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!!

Insanity: Weeks 7, 8, 9?

So I haven't really been keeping up with posting my progress lately so I thought I would do an update. Technically I should be on my final week of Insanity but I'm not really going to call it that because Week 7 was a lazy week for me... I only like 3 days of workouts and I don't really want to count it. As of right now, I am doing either 4 or 5 days of the workouts and although many Insanity graduates would say that I'm not doing it 100%, it's working for me and I plan to continue with it after the 2 month mark.

Before Month 2 started, I was seriously worried about how hard it would be. Yes, it is very very hard but month 1 definitely does a good job in preparing you for the hardest workouts of your life (or mine, at least). Nowadays, I struggle the most with starting the workout, now that I don't have my workout partner, my motivation levels are lower and every single day their is a min battle in my head to get myself to workout. But once I start, I feel really good and I get better and better every day at doing the exercises correctly and efficiently.

Compared to Day 1, I feel so much stronger, especially in my upper body and core (the areas that were the weakest to begin with). I can hold a squat lower and for so much longer that before. I can now to a REAL push up, in fact I can almost do 10 in a row... no more girl push ups! (This has also allowed me to do more of the push-up based exercises accurately)

Looking in the mirror, my stomach feels and looks tighter and my #1 favorite thing is that my love handles are still shrinking! Overall though, I feel like the changes in my strength and endurance is still the nest outcome of this whole thing...

Moving forward, like I said, I plan to do a few more weeks of just Insanity and then start going back to the gym, and working with weight again. I also think I am going to mix in a few days of "Jillian Michael's 6 week 6 pack" for variety. Hopefully a combination of all of that will help break up the monotony of Insanity and encourage me to workout 5 days a week, every week!

As for my the whole "shedding for the wedding" aspect, my first dress fitting is on July 30th, so I basically have 7 weeks to loose a little more tummy... I plan on toning my arms a bit up too, but my strapless dress fitting wont affect that!

DIY: Wooden Road Sign (Part 1)

So after building the planters for my centerpieces we still had quite a bit of the old fence wood left over so I decided to use it for an old style road sign... inspiration below...

 

 

Here is my "mock up" I drew on CAD... I originally wanted to paint the wooden arrows with chalkboard paint so that the "signage" could be erased and changed, but after some common sense thinking, I realized the texture of the wood would most likely be horrible for chalkboard base. (DUH!)

 

I ended up changing most of the arrows "signage" as well...

 

My dad cut the angles into the wood for me and we will eventually nail them to a post and cement the post into a galvanized bucket, so that I can place it anywhere at the wedding venue. (no need to worry about finding a spot to hammer the post into the ground) We also cut a few more board for a few other wooden signs I needed...

pieces for the arrow sign, our "directions" sign and a sign for the guestbook table

For the most part, I free handed the  words with plain 'ole white acrylic paint... I did print out the cursive words so that I could refer to the font that I am using throughout the wedding (and on our invitations)...

 

Overall, the arrows themselves turned out cuter than I expected so I am really excited to see what it all looks like standing up on the post!

 

These pieces will be on a shorter post up at the top of the road, near the entrance to the winery to let people know where to turn in...

It's hard to tell, but this one is about 12" by 6" and will sit at the table where our guestbook will be, maybe leaning up against a flower arrangement or something...

DIY: Adding Succulents to the Centerpieces

Finally, I have another wedding project to post about... this weekend we decided to buy the succulents to fill our centerpieces with! I wanted to be able to let the plants fill out a bit and what better time to get them started than in a week that started with rain and is supposed to end in 106 degree weather! So we made our way down to Lowes Garden Center and lo and behold they had a special section just for succulents and cacti and had mini four packs of a HUGE variety of different types of succulents! I spend about 30 minutes picking out a variety of succulents in the right colors… I tried to vary them by not only color, but height as well. In the end we left with 15 four packs (enough to do 4 plants in 15 planters) and a big bag of cactus soil.

At $3.98 a four pack, plus a $4 bag of soil, the bill came out under $70. At about $4 a centerpiece (considering the planters we built were basically free) I consider this DIY project a success! They may not be the cheapest, but we plan to reuse/replant ever single succulent in our backyard after the wedding… and may I point out that succulents will eternally pay you back because you can always start a new plant off of a single leaf of an existing plant… in fact, we have 4 teeny tiny babies growing right now!

So here is the outcome… and keep in mind that they will fill out a lot more by September. (Also, before the wedding, I intend to use Spanish moss to fill in between the plants to hide the dirt) Sidenote: this morning, when I left the house for work I swear it looked like the plants had already had a growth spurt!

Insanity: Week 6

So week 6 wasn't exactly the "kickstart" of a week that I hoped it had been. We missed a few days but mostly I feel like our diet skills have been slacking (and I contribute this to the warm weather and our desire need for cold beer). We missed Tuesday to help my mom move, so I don't feel guilty about that... and Saturday James went to a dirt bike race while I stayed home, did a ton house work, cleaned out our garage (a grueling, 3 hour task) and walked my dogs... so, yeah, I didn't do Insanity, but I definitely didn't slack on burning the calories! And, I was super proud of myself on Wednesday and Friday when my workout partner wasn't around and I still did my workout for the day... it was really hard to get up off the couch and do it alone! So even though it wasn't a picture perfect Insanity workout week, I feel good about it and I look forward to this week.

As for our diet, we have still been pretty good during the work week. Our weakest points are still the weekends and doing the whole "5 small meals" thing. And although James has made his peace with the fact that alcohol sometimes accounts for half of his calories in a day, I'm still struggling... it's muscles vs. Miller 64.

James has lost almost 12 pounds (I think) and looks much thinner overall but he is still hating the workouts, I don't think he will ever get used to them. I, personally, haven't lost any weight but have still noticed many positive physical changes, specifically a major shrinkage in my love handles and the formation of teeny tiny abs trying to come to the surface (I just need to burn more stomach fat to let them show through more!)

Until next week, we are just trying to continue truckin' along... month 2 is rough, but we are surviving!