Black Tie DIY

Justin & I trekked to Everest Base Camp a few months...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 20:50:55 -0400

Justin & I trekked to Everest Base Camp a few months ago…if you want to read about the trip or see more pictures, I blogged about it on my main site here. :) It was an amazing experience!

The phenomenally talented Katherine...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:06:00 -0500

So, before Justin and I actually officially got engaged (long story), I found my wedding dress serendipitously via a “You Might Like” email from eBay. I bought it without even trying it on, and got all self-congratulatory about being a super low-maintenance bride.

Then I spent three months scouring every site I could think of and hitting dozens of stores to find a reception dress. We were throwing a swing dance, so a white gown wasn’t going to cut it - it had to be knee-length. Not strapless. With lace. And gray (so I could wear it again). I hated everything I saw.

Enter Katherine Bignon. We’d met through friends a few times. She’s an incredibly talented designer and maker, and she worked with me tirelessly (via email!) to produce something that was absolutely beautiful. She’s based in New York (but is also happy to Skype) and just took the exciting step of launching her own company, Katherine Elizabeth Bridal. I wanted to share her work here. She does Bridal and Lingerie. Amazing, vintage-looking lingerie! I can’t rave about her enough, so if you’re looking for that elusive “something perfect,” consider having Katherine make something just for you.

Photos by Three Winks Studio

Cohesive DIY & Style Me Pretty Recently, a few people...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 01:40:56 -0500

Cohesive DIY & Style Me Pretty

Recently, a few people who’ve come here for the tutorials have emailed to ask me what the whole day looked like and if DIY projects really felt “cohesive” in a formal setting. I think the answer is yes. :) We probably could have done some more elaborate decorations or more flowers, but NYC weddings are crazy expensive and I was willing to forgo doing tons of decoration in favor of saving $$$. The whole reason we chose Pratt House is that it looked so lovely on its own.

Anyway, our wedding was blogged on Style Me Pretty, so if you’re interested in seeing DIY-meets-formal, here’s the whole thing. I’ll admit it was flattering to have the editors there give my little projects their seal of approval, especially since one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place is that I felt like the aesthetic I was going for (New York, at night, indoors) wasn’t well-represented on wedding blogs in the first place. Either way, the most important thing was that everything about our celebration was really “us,” and really fun.

I spent so much time crafting and DIY-ing before the wedding, then got busy with work and didn’t have much time for hands-on projects. Lately I’ve had some free time, so I’ve been working on non-wedding/ non-baby crafts, and am about to do some glittery & fun wedding projects for a friend. I’ll post those as they’re completed.

Thanks to everyone for the nice emails. :)

DIY: making a relationship infographic (wedding programs/save-the-dates)

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 22:39:00 -0500

Justin & I are both tech geeks. When it came time to design our wedding programs, I knew I wanted an infographic. There really aren’t any sites out there that we found helpful when we were trying to figure out what data to use for our relationship, so here are our lessons learned…

A hybrid timeline/infographic design works best for quantifying a relationship: Although everything in life has a timestamp, most individual moments just aren’t that momentus. A simple timeline doesn’t necessarily tell your story. However, trends that emerge from aggregated moments can be very interesting. When you’re summarizing a relationship, especially for the purpose of a wedding-related paper goods, the stand-out individual moments are pretty obvious - first meeting, first date, engagement, etc. But I felt like the flavor of our relationship was in the stuff that we did often. So we chose a split design: timeline, then summary icons, then more timeline.

What to quantify in the “summary” part? We thought a lot about what defined us as a couple - what did we do together most often, and where. Some themes were obvious…we met blues dancing, and traveled the country together to go to Lindy exchanges. Some were less obvious, and surfaced when we started looking at TimeHop and Foursquare and other apps we use regularly…it turns out we play a lot of Big Buck Hunter.

How to gather the data: To create the timeline portion of the infographic, we searched Google Calendar and pulled the dates of a few key milestones (the night we met, our first date, the night we got engaged, etc).

For the aggregated-moments section, we checked:

Foursquare
TripIt
Facebook
Instagram
Google Calendar
Twitter

Foursquare was by far the most useful; if you’re an active user, it’s an excellent source of data on all of the places you’ve been in your day-to-day life. (There’s one particular vegan restaurant in the East Village that I’ve eaten at 67 times over the past year, it turns out). There’s an excellent hack built on top of Foursquare called Intersquares, which can show you all of the places that you & your significant other have checked in together. Or, if you’re more technical, there’s API; our first visualization attempt was a heatmap made from checkins pulled from that API, but it turned out we very rarely left the 10-block radius around East 9th Street so it just looked like a bulls-eye.

