A Fun DIY Project (Alternatively Titled: How I Cut My Thumb Open)

Hey all!

So we are getting married two weeks from Saturday.  The clock is ticking and the countdown is on!  I have to admit that for these past four or five weeks I've felt overwhelmed with stress at the sheer amount of things we had yet to get accomplished for this wedding (and naturally the blog has suffered).  But Eric and I have worked through the list slowly but surely, and have delegated a lot of tasks to our awesome family and wedding party, and the day is coming together wonderfully.  I am at the point now where I am just so excited to say I do!  I want the day to be here NOW.

 

Get to call this handsome man my husband in 2.5 weeks!

Now that it is closer to the wedding, we are needing to get done all the tedious tasks that we have been putting off until the end stages.  One of those tasks was our corkboard seating chart.  You may recall this post where I first unveiled it.  So, Eric and I have earnestly saved every cork from every bottle of wine we have shared together, from the day we got engaged until now, with the plans of creating a seating chart made from the corks of our wine bottles of love.  Well those plans tanked pretty fast when we realized we would have to drink three bottles of wine a day in order to have enough in time.  Riiiiight.  So we came up with a new idea for the corks that they would hold our place cards at the tables!

 

Cute!

At 155 guests, we needed far less of them, so Eric went through the (embarrassingly full) bag of corks and picked out the best ones to use for this project.  Then I lured Tara and Melissa over to my place to watch the premiere of the Bachelorette with promise of wine and food, and then dropped the bomb that they would be helping me do crafts all night.  Mwahahaha...

Turns out I have the same patience for crafting as I do for shopping.  10 minutes and I'm sooooo done.  On a project that takes several hours, this was bad news bears.  But I had my lovely besties to help me through, and we ended up doing a pretty awesome job! 

 

We diiiiiiid it.

The first and most ridiculous step was actually cutting the wine cork in order to put the place card into it.  We tried a utility knife, butter knife, steak knife and bread knife, and finally settled on the bread knife, but not before my hand slipped and I dug a newly sharpened Henckels blade deep into my thumb.  After a 15 minute break to stop the bleeding we resumed, but needless to say I was off cutting duty for the rest of the night.  And, I must have nicked a nerve or something because my thumb is still numb around the cut even 10 days later.  Weird.

 

Obbbbbbviously when you craft you need a big glass o'wine.

 

The next step was getting the wine cork to actually stand up and not roll over with the place card in it.  To keep it upright, we went on a rather pitiful run to Dollarama to locate some bling to glue to the cork.  We found some big fake gems and voila!  Cork stands upright.  We used E6000 which is the same glue I use for strassing, so I know those suckers will stick.

 

Troubleshooting like a boss....

Next was glittering the ends of the corks because, let's face it, I like glitter.  I bought one purple and one black container of fine loose glitter, mixed them together in a bowl (to tone down the purpleyness of it all), and the girls brushed the ends of the cork with white glue and pushed the cork into the bowl.  Et voila!

 

Note the bandaid from the aforementioned knife incident.

Tara made the actual place cards using her vast and impressive supply of scrapbooking tools including a cutter, and some other thing, and these sticky things, and something called cardstock, and glittery paper.  I don't ask questions.  So here is the finished product!  And then we will stick little coloured dots to the place cards so that the wait staff know who is eating what. 

 

Whee!  A DIY success!

It's very cool to see all the smaller details of the day coming together.  Here's a couple other things that have been going on this week!

We have the favor tags for our imperial cookie favors....

 

Awe!

My brother chose the dinner wines for our wedding, and naturally Eric and I had to taste them first, and they are AWESOME...

 

Red:  Hacienda Albae 'Seleccion' Cabernet Merlot 2007, Castillo, Spain

White:  Adi Badenhorst Secateurs Chenin Blanc 2013, Swartland, South Africa

 

 

My bro is also hard at work choosing the wines for the wine tasting during cocktail hour, so I hope everyone enjoys that!


