Your Custom Text Here
This weekend was filled with some of my favorite things. Nothing extravagant, just simple things that revolved around home and family. We had a bonfire, good food, good drinks, a family celebration, spring gardening and yard cleanup, and time for new creations. It was swell!
How about you? Did you have any simple, yet lovely weekend happenings?
Having our very own chicken eggs during Easter, obviously meant that we needed to make our very own naturally dyed Easter eggs. And so that is exactly what we did! We ended up with golden yellow, using ground turmeric, and copper, using onion skins. The blue eggs are from our hen Birdie--she makes 'em real purdy.
If you haven't yet dyed eggs and are wanting to, you can find Ashley English's Naturally Dyed Eggs instructions here. They are so easy and make such pretty colors!
Happy Easter to all of you! We'll be enjoying the weekend at home and with family. I hope that wherever this weekend finds you, it finds you well.
While Valentine's Day has become quite the commercial Hallmark holiday, in our house it is truly a day to celebrate love. This year, we started the day with a delicious breakfast of easy sourdough pancakes (A new favorite from The Nourished Kitchen cookbook. Here is a similar version to what's in the cookbook.), then moved on to a day of relaxing, complete with a surprise professional massage for me! I came home from my massage to find Dan cooking away in the kitchen--his Valentine's Day tradition. We ended the day with some wine, a movie, double-chocolate raspberry brownies, and our tradition of exchanging cards.
One way we fight the commercialism of Valentine's Day is to support local businesses in our Valentine's pursuits. Our cards are from one of our favorite local shops and my massage was from a local shop not far from our house. We find that Valentine's Day is a great way to celebrate how much we enjoy one another and to just be together. I hope your Valentine's Day was great as well. However, if you are finding yourself despising the day due to the commercial monster it has turned into, then do something about it and make next year about what it should be about--being with those you love.
With a husband who travels a lot, we find ourselves often very excited over relaxing days spent at home--together. Yesterday was one of those days. And so in honor of the day, we had waffles. Waffles made in my grandma's old Sunbeam waffle iron that may have originated in the 1950's. After a slightly darkened batch, we enjoyed several perfect waffles. It was a lovely way to start the day. The rest of the day followed in a relaxed, yet productive manner. Buttons and a pocket were sewn on a newly completed knitting project. A little sewing was done. Laundry soap was made and clothes were washed. I caught up the latest episodes of Downton Abbey. Several rows were knitted in one of my current knitting projects. And I enjoyed spending the day with my wonderful husband.
It was a truly wonderful way to spend the day, as today marks the start of the spring semester at the University of Minnesota. It's always nice to spend a day relaxing before beginning a semester of hard work.
Spring 2015, here I come!
All of the Christmas decorations have now been put away in our house and the quiet feeling of January has set in. However, before we all officially move on from Christmas, I thought I'd share a little about some of the handmade goodness that we gifted this year. I love giving meaningful, useful, and thoughtful gifts and with my love for crafting, I often find myself making quite a few gifts during the holiday season. This year a few of my favorites were mittens for all of the nieces and nephews (note: 2 year old boys do not find mittens to be exciting, nor something they want to try on for a photo shoot...), a huge infinity scarf for my husband (I used this pattern with a worsted weight), peppermint lip balm (with a mixture of coconut and olive oils), candles, and rosemary-lavender salt scrub (with a mixture of epsom and kosher salts).
I just love making and giving handmade gifts. It just feels the way gift-giving should feel. I love how it takes planning, time, and effort to create something--and not just anything, but a specific something for a specific person. To me, it's a much more meaningful and enjoyable way to give gifts.
How about you? Did you make any gifts this year??
I hope your Christmases were all filled with joy, laughter, and loved ones. Ours sure was! I've been rather silent on this space for the last week because the preparations and celebrations consumed my time. The silence was much needed and worth it, though, as we had several lovely Christmas celebrations with all sides of our family.
My favorite Christmas celebration, though, is always the simple one at home with my love. With our large families that celebrate on different days each year it's hard to have a specific date to always call our own, so we decided in our first year of marriage that while the date could change, would we have one Christmas Celebration Day for ourselves each year. This year we celebrated on Tuesday and started the day with homemade caramel rolls, a new tradition! (Which I realized too late that my store-bought yeast must have expired...so they were a little dense!)
We then had our traditional cheese plate in the afternoon with a steamed artichoke and our favorite Christmas wassail (one of my favorite Christmas traditions).
After opening our gifts to one another, which was so much fun, we ended the evening with a deliciously tender venison roast with mushrooms and onions.
It was a fabulous Christmas had by all! I hope you are resting today after all of the festivities! We sure are here.
This weekend Dan and I got to escape for a few days and celebrate our second wedding anniversary. It was an absolutely wonderful weekend, even though it's been almost a month since our actual anniversary! We stayed at the Spicer Castle Inn and spent our time reading, dreaming, laughing, talking, and just enjoying being together. Since the inn is on a rather large lake, we decided to take my grandpa's boat with us and enjoy one last water adventure for the season.
