i spy

A while back, I posted about our table numbers, using Ikea frames. Well today I'm posting about a little DIY I did for the flipside of our table numbers, the cute little "I Spy" game!

Please ignore the little black parts on the front - I'm not
removing the protective coating until closer to the
wedding!

Those of you who have been around Wedding Blogworld for a while would recognise this little game, but for those who don't - basically, it's a photography-based wedding version of the popular game we all grew up with! A cute little poem encouraging guests to capture moments throughout the reception that you can later collect and add to your wedding day memories (and in this day and age, guests can share with each other on social media!)

I created 3 pages of "I Spy", with 2 different versions per page, so there will be 6 different versions in total. At the moment we are planning approx. 10 tables plus a head table, so there will be some repeats however it will be interesting to see how differently everyone captures the same suggestions!

I used a lot of "I Spy" cards I had sighted on the internet for inspiration in creating mine, however I don't appear to have sources for them so I haven't shared the pictures. If I locate the sources, I will definitely share them so you can see the other designs people have used with their cards! I'm sure a search of "Wedding I Spy" would bring up loads in Pinterest, and I'm sure I've seen a number or two on places like Style Me Pretty. I added quite a few of my own ideas into the cards above, please feel free to use them for your own inspiration if you are looking to make something similar yourself! These were simply created in Photoshop, printed onto card stock and slipped into the frames. A very easy DIY for your reception tables and fun for your guests!

During my etsy shopping, I stumbled on this great idea for photo cards, which I think compliments this game really well - setting up an account somewhere like flickr or the like, and using a little card at each place setting with the information on the account to encourage guests to upload their photos, so that everyone can access the photos they have taken! It's a great way for the Bride and Groom to collect all the photos from the "I Spy" games, as well as any other great photos of the day they may otherwise miss.

[source] Is anyone else planning to use the "I Spy" game at their wedding? Has anyone used photo cards before?

a catch up post

Well! Things are really flying by now, although I have to admit it may make for boring blogging - posts listing what we are accomplishing aren't as interesting as projects with pretty pictures! I'll try to keep them to a minimum or at least try to make them interesting, but as this blog was originally created to document the process of planning, I really feel I should jot these things down :) And this post may be a long one...but I think it may be one of my favourites!!

The future mister and I have continued our streak and have been plowing along, knocking things off our list this week! After last week's ring buying, suit purchasing and invitation sending frenzy, we have jumped into a week of suit alterations, wedding dress alterations (well, the appointment booking anyway!), florist appointments and trial dinner arrangements!

Oh! And we've received our first official mail RSVP! That was on Monday (09/07/12) and since then we've slowly had a few more trickling in. I think we're up to 11 official RSVP guests now!

Yep, that's a sneak peek at our invites for you!
Post coming soon!

The future mister's suit now fits him perfectly and now he can move onto getting his groomsmen all suited up. In a lovely moment of serendipity (and networking!) the future hubs went to the football with my Dad last night, in the corporate box, thanks to my Dad's work (my Dad works for a football store, owned by an ex-football player). While there, they were sitting with none other then the owner (or co-owner...something along those lines? I'm not clear on the details...someone important anyway) of men's suit store Ron Bennett. One thing led to another, the subject of our wedding must of come up, presumably because my Dad introduced my man as his future son-in-law, and low and behold - the future hubs has now been told to head on into a Ron Bennett store, pick our some suits and contact said important man and he will arrange for a very significant discount. *gobsmacked*. Needlessly to say, we are very grateful and still can't believe that someone who barely knows us would be so generous!

I also had a florist appointment this week with the lovely ladies at Kingswood Florists. This Florist is owned by family friends - Jo and her daughter Tiffany. Tiffany and I grew up dancing together (we're talking a good 13 years or so of our lives!), and I'm over the moon that she is doing my wedding flowers for me! We had a wonderful meeting earlier in the week - I took along my photo of my inspiration bouquet and of my girls dresses and we sorted everything out. I trust Tiffany completely and like I said to her, I'm less concerned about having specific flowers in my bouquet and more about it being the "look" of the bouquet I was going for. The lovely white fluffiness, the dusty miller and the sprigs of lavender. Not fussed on what flowers make the white fluffiness though! Same with the girls bouquets - we discussed the look we were going for and discussed which roses and flowers would be best, but again - if substitutions are necessary on the day to get the colours we are after, as opposed to the specific *flowers*, I would prefer to have similar colours then specific flowers and I trust that Tiff will make something beautiful. I can't wait to share everything with you guys after the wedding! We chatted about so many little details for the bouquets but I won't share them all now...I'll let the pictures do the talking after the big day!

