introducing flower girl number 2...

...our gorgeous niece Tamzyn!!!

At our engagement party, we decided to give Tamzyn her flower girl book, because it meant we could do it together. Miss Tamzyn is turning 1 on the 22nd of this month (she's about 5 weeks older then our page boy, Aiden) and will be 2 by the time our wedding rolls around. Tamzyn is the youngest daughter of Graham's older brother, Garth, and his wife, Kimmy. As you can see, I think Kimmy was more excited! (as we expected hehe - this was so more for the mums at this stage!)




I believe this was the point I pointed out "Aunty Amanda" being the bride hehe

So now all our youngest members have their special gifts, I suppose I need to poke the future hubby into asking his groomsmen! He still feels that it is too soon but that doesn't mean I can't start working on something cool for them....right?

introducing flower girl number 1...

...my gorgeous (almost) 3 year old goddaughter, Emily. This spunky little miss is the daughter of my high school best friend, Kylie. Last weekend, Kylie, Emily, my mum, brother, sister-in-law and my sister-in-law's little goddaughter, Tahlia, went to a festival called "Winter Magic" in the Australian Blue Mountains. It's a celebration of the winter solstice, full of parades, market stalls, live music, yummy food and great energy. We go every year and always have a blast!!! This year was particularly cold *shiver*


The craziness that is Winter Magic! (and this is only one section!)

I thought that this would be a good time to give Miss Emily her special book! She loved it (and her mummy might have teared up a little). The first few images below are Miss Em getting her book on the train to the festival. The last two were sent to me the next day by her mum, along with a little story. Miss Emily gets read to every night by her daddy, and that night, after the festival, she asked her Daddy to read a very special book to her :)




I should also note that this little Miss will be getting an extra big birthday party next year - her 4th birthday is the day before our wedding!!! I am hoping to have a little birthday cake made for her to give her during the reception, so everyone can sing her a happy birthday :)

I also had to include this little pic in this post, because I LOVED it so much. Emily and my SIL's goddaughter Tahlia got along very well at Winter Magic, it was the first time they had met. This picture was taken when Miss Tahlia lent over and was explaining to Emily that if they both stayed in their prams, they could have hot chips and gravy!!! Much discussion about this ensued...cutie pies!!



I had also made each of the girls a little present, using the flowers I made from a previous post. As you can see in the pictures of Emily with her book, they seem to have gone down well :)



That just leaves giving our gorgeous little niece, Tamzyn, her special book! A post on that will hopefully come soon!

our page boy!

Ok so I've been a bad blogger this week...See, what happens when you find amazing blogs to read, is that you stop writing in your own. Whoops!

But back into it!

I've got a number of posts lined up for this weekend, as long as I get 5 mins to sit down and write them. Today in fact, I am having a make up trial! Quite excited, it's included in a make up party for me and all my lovely ladies, so I'll be sure to do a write up of it (with pictures!) tomorrow.

But today, I would like to introduce you to our gorgeous little page boy, my nephew, Aiden. He is the son of my younger sister and bridesmaid, Danielle. And he's a gorgeous little monkey.

Now you've all seen the awesome books I found for our flower girls (can be seen here). Well, I ordered a Ring Bearer book online, and made up something similar for Master Aiden!





Cute right? Well I gave it to him on Thursday night. Now, he's only 9 months old, so doesn't really get it (of course) but he LOVES books, and was very excited to get something hehe. My sister really liked it and is looking forward to reading it to him when he's bigger! I can't believe he'll be two when we walk down the aisle!







PS. For anyone who is wondering what the sticker on the back of the card is, it's our stickers that I made to use to close our engagement invite envelopes! I've also used them on the back of the flower girl cards as well, here's a bit of a close up:


I think they turned out great!

Now just to give the little ladies their books!! Has anyone else done some fun projects for the littlest members of your bridal party?



PS. If anyone would like a copy of this Ring Bearer book (it really is a cute one!) it can be found here.

flowergirl project is finished!!

After a busy, BUSY weekend, catching up with a lot of gorgeous ladies (it really was an AWESOME weekend), I finally got a chance to sit down and finish the books for the girls. I can give them out this weekend and I'm quite excited. So, without further ado - the finished project!

(warning: there may be a lot of pictures of the envelopes...the amount of hassle we, and specifically my dad, had trying to get the damn things printed definitely requires some pictures of the end result haha)






Last night I also started the insert for my nephew's Page Boy book (on order) and designing something for the future hubby to put with whatever he decides to do for his groomsmen...when he finally decides to ask them...

Taking forever to ask the groomsmen seems to be a common theme with the men-folk! Did anyone else find their future hubby took a while to get around to it?

flower girl project, part two

I've been a busy little bumble bee tonight. I've moved forward with my flower girl project (almost done!) and pick up some possible flower girl sashes for a measly $3 each (they may end up being used for other things if we don't use them for sashes) and I've been trawling Etsy...

Oh Etsy. I could spend hours looking at all the pretty wonders you offer...

Previously, I have merely been popping onto Etsy to search for specific items. Today however, I had a look in the "Wedding Section". Dum dee dum! I only got to page 40 and I've had to stop...it's bed time...but I could keep going!!! I think I will share some of my findings in a post tomorrow. Tonight, I leave you with some piccies from my flower girl gifts. Since the girls are too little to be reading blogs, and I know their mums certainly aren't reading this, I don't mind showing the process as it goes. I'm hoping to give the girls (or in Tamzyn's case her Mummy) the books this weekend or next. Can't wait to see their/their Mummy's reactions!

On a side note, I really need to learn to take pictures in better light...and not on my iPhone!




