DIY: An Update of Mom's wedding dress

I like to say that my mom bought her wedding at a garage sale for $9.99... but only half of that is true, she bought it new for $9.99, an even better bargain!

The fact that my mom's wedding dress was an un-traditional pink, and perfectly matched my wedding colors, made me want to find somewhere to fit it in to my wedding festivities.. and I found the perfect spot for it: at my bridal shower!

 But I knew I would have to do somewhat of an "updating" to it because it was just a bit long for my taste (and 2013 for that matter). There wasn't much too it, I just trimmed off a few inches and hemmed it! Luckily for me, the dress already fit perfectly so this DIY project took me about 5 minutes!

(Sorry about the crappy pictures, I just had my phone and nobody to else around to help me!)

 



Before - front



Before - side

After - front

After - back

After - side

James came home and took a pic!

DIY: Succulent Centerpieces Face Lift

So it was over a month ago when I planted all of the succulents for our centerpieces and within a few weeks it was evident that they would eventually need a bit of a revamp. The first week after we planted them, there was a huge heat wave that scorched a few of the softer plants immediately (I don’t think those ones ever really stood a chance anyway… by week two, every single one of two certain succulent types were dead) Having never really grown succulents outdoors, I think we also over watered them the first week, but after I started noticing some of the leaves turning soft, I switched to every other day watering and ever since then, they have been doing great. But regardless of the plants now thriving, we still initially lost about a third of them in those first couple of weeks. Also, after finishing planting and weeks later realizing that they weren’t going to fill in as much as I wanted them to, I knew that they needed something else.

I decided to consolidate the small succulents that did survive to three per planter and then add a larger plant to each one to take up some space and add some height. First I decided to purchase two different succulent varieties, plant them and watch them for a week to make sure that they did well… and after my test plants turned out fine, I went out and bought some more! The finished product turned out much more satisfying to me as a “centerpiece”… the added height of the bigger plants looked so much better than just the smaller plants by themselves.

 

One of the boxes that completely survived... but still so sparse looking :(

One down, one struggling to live!

NADA!

...replanting...

The finished products

 

Lush! Hopefully they stay that way!

And here is my Microsoft-Paint-mock-up of the truly finished product, complete with moss and mini chalkboards with the table numbers! (minus all the soil mess)

 



Finger crossed that the new plants survive my gardening skills! 

 

 

 

 

 

DIY: Invitations

... and burlap & lace mason jar candle holders...

So this last weekend, I had a few of my bridesmaids over to help assembly our invitations. After many months of changing my invitation designs and ideas, I finally forced myself to have them printed so that we could get to work. I already posted about printing the outer envelopes and addressing them, and I had finished those a while back, so this weekend we worked on the pocket-fold portion.

One of my bridesmaids, Melanie, is particularly scrapbook savvy and she deserves full credit for setting up the assembly line and letting us know how inefficient our methods were. I'm not going to lie, I just sat back and drank beer (and fiddled with some wire on a mason jar for about 2 hours... but I'm not going to get into that).

 

While the invite girls were slicing and glue-ing and stuffing away, I sat up another bridesmaid working on spicing up some mason jars that I am going to use as candle holders. I bought a few yards of some burlap ribbon, as well as some cotton lace and she used a bit of hot glue to attach the ribbon to a few spare jars I had lying around!

Burlap & lace mason jar candle holder

So here are the final invites, complete with reception card, RSVP cards and envelopes and our registry slips... I also tied the pocket-folds off with some cute string .

 

 

And finally a summary of how much these darned things cost me...

75 Recycled Envelopes & 75 Recycled Pocket-fold invites = $73
(including tax, shipping and handling, from paperandmore.com)

Pack of floral scrapbook paper used as backing = $10
(on sale at Micheal's)

2 packs of gray/white string ($99/ea) = $2
(with coupon at Micheal's)

1 can spray adhesive = $7
(with coupon at Micheal's)

Having a friend in the printing business = Priceless
(but if I had to estimate home printing, I would say that costs of ink and the white card stock would come out around $30-$40)

Total costs = $93... or let's just round it up to $100

So, at 75 invitations (not including postage) I only spent about $1.30 per invitation!

NOT BAD!!