The other services served more as reminders of the things we’d done together. There wasn’t any way to pull out the data, so we did a lot of manual tabulating. We looked for trends in restaurants we went to, what we did on “date nights”, where we hung out. TripIt provided us with our travel stats: 34,174 miles traveled between 20 cities over 3 continents.

Creating an icon set: We had to find an interesting way to visualize the results, so we created representative icons. Some of our milestone dates had clear image pairings…Justin asking me out over Twitter = the bird logo, me moving to San Francisco = the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. The cool thing about this was that creating a relationship icon set gave us our placecard/table card design as well. We made a set of rubbers stamps of our icons, and DIY’d those.

The other side of the program was much simpler to put together - it was just the flow of our ceremony and the names of our bridal party. After everything was laid out, Justin took the files to a print shop - two programs fit on each sheet, and the printer cut them in half. Then Justin hand-stamped the top of each with the same rubber stamps we made for our invitations.

Final results:

If you’re inspired by this DIY and make one, I’d really love to see what metrics you choose.

A 1940s Balmain vintage dress restoration

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 01:54:00 -0400

I was a two-dress bride; our reception was a swing dance, and I needed something tea length that I could dance in. I really wanted a grey dress, so that I could wear it again, and the original plan was vintage. I fell in love with this one when I saw it on eBay: late 1940s Pierre Balmain, convertible to strapless, and with the most amazing lacework.

When it arrived, it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t going to work for dancing. I knew the dress was a fixer-upper, but I wasn’t prepared for the amount of work that had to go into it. The corsetry and parts of the silk were very brittle, and bits were yellowing and flaking off.

After a few weeks calling restoration specialists, I found Jan Barlow. Her work is incredible, and I hope that she puts up a blog post of her own detailing how she made this happen. She literally re-pleated the material so that the brittle folds were hidden, which gave the dress strength (in addition to making it more beautiful) and made it wearable again.

Part of me is thinking of removing the gold ribbon at the hem, and possibly making it a few inches shorter (if it can stand up to that - the ribbon may provide it with structural integrity). I love the designer’s original, more subdued look. But either way, I think it’s absolutely gorgeous.

I couldn’t wear it at my wedding, but I did manage to wear it out to the SF Ballet gala with my husband a month later. :) I opted for strapless, and spent most of the night kind of afraid to breathe, but it all worked out in the end.

DIY: multicolor letterpress wedding invitations hack

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:16:00 -0500

Everyone has something they’re kind of willing to skimp on during the wedding-planning process. Paper was that thing for me - I was totally fine with doing a basic printed invitation.

That was not OK with FDH. He cares a lot about typography and color, so I agreed to turn the paper-goods part of this shindig over to him. He had his heart set on letterpress, but the price of a 3-color invitation started at ~$5.00/piece. So we came up with a hack to bring the price down…one that actually wound up helping us find a design concept for our whole wedding: the rubber stamp.

The base invitation: FDH created a simple single-color design in Illustrator with a vertical layout and elegant typography. (If you aren’t comfortable with doing your own design, there are many Etsy sellers who make templates.)

Then we found a printer: Mercurio Brothers. They are fantastic and by far the most reasonably priced. You send them a PDF, select paper weight and details, and turnaround time is typically 7-14 days.

The rubber stamps: Use a vector graphics program to design simple, iconic images, then convert them to PNG to maintain high resolution. If you aren’t an artist, Iconfinder.com or sites like Shutterstock have plenty to choose from…stick with something simple because fine lines will bleed during the stamping process. Your monogram is a great choice. We used lips and a ‘stache, because DFH actually had a mustache for the first few months we were dating. (Not super original, but very “us”)

After you have your image(s), send the file off to thestampmaker.com, and the stamps arrive ~5 days later.

Buy some high-quality ink in your wedding colors - check Michael’s or eBay - and practice stamping on some looseleaf first. You’ll make some mistakes with the first few, so order slightly more invitations than you absolutely need. The trick is not to press too hard.

Here are our finished invitations:

This project really was a lot of fun. I loved how our invitations were formal but still personalized and fun. And as I said above, we ultimately took our stamping a bit further and created an entire relationship icon set that we used in our programs and placecards. I’ll get a blog post up about that sometime soon…

Don't make bouquets the morning of your wedding.

