Lower North Fork Fire

The Lower North Fork Fire is threatening the home I grew up. We have evacuated animals and taken a lot of sentimental items out. Now we sit and wait, and hope that firefighters can contain the fire before it reaches home. Not only is this my favorite place on earth, but it's also where we are planning to have the wedding.

In an attempt to get my mind off this, I've decided to share a little bit. I'm also avoiding real work. Mostly because I've gotten about 6 hours of sleep and I don't have brain capacity to think anymore.

Talked to my future mother about the points in the last post, got a little snarky to get it out of us and decided that it's best to just go with what I want. She's such a doll! Most people I start in on the ex about and they roll their eyes. She gets up there with me. It doesn't last long, but it feels good to just get the frustration with that horrible girl out. It was also nice to find out the cake topper that they had was picked out by his mom, since I was worried that the one Mr. GL and I had picked out was too similar. He did tell me that he wasn't surprised that some of the things that we were doing were the same, after all he did pick us...I gave him a nasty look. I'm much better than her!

Well, back to the subject at hand...the wedding! The ceremony is almost done, I have the wording and it's lovely. Just waiting for Mr. GL to put some words down for when we exchange rings. After what seemed like forever, I have finished all of the Kusumada balls for the pews. I had a little help from the big girl, but mostly done by myself. I am considering making more so that I have two for each pew, but I'll have to see how ambitious I really am. I also added sparkly fun and cheap beads to the center of the flowers. I wanted pearls, but Walmart was out. And of course in Laramie, it's either order in or deal with what you have. The seem to catch the light so I'm sure it will be nice.

I have a wonderful neighbor whose dad bought a routing machine for wood! I've asked him to make me a few signs for the wedding...I can't wait to see how they will turn out.

The reception decoration is going well. I ordered some very cute and very cheap glass photo coasters. I had considered giving only one per person, but they are so cheap we are giving out a set of two. We put a picture of us in one coaster and then a little printed "thank you" in the other and then put them back in the plastic box they came in. Originally I wrapped them with the purple and green raffia and put a paper rose around each bow. They ended up like this...

Well that's nice, but I decided that I would rather actually wrap them with kraft paper. The result was very nice,

I plan on adding a tag of some sort and those will be all done!

I've also been working on getting the table decorations done. It turns out that my original idea of vases with orchids in water with a floating candle on top would be entirely to expensive, but I found this on pinterest. Oh yeah, cheap and very pretty. So I'm now most of the way through making them! There will be a mix of purple and green on the tables. All the big flowers are made, time for the small flowers. All for about $75. I also found very cute square vases at IKEA for very cheap (about $130 for all) that will go in the center with sand and a candle. In lieu of the fire though, we will be going for flameless candles.



Invitations are ready to be sent out as soon as I buy stamps!
I started off with printing envelopes, but decided to call upon my calligraphy skills in the end and hand address the rest of the envelopes.



I will have to take a picture of the inserts, they are pretty cool. I already gave my dearest neighbor who helped inspire the design her invite and she refused to give me the RSVP card back because she wanted to keep it. Mission accomplished!

Jewelry is also done, here is what I ended up making for mine.


Well that's about all the crappy cell phone pics I have for now. I really should get the big camera out to take pics, but I've been entirely to lazy when the cell is so easy to get pictures online with!

As I update, the fire doesn't seem to be moving any closer to home. Let's pray that the wonderful firefighters can get containment soon and no one else loses their homes or lives!

Second time epiphany

Well the wedding crafting is in full force. I spent a  good portion of the weekend putting together the favors with a little break to go ride the sled and drink some beer.

Thursday night I decided that I didn't want to do anything that Mr. Get lucky did in his first wedding so I convinced him that I needed full access to the pictures and files from his first wedding which we will call from here on out the practice wedding.  Being the guy he is, he gave them to me. I spent a good portion of the evening and Friday looking through them and making snarky remarks. Bad idea. I was starting to feel crappy about the whole thing.