And Eric and I have also decided on our late night fare.  This is obviously really important at a wedding, because it's been 4 hours since you've last eaten, you've burned off your dinner cutting a rug on the dance floor, and you're wasted so naturally you want to stuff your face.  We decided for our wedding that although we both love a good cheese sandwich on rye with the cheese on the outside, that we wanted something a little more upscale that the usual deli-style social food.  So our guests are going to be scarfing down none other than gourmet mini sliders with aged cheddar and onion confit, and mini poutine with smoked gouda and a herb glace!

 

 

Basically small cheeseburgers....

 

 

...and small fries and gravy with cheese.  Dee-licious.

We're so excited to share this day with all our friends and family.  Can't wait!!!


Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M

MC - Master of Coolness

Soooo, wedding planning has gotten a little crazy lately.  Our to-do list is a mile long and it seems like we have something to do every day!  It's fun, but my nerves are starting to get frazzled because it's hard not to feel like we've forgotten some giant detail.

Also, I plan on writing a very strongly worded letter to the makers of NyQuil for my emotional trauma that I have been subjected to due to the use of their product.  For some reason, NyQuil seems to give me nightmares.  Not just your average, being chased by a giant spider wearing clown makeup type of nightmares, where you wake up and laugh at their absurdity.  No, NyQuil seems to contain an ingredient that digs up your deepest, darkest fears and presents them to you in wave after wave of horrific nightmares, after which you wake up in a cold sweat and it takes serious time for you to realize that what just happened wasn't real.

 

NyQuil.  The nightime, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, scare-you-so-much-you-shit-the-bed-and-forget-about-being-sick medicine.

 

 

Why am I blogging about this you ask?  Well, because last night I had a nightmare that I went to try on my wedding dress a week before the wedding, and it did not fit.  It was a real nightmare, at the real place where I bought my dress, with the real people that helped me try it on, and my MOB and MOH looking on sadly as three people had to try and pin a piece of cardboard covered in satin between the gaping wide zipper of the dress to hide my cascading rolls of back fat.  Okay, so maybe that last part wasn't realistic, but I still woke up hyperventilating and then pitifully begged Eric to tell me I'm pretty.  They should have a fricken warning on that bottle for brides!

 

ANYWAY. 

 

In happier news, we have chosen our MC!  This esteemed position requires a person who is funny, creative, affable, responsible, and classy.  There is nothing worse than that sinking, awkward feeling you get when someone up in front of a crowd is rambling drunkenly on the mike, saying things that are not remotely funny and all you can do is let out a shifty-eyed nervous laugh and pray that it's over soon.  Our wedding is going to be an elegant affair, so it was important we didn't select someone who was going to make us feel mortified beyond belief at their embarrassing behavior, but also important to select someone that will keep the evening moving smoothly and set the tone of the evening, so that nobody thinks its appropriate to end up puking off their triple rye and passing out under a table.  You know who you are.

 

 

"Soooooo I sayssss totheguy I ssssays...."

 

 

In my opinion, nobody epitomizes taste and class like my brother Justin.  When we were talking about choosing an MC, Eric and I agreed that he would be a great choice.  Justin is a sommelier and has worked at some of Canada's top restaurants in Toronto, Vancouver, and the Okanagan Valley.  In short: he's kind of a big deal.

 

 

Right?



 

We know that Justin will be an excellent host and make our evening wonderful, but we're also taking advantage of his skill set in a big way.  So in addition to being the MC, we are very excited to share that we've also asked Justin to host a wine tasting during our cocktail hour, where he will choose an array of fabulous wines and impart some of his extensive knowledge on our guests as they enjoy their hors d'oeuvres. 

 

 

 

"And...pinky UP...."

 

 

Justin will also be choosing the dinner wine (no Naked Grape for our wedding guests) and he will be performing the famous sommelier demonstration for our toast, which is sabering a bottle of champagne with a big sword.  I've always thought this was the coolest.  Not only are you lopping off the entire top of the champagne bottle (glass, cork and all) but if you turn the sword at the slightest wrong angle, the champagne bottle shatters all over the place. 

 

 

 

 

Right.

 

 

 

Wrong.

 

 

 

 

Deadly weapon.

 

 

 

So I owe a big thanks to my brother for agreeing to do all this at our wedding.  It's so exciting to see all the details of our day coming together.  I truly think it's going to be such a great experience for all our guests!

 

 

 

Do I have the coolest bro or what.

 

 

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!

 

 

~M