It snowed hard yesterday, but most of it has melted off and today is a slightly sunny day. D has been gone all week but should be home by the time I get off of work. He saw some bears, but no shooters.
Hosted girls' craft night at our house on Wednesday evening. It was a great night! I really need to have everyone over more often. I had planned on making caribou lasagna, but (surprise, surprise) got too busy and ended up serving pizza - along with side dishes of fruit salad, salmon dip, summer sausage, cheese and some salad. And wine. Lots of wine!
This is my last free weekend for the next 5 weeks, so I'll be making the most of it! After that, 5 weeks of pure h@*# will ensue, work-wise. (FYI...don't expect many coherent, happy-go-lucky posts during that time.)
Friday, April 23, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Invites
The wedding invites arrived at our house on Sunday (thanks to Gabe for making a mail run for us!) It's always my worst nightmare to open up a print job and see a mistake. Well peeps - there was a MISTAKE! The printers forgot to ink the second side of our RSVP card, so they're all blank.
Honestly it's not the end of the world, but I had a special design for the back side and I'm kind of disappointed. The company offered to reprint the RSVP cards but it will take at least a week to print / mail out, and we don't have that kind of time. So I'm taking a discount code instead and will use that for a future project.
Overall the paper products turned out beautiful. Great paper, good weight, color matching was pretty spot-on!. I spent all of last evening tying ribbons and stuffing envelopes. Current status: 1/3 complete. The outer envelopes all have mailing labels - I know that technically I am supposed to handwrite all of the addresses but (here come the excuses): 1) I have work tasks and stress up the wazzoo; 2) my fiance' has been gone 24 days out of the last 30 and does not have time to help me address envelopes; 3) invitations would be arriving in guests' mailboxes, oh, by next year if I had to handwrite out each one. So I hope no one is offended, but something had to go and it was this!
Honestly it's not the end of the world, but I had a special design for the back side and I'm kind of disappointed. The company offered to reprint the RSVP cards but it will take at least a week to print / mail out, and we don't have that kind of time. So I'm taking a discount code instead and will use that for a future project.
Overall the paper products turned out beautiful. Great paper, good weight, color matching was pretty spot-on!. I spent all of last evening tying ribbons and stuffing envelopes. Current status: 1/3 complete. The outer envelopes all have mailing labels - I know that technically I am supposed to handwrite all of the addresses but (here come the excuses): 1) I have work tasks and stress up the wazzoo; 2) my fiance' has been gone 24 days out of the last 30 and does not have time to help me address envelopes; 3) invitations would be arriving in guests' mailboxes, oh, by next year if I had to handwrite out each one. So I hope no one is offended, but something had to go and it was this!
Monday, April 19, 2010
Wedding project: dessert stand
When I started wedding planning last fall, one of my first to-do's was price out wedding cakes. I was shocked at what I found out. $5 a slice for cake and $500 total? REALLY?! It's difficult not to get jaded about the wedding industry when you are faced with inflated costs left and right. My solution for most of these overpriced options is to DIM (do-it-myself) or DIWDH (do-it-with-D's-help).
Instead of a traditional 3- or 4-tiered cake, we will be offering our guests a selection of our favorite desserts, like cheesecake, cookies, cupcakes, etc. I saw this project on the internets somewhere and modified it to fit our needs. It's basically a 4-tiered dessert/cake stand.
I saw these melamine plates at Michael's and immediately snatched up 25 of them for this project. The store also had cute door knobs that matched the color scheme so I bought 5 of those as well. Total cost of these plates and knobs was $30.
At Home Depot, I purchased something called Allthread that matched pretty closely to the diameter of the threaded portion of the door knob. I asked the HD guys to point me in the right direction and ended up finding everything I needed in one aisle.
After D returned home from hunting, he took up his tools to help out with the technical stuff. He matched his drill bit size to my 1/4" 20 allthread. I planned to make 5 stands, so I bought at least 5 of everything. After some broken and cracked practice plates, D switched to a ceramic tile bit and drilled holes in the center of each plate. (I think we ended up losing 6 plates.)
From one of my Home Depot trips: washers to protect the top and bottom of each plate from my tightening nuts, really long nuts to connect the allthread and doorknob, and rubber feet to make the stands more stable.
D put some weight on a couple levels to test our first stand. It held up!
Overall this project came in under $50 for 5 stands, not including our time, but we definitely would have paid more at the store for something similar. So I consider $10 per stand to be a substantial cost savings over retail.
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