That was nothing though. This morning I decided to tackle the ceremony wording. I picked a few readings including one from a favorite book, The Prophet. Since I like to be original we have decided on a hand fasting ceremony as well. I opened the practice wedding ceremony wording to make sure she never read The Prophet and it wasn't included. Well, good news there. As I read a little further my heart sank. Some of the wording that I had found for the hand fasting ceremony was repeated very closely. Well crap. I had to notice that what I found and I liked so much was about partnership while her rendition was all about how wonderful she was. Typical.
I showed it to Mr. Get Lucky and he shrugged, "well the context is different." Thanks honey. After calling all of my friends and whining I got some of the best advice I've heard. Don't worry about her and do what makes you happy. I've been so concerned about bot repeating anything that was in the practice wedding and avoiding asking Mr. Get Lucky as to avoid him thinking about it as well as having my ideas rejected without a reason why. But they are right. This is our wedding and we can't avoid everything. While I don't want to remind him of the past it might happen. While I don't want to repeat what she did it might be inevitable.

What I have to remind myself is that this is the real wedding. I won't ever tell him that I want a divorce in a pathetic attempt to....uh, "save the relationship." I refuse to be that stuck on myself. I will do everything in my power to stay together forever.

Ok, time for a little snark though. I will be the bride with a beer pong table but I won't take pictures of us kissing half in the portal potties as a posed picture. I don't think my photographer would even agree to that. I will not have "artistic" pictures that involve my deodorant or me making a fishy face.
I will not make the same pose forehead to forehead to every member of my wedding party. My pictures won't have my acne scars visible, oh wait I don't have acne scars. My photos won't have red eye. My bridesmaids will not be in prom dresses. I will not force Mr. Get Lucky to read a full page of vows I've written for him about how much he loves me. My wedding will not look like Toucan Sam threw up. I will not have cupcakes that look like they came from Walmart. I will not make my future sister in law be my personal attendant and treat her like a slave. I will not hire a bartender to get my future in laws drunk so they will look like asses in front of our friends and family (especially when they paid for the wedding).  I will not make it all about me, but I will make it all about us. I will be unique and the wedding will be visually stunning.

Most importantly I will never take my future husband for granted and I WILL love him for all that he is.

Decorating a wedding

I some how thoughtd that decorating a wedding myself would cheaper. Just like I thought that doing my own invites would be cheaper. It's not. Why? Cause just when you think that you have it perfect, you see one more element that needs to be added. Case in point, I just decided that my outer envelopes will need liners and my inner envelopes need paper bands, but I will get to that later.

As thought how to decorate the aisle for the ceremony I dreaded the cost of flowers at the end of each row of chairs. I saw this picture on theknot.com....

Lanterns! What a great idea! But lanterns are still a couple dollars a piece...I'm sure I could do better than that! A few months ago I downloaded an app for kusudama origami for big girl since she has discovered oragami and loves it. Then I ran into a blog post where a bride to be had used these for pew decorations.There are a lot of variations, of these flower balls and some very stunning, but finding instructions was all too difficult so I'm staying with the traditional ball. You can find some nice instructions here. I got out my stock of purple and green scrap book paper, made a bunch of 3" paper squares thinking that I would be well on my way to the 16 balls I think I will need. Not even close. I have enough for about 5. So I started searching for origami papers to make it out of. Wrong again, too expensive for the amount of paper that I needed. My next bright idea was to go through all of my old magazines and pull out any pages that had the same colors. Brilliant! That got me another two balls. Crap. Why didn't I think of it sooner....wrapping paper! Of course! It comes in every color and design imaginable, it's relatively cheap and there is usually a lot of it.

If you are thinking about kusudama balls for decorating keep a couple things in mind.

• They are time consuming. I can do one ball in about two hours.
• They take an insane amount of paper. I made mine with 3x3 pieces for each petal. They take 60 petals to make a ball. Do the math.

I'm thinking of doing the balls and a lantern on each end chair for a bit of overkill. Or just to annoy the guests sitting in that chair.

Of course buying 100' roll of wrapping paper in our wedding colors also gave me another idea, envelope liners and paper bands! Work continues on getting them together. I already have to buy more ink for the printer (magenta went first).

