static guard

Tide pen

Deodorant
Feminine products
Mouthwash
Floss
Listerine pocket pack
Tylenol or other pain killer
Alka-seltzer or Tums

Baby powder

Blister pads
Clear band aids
Hydrogen Peroxide
Makeup wipes
Hand wipes
Lint roller
Nail file
Nail clippers

Tweezers

Q-tips

Not shown:

Stick on instant hemming tape

Clear nail polish (for runs in stockings)
White chalk (for marks on dress)
Tissues
Hairspray
Hand mirror
Nail polish- the color you're wearing
Matches


Update:
We booked our honeymoon flight last night!!! We're that much closer!
And I have an appointment after work today at a Bridal Salon. We'll see!

Love, Caitlin soon-to-be married

Wedding Update

More on wedding.

My last 2 wedding posts were pretty bipolar. One stating relief as having so much time, the next lamenting the time I have. Such is the emotional journey of planning a wedding. Emotional spells aside, it has been a great process so far. Mainly due the the AMAZING and talented people that are in my life!

So far my talented friends that have offered their services include:
Catering
Cake baking
Graphic Design

Calligraphy

Event Coordination
Videography
Engagement Photography
Live Music
And these people are not ametures! Most of them do these things for a living!
I am going to have some major thanks to express whan this is all done.

Most recently, I made my selections for the artisan cheese plates we will be serving. I found a great asset in igourmet.com. This article from Real Simple on The Perfect Cheese Platter helped me a lot as well with deciding how much cheese I'll need to get based on the number of guests and what else is being served.

My cheesy selections include:

Garlic Beemster (a favorite of mine & Stevens for going on picnics):

Cow. Holland. Similar to Gouda - mild, semi soft

Chèvre (one of my favorites):

Goat. France. Creamy, mild, and spreadable

Borgonzola (A blue for Steven):

Cow. Canada by way of Italy. Blue cheese. Rind is soft and creamy (similar to Brie) with Italian Gorgonzola mold veins

Manchego (I met Manchego while working in fine dining)

Sheep. Spain. Zesty and hard but not dry

Irish Cheddar (Irish cheddar is the best cheddar if you ask me)

Cow. Ireland. Strong, biting cheddar, smooth consistency

Wisconsin Colby (represent America!)

Cow. USA. Mild, similar to a young cheddar but more elastic 

Wedding idea of the day:

Write your own vows

Source: oncewed.com via Caitlin on Pinterest

Wedding Update

I must say, I am glad that I have another 8 months to plan my wedding! These last couple of months have afforded me very little time to plan.
In the midst of packing & moving me and my mom, wardrobing a cast of about 75 for a huge production at work, attempting to maintain my regular office workload, staying involved with family that lives halfway across the nation (not to mention the family that lives locally!), trying to stay connected with friends, and cultivating my (relatively) new relationship with my fiance, we have at least managed to nail down our venue (hooray!), get close to finalizing our guest list, interview a photographer,  contacted Mr. & Mrs. Smith to put down a deposit for our honeymoon, dialogue with my dad about budget, select a design for our save-the-dates, and create a wedding planning website.

We had talked about the perfect wedding location. Steven contacted the owner and we got permission to use it free of charge! Our wedding will be in an airplane hanger in a private airport. It's large anough to have our ceremony and reception set up at the same time. The only transition needed will be to move the chairs from the ceremony area to the tables in the reception area. And it is absolutely what I wanted. A blank slate that we can do what we want with. To add to it, my finace and I get to fly away after the reception!

I AM IN LOVE (of course with the man I am marrying :) but also) with the photographer that I talked to. Their pictures are perfect. I swoon at the sight of them. (check them out here)
Unfortunately they are out of our budget range so the search continues. I am trusting God that we will get connected with just the right photographer. That it will be a win/win for both of us.

I created a website through Google Sites to stay connected with the wonderful people that are involved with planning my wedding. As busy as I have been I wanted a place to have all of my concept photos and information for them to refer to. Especially my sisters who currently reside in Boston.
I used the project wiki template and altered the pages to fit with my needs.
Here is a screen shot of my homepage:

Click to enlarge

I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. :)


Wedding Idea of the Day:

Wedding Snap App so all guest's iphone/android pics will go to an online wedding album

  

Source: bellethemagazine.com via Caitlin on Pinterest

The Adventurer....

In setting a wedding budget, it is paramount to first decide priorities. What are we willing to splurge on? What is non-negotiable? What can we cut costs on?