Earlier in the week, Mum and I had headed to A Bride's Blessing to pay off the rest of my wedding dress and book in my first alterations appointment following which we picked up the mister and headed over to The Sebel to catch the end of their Wedding Expo so we could see the rooms all set up and get an idea of the table colours. The colours were something we've been struggling with as we didn't want to have the room overwhelmed with colour, yet thought the idea of mixing colours would look strange. As such, we were leaning towards the idea of perhaps having a neutral, like ivory or cream, for our chair ties and center squares. We had tossed with the idea of silver/grey but thought that with our centrepieces being wood/earth tones, it might clash.

However, when we arrived at the Sebel, we were pleasantly surprised to discovered one of the rooms set up with a variety of purple and grey options - perfect for us to look at! One table was purely purple - purple organza table squares and purple chair ties. We quickly vetoed that as too much purple for what we have in mind. I very much prefer purple as a highlight colour, as opposed to a central colour.

While this mightn't look like too much here, I've seen
a picture of our reception room done in all purple...
It seemed like too much!

They also had a few chairs done up with silver satin doubled up with purple organza chair ties, with purple organza table squares...which we also vetoed. However, when we saw the tables with the silver satin chair backs and the purple organza table squares, we were surprised to find we liked them! I didn't think that a) mixing mediums (organza and satin) would be a good idea or b) mixing colours would be a good idea. I thought it would be best to stay uniform - one medium, satin or organza (I thought it would look messy to mix!) and our coordinator tended to veer us away from mixing colours. But I guess in this case you are mixing more of a neutral and a colour, which is probably why it works better. And it ends up being just a little pop of purple in the middle of the table (and the organza being somewhat transparent also helps!) instead of the whole room seeming purple!

Please ignore a) the bad photography and b) the bad styling of this table. What actually swayed us was a differently styled table, in the same colour scheme which was better dressed. Of course, I didn't take a photo of that table. Typical. Also, this room wasn't styled by our coordinator. We visited her rooms, which were styled in deep blues and another in black and white. They were perfect - ever bow was perfect, everything was lined up beautifully...I was reassured to see how beautifully dressed the tables she did were. Unlike these droopy bows...*awkward*

That still left us with the concern that the look we wanted for our centrepieces might clash with the grey...but when we held up this picture:

[source] ...to the middle of the table (keeping in mind it would have similar flowers to my bouquet, including sprigs of lavender) we were surprised to find it worked perfectly fine! When I thought about our favours and their packaging (more on this later!) and how they would also tie all these elements together, I was pretty sold on the colour scheme. Thankfully, the future mister was happy with it as well, so the process we were both dreading seems to be a lot easier then we could have hoped! Given that the mister has now settled on a grey suit, we are less inclined to go with ivory tables...we feel like that would clash a bit more then a bit of wood in our centrepieces with silver/grey chair ties!

We took some time to have a look at our reception room and talk about where we would like to display things, have things set up and talk a bit about how we would like to decorate the dance area (still debating on this!). Mum and I showed the future hubby the block of 4 rooms we had booked for us all to stay the night before, with the two end rooms being the rooms we will be getting ready in on the big day. They are nothing fancy, just nice, standard rooms (the gorgeous, big, Bilpin suite was booked by another wedding :( ... ) but they have their own balcony and us girls are looking forward to taking that over once the boys head over to the Chapel ahead of us! We are also going to enjoy spending some time together the night before, before heading our separate ways.

We got to have a look at the Deluxe Suite we will be spending our wedding night in (or one of the similar rooms I should say since there are a few). We are hoping to break our "Spa Curse" on our wedding night - every single time we stay in a hotel room with a spa bath, or even just book into a hotel with a spa in *general*...it doesn't work. Or it's broken. Or out of order. For whatever reason! We are yet to stay in one that actually works! We have a lovely spa bath in our Deluxe Suite and all I can say is - the damn thing better work!!

We also managed to sneak some quiet time in our little Chapel and get some photos of the grounds.