Throughout the weekend, my fingers also made a ton of progress on my "honeymoon sweater," a cardigan for myself that I started on our honeymoon two years ago. It's a project that has spent a lot of time sitting in my knitting basket while other many other projects have gone on and off the needles. It's finally nearing completion, though, and I'm getting rather excited about it!
It was a truly wonderful weekend--one which made me love my dear husband so much more. Here's to the rest of our lives together, my love.
Why, hello! It's been a few days of intense grading around these parts, but I thought I'd squeeze in one more post about wedding goodness before moving on to all of the wonderful fall things that are beginning to fill my days.
Last week I shared a bit about our wedding (our wedding day) and a few of the things that I created myself (my wedding dress, wedding flowers) in order to save money and truly make it my own. Today, I'd thought I'd share a few more of those things, in hopes that you'd be inspired to take a simpler approach to event planning and celebrations.
In our world of Pinterest and DIY craziness, it's easy to get swept away in the excitement and creativity of it all. However, a lot of the DIY ideas out there aren't really all that cost effective! My goal, when planning our wedding, was to be able to make things myself for much less than I would have been able to buy them. I love making and creating things, but if the final product is not cheaper and/or better quality than the store-bought version, I don't usually think it's worth it.
Today I thought I'd highlight a few of the things that I really enjoyed making and ended up being super happy with the finished products, both in cost and quality.
The decorations were by far my favorite. While I don't have pictures of everything, I was beyond satisfied with what I created for our reception and ceremony. My inspiration for these started with a few pieces of fabric that I found in our wedding colors and accents. These accent fabrics were then used for our "bride" and "groom" signs for the head table, for decorative shoe clips for my ladies, as a hair clip for my 'lil lady, and as the background for some of our beer-bottle and glass bead magnets that we gave as favors. Being the coordinated person that I am, I thoroughly enjoyed incorporating these fabrics into as many things as possible.
One of my favorite decoration pieces were the tissue paper flowers that I made with some of my girlfriends. We spent one lovely summer afternoon at my house making these wonderful flowers for just a few dollars and they added so much to the beauty of our day! They were made from the tissue paper of old unwanted sewing patterns that I got at a textile sale for $0.10 a piece. I purchased 30 patterns (for a whopping total of $3.00) and I think we only used about 10 of them! We secured the flowers with floral wire that I got at a craft store for a few dollars and put them into vases that were made from bottles that I saved from my kitchen recyclables and wrapped in twine. I absolutely loved the way they turned out! And this project was SOOOOO affordable!
The table runners were made from burlap coffee bags that we got for free from a local coffee roaster and they were covered with a layer of sheer fabric that matched the sheer overlay on my wedding dress. Once again, I adored the coordination and the prices!
For our ceremony, my dad built us a gorgeous arbor, which now stands at the entrance of our garden, and we filled the area around it with hanging baskets and potted plants from my dad's and grandma's houses. Since the ceremony was right next to the reception tent, the plants added color and life to our reception as well.
A friend of ours (pictured below) graciously lent us the beautiful birdcage that our 'lil lady carried down the isle. I wanted something different for her and the bird theme was perfect. A similar borrowed bird cage was also used as a "card basket" near the dessert table. While I loved the color and fun that these pretty bird cages added, I also loved how I was able to borrow them and not spend a dime!
We loved everything about our wedding, but one of the things that I loved the most was the fact that we were able to celebrate our love together and begin our lives together without any debt or wedding bills to pay after it was all said and done. Part of this was due to the generosity of our family and loved ones, but it was also due to the fact that I got creative with the things that I could control. It can be hard to save much money when it comes to venues and food, but you can most definitely save money by finding creative ways to decorate. Making all of these things I did also provided so many opportunities to spend time with those I love. We crafted together and enjoyed each other's company. It made our wedding much more of a communal affair. In my opinion, being surrounded by community is one of the best ways to start a marriage.
When it comes to saving money for a wedding, making your own flowers is a quick and relatively easy way to do so! If you're going for a more natural bouquet look, it's pretty easy to not only assemble bouquets and vases yourself, but boutonnières and corsages as well! After helping to make most of the flowers for three of my cousins' weddings, I knew that flowers were definitely something that I wanted to do myself.
I chose flowers for the wedding based on what I knew I could easily access in Minnesota in September. I fell in love with maroon and yellow celosia and decided to try growing it at my dad's, my grandma's, and my apartment. While we didn't end up with quite as much celosia as I'd hoped for, we still had enough for it to play a big role in our arrangements.
To add to the arrangements, I purchased a few bunches of things from Market Flowers in Minneapolis. They specialize in selling bulk flowers at prices that are close to wholesale. I really wanted Billy Balls in my arrangements, and was beyond thrilled when I found out that they stocked them there.