Until the last couple of weeks, my ideas were just a disconnected jumble. My whole thrust was saving money in every way possible (which really isn't all that fun if you ask me). Where's an inexpensive venue? Where can we go for a honeymoon that will be nice and low-cost?
Ah the Honeymoon. This was quite the pickle. We talked about staying in the US to keep airfair costs down. Staying in a boutique hotel somewhere like Seattle that is beautiful but low-key. Nothing really seemed to fit. We had some fair ideas but nothing that got us excited.
The whole time I had been feasting my eyes on images of resorts in the Maldives, South America, Greece, etc. just thinking 'if only...'
When I came upon a certain boutique villa hotel on the island of Santorini, I was stuck. I couldn't think anymore of our cost cutting honeymoon alternatives.
Beautiful Aenaon Villas: a series of sugar cubes descending contrastingly down the mountain between Imerovigli and Oia with stunning views of the Aegean Sea, caldera, volcano, and sunsets galore. Only seven villas, each with a white cloud of a bed and private veranda.
My darling was similarly smitten with the place, leaving us with a decision.

The decision was made: Our #1 priority for our wedding will be the honeymoon.

I've rolled up my sleeves with renewed enthusiasm and vision to plan the ultimate, low cost, DIY, upcycled/recycled wedding that will leave the majority of our wedding monies for our Greek boutique honeymoon.

Life of adventure, here we come!

Behind the title:

My mother and I were discussing the men that me and my sisters are involved with, each of them fitting perfectly with the kind of lifestyle that my mom and I picture working best for each of us. They really do fit who we are: My older sister with The Entrepreneur, my younger with The Prince. It was easy for me to fit my sister's men to their roles/titles but I was stumped when it came to me and my darling. I left the conversation to climb into bed for the night still wondering when my mom texted me: "I like it. The Entrepreneur, The Adventurer, and The Prince." And that is exactly so.

Wedding Idea of the Day:

Send paper airplanes made of old charts and maps sailing as the Bride and Groom make their exit (instead of rice or seeds)

Source: occasionsbylisa.blogspot.com via Caitlin on Pinterest

Pitching in

In researching costs for my wedding and trying to create a budget, I have been thinking alot about what a girl at my Chiropractor's office told me last week.
When the topic of wedding plans came up she asked me, "So how do white people do it? Mexicans have sponsors for each part of the wedding. Someone will sponsor flowers, someone catering, someone honeymoon, [etc]..."
How wonderful to have this (perspectively) huge expenditure be carried for you by your community.
Facing so many high cost items (invitations, postage, venues, dresses, rentals, airfare, hotel...) has already proved to be VERY daunting. Especially not knowing how much help we are going to get from our parents. It's my own fault for not knowing. I haven't asked. It feels like a touchy subject.
I read in The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Wedding that the FIRST THING you do when you are engaged is to sit down with your parents and find out how much they expect to contribute and begin setting a budget.
Welll.... maybe my perplexing pickle is due to my divided family. I was raised by my mom and am still in fairly close contact with my dad. Is it still my dad's responsibility to cover the wedding costs according to tradition? Does the responsibility fall to my very hard working but currently scantily employed single mother? Does the unshouldered burden default to my fiance's parents? Is the full load of the cost to fall to me and my fiance?
These things I do not know.
These things I have kept to myself.
These things I have been too uncomfortable to ask.
That is my difficulty in setting a budget.

I keep thinking that if my community was divying out and sponsoring costs, this planning experience would be substantially more pleasant.

And yet... as a testament to the wonderful company I keep, a girlfriend approached me and asked if I would do her the honor of accepting her help with the flowers for the ceremony and reception. I enthusiastically accepted her assistance and later discovered that she also means to cover the entire cost of florals. I will not be able to express to her the great relief she has bestowed upon me and the humble thanks that is owed to her.

So maybe there is a community out there for me after all.

And the truth is:

"Cast all your anxiety on Him, for He cares for you." I Peter 5:7

"Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart." Psalm 37:4

Wedding Idea of the day:

Alternative guest book: Silhouettes and finger print ballons! Use whatever colors of ink you want. You can have peaple write their names in their finger prints too.





Source: flickr.com via Caitlin on Pinterest

All on Wedding

Wedding pin of the day:


Pinned here I love the look and feel of this barn! So simple and family.


Wedding idea of the day:
Buy vintage stamps for a stamp montage on invitations.
Champion Stamp is a good resource for stamps.

Image from Martha Stewart Weddings

I played around with floral and airplane stamps of different values and colors for some custom combos that make up 45¢ worth of postage and how much each combo will cost per envelope (This is assuming that my invitations are within the weight limit of regular 45¢ postage) I hope I can work this into my budget!! This is what I came up with:

Which one do you like the best?