I have to say, this was my favourite part of the day. We managed to get to the Expo right at the end of the day, when most people were gone, so it was lovely and quiet. When we visited our Chapel, there was no one there. A big change from the first time we visited, when it was bustling with people.




This time, it was just us, and Mum. And it felt so right. So real. Everything just suddenly seemed like it clicked into place and everything we have been doing was really going towards something real - a real day that was really going to happen, and soon! It was lovingly overwhelming...we were standing at the front of the Chapel and the future mister turned to me and said, "This is where we are going to be standing, when we get married. You're going to be standing there, I'm going to be standing here"...

Then we had a bit of confusion over left and right sides...but he was right. Haha.

I had no idea my Mum was taking this photo...
She's not the best with her iPhone camera but it's so cute!

We left the Sebel that day very excited and despite the fact that we haven't yet picked our music or our readings, and we haven't done our programs or place settings or a billion other little things...I could have had our wedding the next day...We suddenly felt just how ready we were to be married!!!

Did anyone else have a moment like that?

table numbers and ikea frames

Project number #2 over the weekend for me was the creation of our table numbers (or what is our table numbers at this point! Still contemplating printing them on some old book pages, as mentioned in my table number inspiration post) If you recall from an earlier post last year, we purchased a number of Tolsby Frames at $2 each (in Aus. dollars, I think they are .99c in American?) from Ikea to use for our table numbers, mostly because we loved the idea that they are double sided!

Earlier in the planning process, I had found this wonderful free download from Betsy White's Blog, Flights of Fancy, in their free downloads section:

(Admittedly, I can't find the direct link to this download anymore, so I believe it may have be removed!)

I hope Betsy White doesn't mind, but I changed the colours of this gorgeous design to suit our wedding - it's so stunning but green really isn't one of our wedding colours! After a few tweeks, these little beauties turned out perfectly!

Over the weekend I printed out these numbers on two different types of card, to see which would work best in our white frames. Before printing them, I had thought that perhaps they would have worked better on grey card stock against the white frames because white card might have looked too washed out with the white frames. But when printed, both the future mister and I agreed that the white version looked much nicer! The grey actually ended up looking more of a blue and the colours looked rather dingy. Do you agree?



Ignore the black triangles - we're not removing the protective coating until before the wedding!
Anyway, here they are all printed out and lined up in a row. I'm still tempted to try them out on some old book sheets if I can get my hands on some, but given the very rustic style of the centrepiece's we've chosen for inspiration (we haven't spoken to our reception place yet to confirm what they will really end up looking like!) I think maybe they might need to stay white, to be able to pop a little.


Next up is to create our personalised "I Spy" for the back of these bad boys - a different one for each table so that *hopefully* we end up with a lovely mix of pictures from our wonderful friends and family at the end of the day! I can't wait to see how it turns out! What do you guys think?

table numbers...

Feeding on from my previous post on centrepieces, this quick little post is about our table numbers!

I was quite excited when, during our hunt for centrepieces, I discovered this post on the One Fab Day blog, all about the Ikea Tolsby Frames that we are planning to use for our table numbers! (Com'on, at 2 bucks a pop, I knew someone else had to have had the same idea as us!)

Here are some of the ways they have already been used - don't they look great all done up??

[all pictures are sourced from One Fab Day]
Still debating how we will use ours! I still love these pretty numbers from dearemma (in our colours of course)...

...but I also love the idea of book pages printed behind the numbers, similar to this pic...

[source] ...There's just so many choices! What did you guys use as table numbers? Or what do you plan to use?

centrepiece size-ups...

The 29th marked the 10 month countdown to the wedding...and a mini freak out for me! As of now our monthly count down is in single digits and that seems to have come up *really* fast. Particularly when I think of the finances...*but* that's a whole 'nother ball game.

Recently the future hubby and I have started thinking about the finer details of our wedding that we need to organise - centrepieces, invitations, cakes... Today I wanted to record some of the things we've talked for our table designs.

