Wedding candles

We bought our wedding candles at Bed Bath and Beyond and Joanne Fabrics.  What's great is that they come in various sets of packages and sizes.  Our florist advised us to stay away from tea lights since their burning period is less than an hour.  Also due to fire hazards and restrictions, Wedgewood Crystal Springs only allowed enclosed flames and about 3-4 candles per table max.  Even after trimming the wicks, the flames still weren't enclosed so we burned the candles for about an hour to meet their requirements.

The candle holders were a little too plain for our taste so we bought a roll of lace from amazon for about $15.00, bought a small glue gun and sticks, and wrapped the lace around the candle holders to make them look a lot more elegant and decorative...it's the little details that count!  We only had 12 tables and with 3-4 candles on each table the project only took a couple hours.

 To make the process quicker and easier, I first had all the lace cut to the appropriate length to wrap around each candle.  It's easier so you're not cutting than gluing, then cutting and so on.  Then I just glued an edge of the lace, wrapped it around the candle, and glued the other edge of the lace.  Word of warning, this can be a messy project so I recommend using paper bags to cover your table.

Materials needed:


Lace- we used May Arts
Scissors
Glue gun
Non-toxic glue sticks.

Motivation

Charles Jourdan Haley Shoes

Whenever the Pop Sugar sale alert goes off on my phone, I worry.  Sometimes I glance at the item and hit the cancel button and move on, other times not.  These shoes had me at hello.  I'm embarrassed to say these shoes incited a mad illness in me to have them.  Luckily it only happens once in a blue moon.  I scoured the internet hoping to find even better deals and was surprised to learn Amazon of all places had them, and with their discount code the cost was even less.  

Sadly, when they arrived the shoes weren't up to par with my expectation.  The shoes are a raffia woven style so parts of the material were fraying from the shoe.  Also with 4" heels with no platform support I had to walk slowly in these - not good for someone who has a quick gait.  But from afar they were lovely to look at; it was easy to dismiss its imperfections so much so that it took me two weeks to work up the courage to print out that darn UPS return label from my home printer, kiss the shoes goodbye, tape up the brown box and ship it off.  Two weeks!  It just wasn't meant to be...

Wedding menus

Didn't realize my last blog was the first month of this year.  Now that all the wedding madness is over, I have more time to blog and hopefully give tips and insights for budget conscious brides on planning a spectacular, seemingly extravagant wedding.

One of the things we didn't want to spend a lot of money on were wedding menus.  We didn't want to go to a wedding printing company and spend money on something that we knew people would only glance over briefly and throw away.  Also, it wasn't practical to print a menu for every single person.  

So what we did was we got creative and went to Jo-Anne's fabric and craft store and chose stock paper that matched our wedding colors which were gray, soft purple, and blush. I kind of played around and got different textures and colors of paper and made mock menus.  Let me tell you- I am so not a crafty person but this was the quickest, easiest, most simple method for making menus.  When my fiance took one look at them and was impressed, I knew we had a winner.  We also saved money by opting to have two menus at each table instead of having one for each and every guest.    

The only materials we used were:

Stock paper

Non-toxic glue sticks

Pencil

Paper cutter

Regular 8 1/2 x 11 paper

Home printer

Step 1:  Chose paper stock that matched our wedding colors:

 Step 2:   Printed our menus on regular 81/2 x 11 paper on a home printer.  To save paper we made two columns and cut the printed menus and eye-balled it to the size we wanted.

Step 3:  Cut a section of another type of stock paper to make the menu header.  

Step 4:  Cut the stock paper so that its border around the printed menu is about 1" to 1.5" wide.  Next I glued the headers and printed menu on the stock paper in no particular order.   

End result

Total cost:  $100 for stock paper including the paper cutter.  The stock paper we chose was $1.99 each but Jo-Anne's had a variety.