*EDITOR'S NOTE* Yes. I saw the typo. And had to reprint. *sigh*

busy busy day!

I'm writing this before taking off for work (yes, I don't start work until 12pm everyday...but I also don't finish until 8pm!) so it may be a little rushed...bear with me!

I have so many things that I want to put in here, and I keep running out of time! I'll get to them eventually, but I thought I would write a quick post about yesterday, as it actually turned into a day of many wedding purchases...purely by accident!

It all started off with my needing to buy some simple silver/grey envelopes to move forward my flower girl project.

Exhibit A:


That didn't take me very long on my lunch break at all, so I decided to wander over to the shopping complex. Snap second decision, I decided to go and see if Borders had a further discount going on yet.

Our local store is closing down, but their wedding section (where I had been eyeing off a book I didn't want to pay full price for!) had only remained at 30% off. Then it moved to 35%. Finally, yesterday it was 40%. Still wasn't really enough to justify me buying the book I had been looking at - It was really nice, full of quotes and explanations of where wedding traditions had come from...But really, I could find quotes on the internet. I really wanted a nice little book of vows/poems/readings. And yesterday I found it. Purely by chance because it DEFINITELY wasn't there last time I looked. AND it was cheaper then the other book, meaning that with the 40%, it was a reasonable purchase! So I got it! I love that it looks nice and vintage-y too...and inside it's all lovely visible binding, which is nice! Going to start looking through it today to find some readings for my FSIL's to choose from...



After that, I spend some time wandering through the shops...bought a non-wedding related couple of purchases (a shirt for $5 and a headband for $5! Score!) then wandered into Rubi Shoes. And found these cute little headbands in one of our wedding colours (or what I'm hoping will be a wedding colour). I figured, if we use them, great! They were 2 bucks! If we don't, great! They were 2 bucks. :) If we don't end up using them I'm sure my nieces will love them in a pressie...but they will look pretty cute on our flower girls if the colours work :)



Lastly, my sister messaged me during the day to say that there was a packages waiting for me at my parents house! (I forgot to delete their address off my Etsy account...I only moved out 2 years ago...sheesh...hehe) My photo props finally arrived!! (Thanks Easter extra-long weekend for making it a longer wait then normal) I'm so excited to play around with these this weekend. Hopefully the weather dries up a little so we can play :) I showed them to the boys last night with a "Sooo...you'll take some fun photos with me right?". He rolled his eyes and walked out...but there was no 'no'! That's a good sign ;) Hehe

Both sides:


I was discussing the "Thank You" and "I'm his Mrs", "I'm her Mr" with the photographer on the weekend and she was so excited...but more on that later! I'm off to work! :)

gold dove and letterpress

I spent today with my mum, searching for gold doves. Preferably stickers, but was open to paper cutting tools, paper doves...just in general, two small, flat, gold doves.

"Gold doves?" I hear you say. "That should be fairly easy!"

Don't be fooled. It's not. NO ONE HAS GOLD DOVES. No one even has SILVER doves. No one had any dove stickers, cut outs, ribbon OR paper cutters.

"What the?" I hear you think. "Aren't doves nice and wedding-y?"

Yes. Yes they are. Or they USED to be. Nowadays? Impossible to find...

*sigh*

So, a new project was born. Fairly simple really but just a pain in the butt that it even had to be done. We managed to find some cream, felt doves. I have now had to paint said doves gold. And I will have to adhere them to an envelope and hope they stay...

Voila!




"Well what on earth do you NEED doves for?" (I'm good at reading your mind, aren't I??)

That question brings me to the project I have started for my little flower girls.

Given the effort I put into the cards for my lovely ladies, I wanted to do something fun for the littlest members of our parties too!! Now, the two youngest are at ages where quite frankly if it can't go in their mouth, they don't really care about it (they're 7 months old - they'll be 2 at the wedding), but I wanted them to have something to keep. My older flower girl (or my "senior" flower girl, as I like to call her) is almost 3 and definitely able to enjoy this a little more.

Back when I first started to organise the dollies for my ladies, I hunted down a Flower Girl and Ring Bearer (we aussie's prefer the term "page boy" but good luck finding a book about THAT) book and saved them both to my wishlist on Amazon. It just so happened that while I was at the bridal expo a few weeks ago, with my mum and bridesmaids, they were selling Flower Girl books. They actually looked a little nicer then the one I had found, so we picked up two.



It wasn't until we got home and actually read through them that we realised (drumroll please)...

...the bride in the book is none other then "Aunty Amanda!"


Pretty damn cool if you ask me! I was pretty stoked.

SO. After reading through the book and finding that, I decided that rather then just writing in the front cover of the book for the girls, I would replicated the letter in the book and adhere it to the inside front cover. As you can see, the envelope has a tiny gold dove in the corner, and the girl's name in "curly special writing". Well, that would be easy...or so I thought until today!



Anyway, I've now got some little gold doves (even if they're not tiny!) and will be doing up the girls envelopes and letters soon. I will definitely keep you all posted on the end result!

In another note, today my mum and I discovered the L Letterpress by QuicKutz. I may have fallen in love...



Since getting home and doing some research on the product, there have been a number of problems with the printer plates cracking after a number of uses...presumably because they are only plastic. However the QuicKutz website offers custom made printer plates in the professional moulding, which appears to fix the issue. That and a soft rubber brayer instead of the included brayer, and most people seem to have agreed that you can get some good looking work out of the machine! Sooooo....I might be getting one to do our wedding invites on! I'm VERY excited and can't wait to get one and play around on it. Will keep you all updated on any practice projects!

Have any of you guys bought craft-related items you usually wouldn't have, for wedding related projects?