My wedding update:
The first venue we visited was the Ashton Depot in downtown Fort Worth.


Pinned here



It is an old train station that was restored. We were disappointed by how little 'oldness' was left in the restoration. We don't feel that they kept the integrity of the original building and purpose.

Consensus: Amidst little things about it that we didn't think were right for our wedding, our decision was mainly beased on that it is too all inclusive for us. We are looking for a blank space with indoor/outdoor options that we can budget and DIY to our heart's content.
We have a great lead on a venue that I have been to before but has just expanded, adding another event space that looks like it could be just what I imagined! :) Hopefully we'll be able to visit it this weekend.

My research project right now is to find hors d'oeuvres that will represent the foods that we each like best. I like potatoes. He likes bacon bleu cheese burgers. We both love cheese.

Something else I've been mulling over, is how to cheeply get/build farmhouse tables for the reception...

Pinned here

Any ideas on that?

Sunburn

My 5yr old nephew got a MONSTER sunburn.
His parents are out of town and my mom is babysitting so I went over there on my way to work today to help her treat it.
It is very blistered and the whole area is very rough.
I learned a natural burn treatment from a friend of my sister. I call it Indri's Treatment. My sister lives in a girl's boarding house in Boston, Mass with girls from all over the world. One evening she had a votive candle go crazy on her desk and in her haste to blow it out had wax splash all over her face and eyelids. Indri, (who is from Indonesia) came to her aid gathering ingredients from the other girls and treated the burn. It was 3rd degree and blistering badly. After the treatment, prayer from me and my mom, and a night of sleep, my sister woke up to the skin on her face almost completely healed and softer than it ever has been.

This is what Indri did:
1) Applied an egg yolk to the burn and fanned until the egg had warmed up
2) wash off with cool water
3) Applied thin slices of cucumber and fanned until they became warm and removed
4) Applied plain greek yogurt with honey and fanned until the yogurt was warm
5) wash off with cool water
Then my sister applied some burn ointment from another housemate who is from Russia.

I scaled the treatment up to use on my nephew's entire torso and down his arms a little bit.
He doesn't like gross things touching him so he was unhappy with thought of those food ingredients being all over him (except he thought the cucumber was a little funny).


Applying Cucumber slices



He wanted a picture so he could see what he looked like with cucumbers all over him

 After 'Indri's treatment' I applied Burt's Bees After Sun Soother.
I rushed off to work after so I haven't seen how his burn has improved, but he seemed happier when I left.

Here is Indri and my sister:

Thank you Indri! :)

Update 5/7/12

The treatment worked great. My nephew was happy and playing all day (still couldn't wear a shirt but he didn't care). He slept deeply  through the night, whereas the night before the treatment his burn was too painful for him to lie down or even to lean forward on pillows so he sat up and slept fitfully and very little. The blisters started to drain and heal the next day and he didn't complain about pain at all. I was even able to give him a haircut which is laborious on a good day. :)

Wedding planning starts

And so it begins... what I presume will be alot of entries about the planing of my wedding. It will be a very DIY affair with vintage flair.

I have been going nuts on pinterest and wedding blogs & sites (Martha Stewart Weddings and The Knot are a couple faves) for months (and even contacted a photographer & coordinator under the radar) and am excited to get the real planning going. I set the planning process in motion by sending this letter to family members & close friends. It announces the date and scheme of our wedding and asks them to start collecting vintage plates, misc. glass bottles for center pieces, wine bottles for serving water at the reception, farmers market berry baskets, and to keep an eye out for vintage furniture for a reception lounge.



I've also been busy starting a cost worksheet so I can set a sample budget.

My next step will be to meet with each of our parents to find out how involved they want to be in planning and financing.

I have been taking cues from The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Wedding (I got the 3rd edition from Half Price Books) and have been going over wedding checklists like this one.

This is really happening!!!

What time? Valentimes.

Hey look! February 14th. My first Valentine's Day with a wonderful man I love.

  We wanted to keep it low key. 

I made him a card with a vintage valentine that I printed off:

He made me a metal heart on a stand

He said not to show it to any airplane mechanics because it's not air worthy. :)

Our plan was to put a mattress & a bunch of blankets in the bed of his truck and go star gazing but the weather was not conducive. Instead, we stayed in, wore 'comfy clothes', I made a candlelit dinner, we made a blanket fort, and watched a movie.

Chipotle Lime Chicken Breast <3
(I cheated and got pre-marinated chicken breast from Central Market)

getting started with the building

I think he's done this before...

Sans walls. Apparently I didn't get a picture of the finished product.

 He decided that, wherever we are, we will make a blanket fort on Valentine's Day every year.