The last bit of filler flowers and greenery came from all around my dad's property. We used hosta leaves in the boutonnières, wild plume grasses in bouquets, and anything else that caught our fancy as we walked around the yard with a pair of scissors. The day before the wedding, my ladies of honor, aunts, grandma, and stepmom all offered their creativity as we made all of the floral arrangements for the following day. After making flowers for several weddings, I've found that the time spent with the ladies that day is so valuable and it's so much fun to be able to really enjoy the flowers. For some many weddings, there are gorgeous flowers that you hardly get to even smell! Making the arrangements yourself gives you the opportunity to really enjoy them, and enjoy each other. I loved that.
I was beyond thrilled with the way the flowers turned out! The colors were perfect, the shapes of the bouquets were just whimsical enough to make me smile, and the Billy Balls were so adorable! In the end, I think I spent about $200 or less on all of the flowers. I was pretty pleased with that price tag, and so happy with the finished product.
If you feel unsure of your flower arrangement abilities, take a class, watch some YouTube videos, or just start experimenting! It's really a rather simple and fun way to save money and your skills will certainly be called upon for years and years to come.
I've dreamed about my wedding since the day I first understood what the word wedding meant. Every sleepover I had in elementary school and junior high was filled with giggles and innocent dreams about that day and all that it would hold. The dress, of course, was one of the most important thoughts. Would it be long and flowing? Would the veil cover my face? Would the dress sparkle in the candlelight?? I was a dreamer and for as long as I can remember, these thoughts have filled my mind.
Once the reality of wedding bells grew closer, though, I began to realize that the dreams in my head of that perfect dress were going to be hard to satisfy. You see, I'm rather picky when it comes to clothes. This is mostly due to my love for vintage clothing, especially dresses from the 1950's. When I picture the perfect dress in my mind, I see a full skirt with a fluffy petticoat peaking out from below the hem. As I began to think through what type and style of wedding dress I really wanted to have, I began to realize that it was going to be very hard to come by, especially with my rather limited budget.
So, I came to the only decision that made sense: I decided to make my own dress.
Now, at the time I was a novice seamstress, at best. I had made a few aprons with full bodices, a couple simple dresses, a skirt, and a few random other things. But, you see, I have this philosophy on life that if it's possible to make it myself, then, by golly, I'll make it myself!! Because, you see, up until the last sixty years or so, women often made their own wedding dresses (or their mothers/grandmothers made them) and I do so despise the fact that we are losing the art of sewing in our society. So, with all that in mind, I figured, it couldn't be that hard---I could, and would, figure it out. And, so, I did!
I found a picture of a vintage dress pattern, that I absolutely adored and a few pictures of wedding dresses that had a similar feel and I used them all as inspiration for my design. (The sources for these images are long forgotten. My apologies!) I was able to use the picture of the back of the vintage dress pattern to give me an idea for the amount of fabric I would eventually need.
I then ordered my fabric online, which took a lot of searching to find just what I was looking for! The sheer overlay ended up coming from an Etsy store based out of China and the main fabric of the dress I found at Joann.
Then came the most challenging part--designing the pattern. As I sat in my chilly apartment that winter and stared at my sketches before me, I regretted all of the times that I had thought that fractions were a waste of time...I decided through this designing endeavor that my future children will learn the practicality of fractions. They are rather necessary in so many of the projects I find myself doing!
After the initial pattern was designed and cut out of tracing paper, I got to working making my first sample dress out of an old white sheet.
Although I thoroughly documented this entire process, I unfortunately lost the majority of the pictures in an unexpected phone crash right before the wedding. Out of all of the pictures I lost, the ones of my dress were the most disappointing.
After the white sheet dress was finished, I made a few adjustments and then started on the second sample, this one was made out of an adorable vintage sheet set with bright yellow flowers that I had slept on for years at our beloved cabin. I ended up wearing that dress for my family bridal shower, which was perfectly delightful! Those photos were also lost. Boo.
Then, about a month before the wedding (Hah!!! Yikes, is right!!), I started on my actual wedding dress. It came together rather quickly and I was so happy with the pattern tweaks that I had made along the way. The final product was exactly what I wanted. It fell to the perfect spot on my legs, it twirled just right, and I felt my absolute best in it.
I also made my hair piece and veil, which were by far the easiest parts of the project, but they added just the right amount of vintage flair and feathered spunk to my full ensemble (especially when paired with my mustard pumps)! Oh, I did so love how everything turned out!!
Now, I as I said earlier this week, I wanted to write about our wedding as a way to inspire. I realize that the majority of the brides out there are not going to make their own dresses, and that's honestly not why I'm writing about this. I am sharing it with you, though, to help you think outside of the box. My dress, shoes, and accessories ended up costing me less than $200. I made everything except my jewelry (a pearl necklace and earrings, which my mom had bought me for my 18th birthday) and my shoes, which I found online after months of searching. The point is, when you stop to think about it, there are lots of ways to get creative with weddings and any event, for that matter. Why spend so much money for something that so many people end up sealing away in a box and sliding under their bed?!
For me, I couldn't do it. So, I figured out an alternative. And as for storing that lovely dress of mine? It hangs in the closet of our spare bedroom so that each year, when our anniversary comes 'round, I can pull it out, put it on, and let my husband twirl me around our living room with our wedding songs filling the air with their sweet, sweet melodies.