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 21:30:00 -0500

I obviously didn’t post this on the morning of my wedding, but I had a last minute, morning-of-wedding DIY project and I figured I’d share “lessons learned” from my bridesmaid bouquet disaster. Pro tip: do not use Amaryllis if you’re DIY-ing a bouquet. It is a flower for florists, not amateurs. My girls and I had planned on just wrapping it in satin ribbon with pussywillows and some greenery. Turns out there is a giant wooden dowel that runs up the center of those stems, and they fall to pieces when you remove it.

One of my amazing bridesmaids and my maid-of-honor (sister) saved the day by doing an emergency run for peonies, and we whipped up four bouquets in an hour, five hours before the wedding. I’ll update with better pictures and a how-to when I get our wedding photos.

So. Much. Fun.

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 23:30:00 -0500

November 12th = best night I’ve ever had. Madly in love with new husband.

Everything was perfect, except for the fact that Batman made a lot of our guests late.

Seriously. Batman was filming, and traffic was horrible. Whole avenues, and the Queensboro bridge, were closed. But everyone got there eventually.

Our amazing photographer posted these two sneak peeks. :)

DIY: super-easy birdcage veil

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 23:24:00 -0400

I’ve talked a bit about my ceremony veil in other posts - it’s a killer handmade all-lace mantilla, but it won’t work at all for our swing dance reception. For the dance, I’m planning on changing into a tea-length grey dress. To still look “bride-y,” I decided to DIY a birdcage veil. I might wear it at my rehearsal dinner, too. It’s super-simple and quick to make one, and the materials cost less than $10.

What you need:

an applique (or fascinator - though that will raise the cost a bit)
a 9” wide piece of Russian netting (use a wider piece if you want it to cover your whole face; 9” comes to just below the eyes)
a pack of bobby pins
a needle and thread.

How to:

Cut the Russian netting into a trapezoid shape. Mine was 21” long on the bottom edge.
On each diagonal side of the trapezoid, sew in and out of the square openings, anchoring each stitch into the thick areas of the netting. As you pull the thread tighter, the material will bunch. Stop when you get to the flat top part of the trapezoid, and knot off the thread (again, into the thick area of the netting).

I realize that instruction may sound unclear; it did to me, too. I spent quite a lot of time looking for help on this, and used this tutorial - it has a few great graphics showing the trapezoid shape you’re going for. Honestly, though, don’t worry about getting it perfect, because what is really going to make this veil look good is how you pin it on. A lot of sites will tell you to sew it onto a comb, but I found that was unnecessary.

Assuming you don’t go the comb route, you’re going to pin the veil itself to your hair - use a lot of bobby pins to get it to sit just how you want it. Birdcage veils have a tendency to puff up. After it’s situated, attach the fascinator or applique to your hair as well, using it to cover up the spot where the veil is gathered. My applique had a million threads criss-crossing the underside, so I just stuck some bobby pins through and then had a friend work them into my hair. If you’d like to be more thorough, buy an alligator clip and glue it using E6000 or something similar.

An applique will sit flat on your head, so if you want something more decadent, buy a fascinator clip. There are many amazing ones on Etsy.

I know this tutorial needs a lot more photos, especially of the finished product. I’ll update it with pictures of me wearing it once I have my wedding pictures. :)

Update: this is the birdcage veil from the back, worn with the applique.

DIY: lace wedding anythings (hair pins & jewelry)

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:06:00 -0400

I’ve been looking for some hair decorations, and I’ve been seeing a lot of hair pins, embellished headbands, and jewelry made of bits of lace. They’re lovely. They are super-easy and cost about $5 to make, but sites like BHLDN sell them for $90+. Don’t do it. You can totally make these yourself.

Venice lace is the best for making wearable pieces of lace because it’s heavy and that makes it a good candidate for stiffening. All of the pieces you see in the photo below are from swatches I got while I was shopping for lace to make my mantilla, so they were actually free. Even if your fabric shop charges you, you can make do with 1/8 of a yard.

What you need: Elmer’s glue, venice lace, scissors, findings (hair pins, chain, etc)

How to stiffen lace:

Using the scissors, cut the lace along the motif into the shape you want.
Take 1/4 cup of Elmer’s glue and mix in 1/4 cup of water into a container with high sides (tupperware is great). You can try something other than Elmer’s, but be sure it dries clear. Craft glues are generally unsuitable; the lace will get too hard.
Submerge the piece of lace into the glue & water mixture. Make sure it’s completely coated and soaked through.
Press out as much of the mixture as you can against the side of the container. Wring it out between your thumb and forefinger, but try not to bend the lace.
Let dry overnight on a nonstick surface (the lid of a tupperware container or a plasting cutting/craft board is perfect).