We're slightly limited in our knowledge of just how much we can customize our place settings, linens, etc. at this stage, as they are things we need to discuss with our venue. Given that we booked our venue so far in advance, we knew it would be a while before we would have any serious meetings with our coordinator. I plan to contact her soon to start getting some information. BUT until then, we have started discussing our centrepieces and that's something we know we have some freedom around - our venue already told us that they don't have a specific selection of centrepieces included in the package like some places, rather we have an allocated section of the package to spend on whatever type of centrepiece we want (including flowers) and should other pieces of our package end up being cheaper, we can direct that money into other areas (into the centrepieces or vice versa, if centrepieces end up cheaper we can use the left over money in other areas).

Back waaaaay before we were engaged, the future hubby and I saw this personal photo on a friends Facebook page and he encouraged me to save it for future reference.

[personal photo]
With this in mind, when my mum and I went to the Bridal Expo. at our venue (before it was our venue!) and they had this on display, I knew it was something the future hubby would like.

[personal photo]
My only comment was that I felt this display was too big, too tall, that the smallest vase in this display would actually be best as the tallest - so that people can still talk across the table and see each other! When the fiancé saw the pic and other similar ones, he said the same thing.

So...We seemed to be going with the long cylinder vase idea, but not too tall. We hit up Google and discovered a number of pictures, including some of the ones below...

Given that only last year one of the fiance's best friends used a centrepiece very similar to the original pic we saved (single vase with a floating candle and a rose) we knew we wanted to make our centrepieces different and have more then one. Early into the picture hunt, we discovered that the future hubby really liked the idea of 3 vases (thinking that more looked too fussy) and really DIDN'T like mirrors underneath (personally I think the mirrors can look really classy, but agree with his opinion - I don't think they work for the feel of our wedding).

That narrowed down our search a little and started to clarify the look we were going for. Then we found this picture...

[source]

This is the future hubby's favourite so far! I was surprised by how rustic his choice was. I love it, although of course we would have to make a number of adjustments - less brown and more grey/blush/lavender, to give it more of a vintage feel. Pretty simple to do though, by adding a little lace and coloured ribbons and ties instead of brown twine. I like the idea of the wooden base, which gives a bit more interest then just the cylinders however it would depend on our venue if they can source them. Otherwise I'm tempted to hunt them down ourselves if we could find them somewhere cheap.

It seems like we are leaning less towards floral centrepieces and more towards the candle concept, however we have also toyed with the idea of each vase being something different - one with a candle, one maybe with a flower (probably one of Nanna's roses) and a floating candle, and maybe one with some flower in the top, similar to this:

[source pic 1] [source pic 2]

I also like the idea of something in the bottom of the vase with a candle sitting on top. We wouldn't use acorns, but this picture gives you an idea of what I mean:

[source]

Or even with something in the bottom and different sized candles inside...I like the idea of the candelabra inside the vase but the future hubby wasn't such a fan...but really like the table number in this pic!

[source]

We also liked the idea of the cylinder vases, but with perhaps a different top, similar to the top of these candelabras, for interest:

[source]
I had saved very few pictures of centrepieces during all my Pinning because I really had no idea what I wanted...all I knew is that I wanted the future hubby's input! It's strange how they have ended up with similar elements though...

[source pic 2] [source pic 3]

All in all, I think we're starting to get a better idea of what we want to see in the middle of our tables...which is great, because it's helping me envision the reception decor a little better! And of course, we have these great little frames to style up with our table numbers! I can't wait to get started on designing something to go inside them!

How did you guys go deciding on your centrepieces? Was/Is your future hubby involved or is it all too girly for him?

mail delivery!

A pleasant surprise arrived in my mail box yesterday...



My shoe stickers!!

Yay! I love them. They now go into my wedding box, waiting to be pulled out next year :) Can't wait to see them in use!

In other exciting news, my parents made a trip to Ikea this weekend, and while they were there they picked up these little beauties at my request - the frames we're going to be using for our table numbers!

[source]

At $2 a pop, these double sided frames are great value for money - we plan to use them afterwards with pics in our home, and also with some wedding pics for gifts (e.g. for our parents and grandparents). I can't wait to start designing the table numbers to go inside, along with all our other stationary...although I have to admit, I am leaning very much towards these GORGEOUS table numbers from dearemma in "pearl" and "lavender" (check out all the gorgeous colours they are available in here):

I honestly don't know where we are going to keep all our wedding stuff, now that we are in a single room at my parents' place! I swear, they are going to end up sick of us by the time we move out! How did you guys go about storing all of your wedding items before your big day?