You now have stiffened lace. The rest of the photos below show me attaching it to bobby pins and barettes, using E6000 glue. (What’s not pictured is me using an dress form clamp to hold the pin to the stiffened lace - highly recommended) Once again, if you are going to use glue, be sure it dries clear. The first time I did this I used Gorilla Glue. Mistake.

Even though the lace is stiffened, you can still sew it if you use a thick enough needle; I sewed some onto a flower fascinator/birdcage veil I made for my reception. You can just as easily attach smaller pieces of lace to earring backs, or connect a chain to the two ends of a long piece to make a necklace. The possibilities are endless. :)

Oops. I bought three vintage reception dresses...

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:50:00 -0400

because I’m horribly indecisive. And a friend is making me a fourth! I just don’t know what the handmade one will look like yet, and I asked for it to be made in dark grey (so I can wear it again). It turns out that Justin doesn’t love the grey dress idea. However, our wedding reception is a swing dance, so I need something shorter than my wedding gown.

I can always use one as a Rehearsal Dinner dress, so it’s not like I’m really all that many dresses past what I need. And I can return or resell them. But Justin thinks I’m kind of ridiculous. :)

Still. Look at these bits of vintage amazingness.

White brocade “cupcake” dress.

Saks Fifth Avenue label chantilly lace dress

Pierre Balmain

And then today, the florist quit.

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:38:00 -0400

Eesh. Oh well. I didn’t really like her anyway. One of our month-of wedding coordinators from Bellafare says she knows an alternate florist. So it looks like now we’ll be going with Verde Flowers for my bouquet and the centerpieces and boutonnieres, and then DIYing the rest of it.

The coordinator came up with a great table design involving mercury glass to fill out the rest of the table (we went with long banquet tables). I’ll own quite a bit of mercury glass when this is all done, but the pieces look great. I love these hurricanes:

I’m totally impressed by how awesome the planners have been. Absolute pros. I’ve been able to focus on work and not worry too much about planning, and I completely trust them to make everything run smoothly and look awesome. I wish I could find someone who could make the same kind of magic happen with my new apartment…I’m still living out of boxes!

DIY: Jordan almond wedding favors

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:56:00 -0400

I have such a sentimental attachment to these favors, I knew I had to have them. I’m Italian, and as a little girl I always thought these candies were the best thing about weddings, christenings, and the like.

I decided to make these myself because most of the sites selling them pre-made used really tacky netting/ribbon or are incredibly overpriced. If you make these with one other person helping, it takes about 2 hours and supplies cost ~$60 for 100 favors.

What you need:

A bag of Jordan almonds. I used up a 5-lb bag on 100 favors.
Some ribbon. 3/8” is the best thickness for tying on a bow.
Tulle. It’s super inexpensive, and most fabric and craft stores carry it.
A rotary cutter. Trust me, this will save so much time, it’s worth the $12.

How to:

Find a piece of round tupperware in your kitchen that’s approx 6” in diameter at the opening. That size circle will hold 5 almonds.
Fold up the tulle into a rectangle (or if you have individual small pieces, stack them). Place the opening of the bowl on the tulle and trace around it with the rotary cutter (do this on a clean, hard surface such as a plastic cutting board - rotary cutters are sharp!) If you do this right, one go-around with the cutter should give you multiple circles.
Place 5 almonds in the center of one of the circular pieces of tulle. Gather up the tulle around them and twist so that the almonds are in a little pouch of tulle.
Tie approx 8” of ribbon around the twisted part of the tulle. It’s actually easier if someone else holds the little pouch while you tie the ribbon.

And that’s it! I’ll update with some photos of the finished product soon.

Update: here they are displayed in some of the silver we collected, with a little card explaining the tradition.

DIY: guestbook & tech-nerd photo booth

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:50:00 -0400

Hipster guestbook alert! FDH has hipster tendencies. He rides a fixie and wears selvage denim and likes bright socks with tuxedos. When we started looking at guestbook options, everything seemed kind of lame and overpriced. We don’t have spare wall space to do one of those signed-canvas things, so we decided to go with a book…a Moleskine sketchbook! We’re planning to combine the guestbook with a photo station, in hopes that the result at the end of the night will be a cool collage-book.

To get things going, we printed some of our engagement shots on Snapfish and bought photo corners and sticky-dot adhesive. We scattered our photos on pages throughout the book.

Then we downloaded an iPad app called Pocketbooth, so that we can offer the fun of a photo booth even though there’s really no room for one at our venue.

How fun is that?!

At the wedding, we plan to have an AirPrint printer and our iPad out on a table with the guestbook so that guests can take their own photos when they sign.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this turns out. I have some doubts about keeping all of the moving parts running smoothly, but DFH’s brother volunteered to man the station.

Post-wedding update: Leave the printer at home. No one will want to print anything, it turns out, and it’s too much of a hassle to go through the setup. But definitely put an iPad running Pocketbooth out next to your guestbook! So many people took pictures, and it was really fun to go through them and add the good ones to our guestbook after the fact.

DIY: heart confetti

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:49:00 -0400

I’ve had a lot of sticker shocks while wedding planning…somehow things get marked up about 1000% if they’re explicitly for wedding use. Today it was over the price of confetti at Michael’s. :) It’s bits of paper, for crying out loud, and I’d bet that confetti isn’t the thing that guests really remember about a wedding.

Alternative: this Martha Stewart confetti heart paper punch!

It’s from the same punch series I used for the pomander hydrangeas. It makes many tiny hearts at once, and costs $18. I bought it, picked up a few pieces of nice paper in our colors (grey & burgundy), and got to work.

The down side, really, is the labor required. I am already so tired of punching paper, and I’m realizing that making enough confetti for 100 guests is going to take forever. Maybe I’ll rope Justin into taking turns.

Maybe you don’t actually want to DIY this. ;)

Update: you definitely don’t want to DIY this. Though it technically does save $$$, it takes forever and you become convinced that you’re going to develop carpal tunnel syndrome.

Recognizing when you are in over your head: garnet bridesmaid jewelry

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:25:00 -0400

I had this grand vision that I’d DIY the jewelry parts of this wedding, too…at very least, my bridesmaids’ necklaces. But now, with one month left: no way! :) It’s kind of liberating. I had started hunting around for silver deco mountings and emerald-cut garnets (the “burgundy” part of “grey & burgundy” is kind of underrepresented in our wedding), and then realized I just didn’t have the time to wait for materials to arrive when I still have so many other projects to get done. I don’t want to give rushed gifts.

So! Etsy. I wish they still had the Alchemy function, so I could’ve just put up an ad detailing what I was looking for, but I made do with searching around the site for hours and emailing sellers. These are the ones I’m considering…so many talented artists to choose from!

Thwarted DIY: All-lace waltz-length mantilla veil

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:59:00 -0400

This is a thwarted DIY project with a happy ending. :) Starting in late July, I went looking for an all-lace waltz-length mantilla veil. Aside from the shoulder-length Catholic mass veils or traditional Spanish mantillas (usually black), they’re impossible to find.

That’s probably because a piece of lace this big would clash horribly with most modern wedding dresses, but in the late 19th century it was actually pretty common to have a simple dress and elaborate veil. Belgian lace heirloom veils occasionally come up for auction, but they’re incredibly expensive and delicate. This was one of my favorites:

Most of them are hand-embroidered. The one above is a Russian family’s coat of arms.

So I tried to DIY one, by finding patterned lace myself. I considered buying a heavy Venice lace, pictured below, and cutting along the motif. It turns out that it sits poorly on the head, and is incredibly heavy. Failure.

I realized sewing would be required - I’m not that great at sewing - and tried to sign up for private lessons with a local SF seamstress, where the project would be the veil. How hard could it be? A circle of lace edged with other lace! Unfortunately, my teacher didn’t quite get what I was going for, so sewing lessons were a bust.

The site that always comes through: Etsy! I looked around for weeks until I found a black lace veil similar to what I wanted, then contacted the seller, Honeycomb Veils. She is amazing. She understood “the vision” right away, told me what would work and what wouldn’t, and started sending me snippets of laces in different colors. We decided to go with a thin ivory lace that would fall lightly on the head, and I found a warm silver edge lace at Britex Fabrics of San Francisco. (It was vintage deadstock from an Italian factory!)

Today I got the photos of the finished product, and I’m so thrilled with how it looks. It’s not really like the embroidered Belgian lace veils, but it has a style all its own and it’s my absolute favorite part of what I’ll be wearing during our ceremony.

Vintage silver wedding decorations

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:10:00 -0400

The past two weeks of planning have been super fun…I’ve started looking for vintage silver & silverplate serving pieces, and it’s like a little treasure hunt. There are so many beautiful things out there. I love all of the intricate details in these old pieces.

I’ve been looking for 1930s-40s holloware and serving pieces. A lot of it is surprisingly inexpensive, especially on eBay and Etsy, and I’m excited by the idea of having gorgeous keepsakes to entertain with long after the wedding is over. :)

This is what I’ve found so far…

A Wallace Silver pierced bread basket (for programs)

A decadent little basket, stamped “Made in Occupied Japan” (for flower girl)

An International Silver basket (for confetti)

I know it doesn’t match, but finding a matching set turns out to be pretty much impossible.

DIY: paper hydrangea pomander balls

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 01:33:00 -0400

These little flower balls are awesome, easy to make, inexpensive decor for any wedding.

One of the reasons my fiancé and I picked our venue is because it’s so gorgeously opulent in its natural state. So our ceremony decor is going to be very simple…just two large floral arrangements with us standing between them. To make the room a little bit more festive, I decided to make some of these pomander balls to hang on the chairs and doorknobs.

It’s really simple. I was inspired by this baby-shower pomander tutorial by Paula of Frog Prince Paperie, which is posted here. Her instructions are great and have way better photos than my post, so you should check them out.

What you need:

flower paper punch - hydrangeas or daisies are particularly lovely.
cardstock
150 pearl-head corsage pins (eBay had the best price by a lot)
1” wide ribbon
Krylon H2o Latex Spray Paint (optional, but please use this brand)
styrofoam balls - for a wedding, you want at least 5” diameter. (see the photos of mine on the chair; they’re still a little small, and they were 5”)

The reason for that very specific spray paint is this: your flowers will shift around a bit after you make them, and some of the white styrofoam underneath will show. If you’re aiming to make very dark pomanders, you can either really pack in the paper flowers, or you can start by spray-painting the balls. But!! Regular spray paint dissolves styrofoam, so please use Krylon H2o or make sure that yours works with acrylic.

Another option is to wrap the entire styrofoam ball with ribbon. The tutorial below assumes that your styrofoam ball is already painted/wrapped if you want it to be.

How to:

Punch approximately 200 flowers out of 2-3 pieces of cardstock. That will cover a 5” ball if you’re using one of the Martha Stewart punches.
Cut a piece of the ribbon - the length should be approx 3x the diameter of the styrofoam ball you’re using, plus however much extra you need to create a loop for hanging.
Wrap the ribbon around the ball once and pin it in place with some of the corsage pins. Create a loop, and tuck the end back under the ribbon on the styrofoam ball. Pin that into place as well.
Take two of your punched flower shapes, and place them one on top of the other, offset, so that they look fuller. Push a single corsage pin through the center of the two pieces of paper. You now have a “flower.”
Pin the flower to the styrofoam ball. I start by pinning them onto the area I’ve wrapped in ribbon, to better hold it in place.
Continue pinning flowers to the ball until it’s entirely covered.

You’re done! If you used a ball larger than 5”, make sure that the 1” wide ribbon is capable of supporting its weight when it’s hanging.

Updated w/wedding photos:

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:28:00 -0400

It’s a visual-bookmarking site. It’s fantastic. Now instead of emailing links back and forth with my bridesmaids & wedding coordinator, I can just “pin” things using their bookmarklet. The view of all of your images on one board lets you see how things fit together aesthetically, but takes no time at all to create. Best of all, you can see what others are pinning, so I’m finding planning blogs and designers I didn’t previously know about.

My details board:

My clothes board:

And I have non-wedding boards, too. Really loving the site…it’s addictive.

Black Tie DIY

Justin & I trekked to Everest Base Camp a few months...

The phenomenally talented Katherine...

Cohesive DIY & Style Me Pretty Recently, a few people...

DIY: making a relationship infographic (wedding programs/save-the-dates)

A 1940s Balmain vintage dress restoration

DIY: multicolor letterpress wedding invitations hack

Don't make bouquets the morning of your wedding.

So. Much. Fun.

DIY: super-easy birdcage veil

DIY: lace wedding anythings (hair pins & jewelry)

Oops. I bought three vintage reception dresses...

And then today, the florist quit.

DIY: Jordan almond wedding favors

DIY: guestbook & tech-nerd photo booth

DIY: heart confetti

Recognizing when you are in over your head: garnet bridesmaid jewelry

Thwarted DIY: All-lace waltz-length mantilla veil

Vintage silver wedding decorations

DIY: paper hydrangea pomander balls

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