Another piece of advice, make sure you spell check your invites and all inserts. I did mine in photoshop and didn't spell check. The first thirty direction cards I printed I spelled south with an "r". Whoops. So I whited out the R and figure I will send those to people who are getting the courtesy invite but won't actually come.

I've also decided that printing our return address as well as the RSVP card envelopes will be too much of a pain, so I decided to create a stamp. Now the stamps that the paper source have are undeniably cute, but also too small and also expensive. But it turns out that you can have a stamp created from a jpg file very affordably. I chose a 2 7/8 by 1 3/8 self inking stamp for $18 from thestampmaker.com. I created the design I wanted in photoshop, uploaded it and tada! For $10 less than the cost of the papersource stamps, I have one that is large enough to stamp our address on the RSVP cards and will work for return addresses as well. It's also something that I can have Mr. Get Lucky do. As good as he is about all this wedding planning and DIY, I would love a little more help.


Well that is what I have for today! Or at least this morning...

OMG! So Flipping Cool!

After hand addressing 130 some save the date envelopes I'm pretty sure of three things: 1) I really need to lighten my grip on the pen; 2) I have carpal tunnel; and 3) I'm definitely printing the envelopes for the formal invitations. While theknot.com says that it is absolutely unacceptable to let your computer do the work, Martha Stewart says that it's okay. I'll trust Martha on this one, given she's the queen of all things DIY AND Etiquette. I'm sure she didn't write the article, but I digress.....

The save the date cards had a bit of a snafu; according to them I'm getting married. 7/14/201. Get your time machines out peeps. I'm pretty sure that I just missed the full date not fitting in the allotted spot when I created them on Walmart's photo page (yes I'm cheap). I really didn't want to wait the 2 weeks it would take to return them and have them reprinted, so I sucked it up, found an old scratch board pen and scratched the two in the photo paper. Wouldn't you know that after 150 I could scratch out a fairly convincing two? This is the second F-up I've made; the first being that I ordered text paper, not card stock to make the pocket folds out of. I decided that would be okay since it just reduces the weight of the invite and hopefully the postage as well.

Back to the invites I think I got the wording down, the directions return cards and so on together. All I needed was a nice map. Now I could spend 4 hours on photoshop trying to make one, I could pay someone on Etsy a ridiculous amount to make me one...or I could do a little internet searching. Since I'm both lazy and cheap, I chose the latter and found this little bit of awesomeness....

Which gave me an awesome map, that I will choose not to share less my three anonymous readers decide to crash my wedding (email me, and get a formal invite at least!) Hopefully the link took you to the right place, but here is a mock one that I created so you can see how cool this is.




In the meantime I wait for postage to arrive so I can send out save the dates and the rest of the fun stuff for the invites so I can finally get a full mock up to weigh, send to myself and of course take pics of it for here.

What mistakes did you make when planning for the wedding? What cool tools did you find to help you along?

Fiberwhore is getting Hitched!

Second time is the charm right? Oh it's third? Well we are going with second....

So for the next six or so months wedding me will be taking over the blog! Mostly so I can bitch and moan about how ridiculous weddings are of course. And of course it will be a mostly DIY wedding so hopefully I can add something useful to this as well.

I've already gotten a jump start on the planning. The first thing to get reserved was the photographer of course. I am choosing Volkel Image. He did a friends wedding and the pictures were fantastic! Pricey but so is the wedding and what use is all that money spent if you don't have great pictures to help remember it by?

I'm getting a head start on invites, decorations, lighting and rentals. What I'm not so excited about doing is finding a DJ, baker, caterer, florist and officiant.

So far one of the greatest challenges has been addresses. Getting them how to write them, FRUSTRATING!!!!!!! So I stole the bright idea from a friend who had done the same, to put an event invite up on Facebook to get friends and families to send us addresses since I have none of them...

If you are thinking about doing this DON'T. Worse idea ever. While about 20 of the people who I added to the "Event" bothered reading the event title and description and actually sent me their addresses, the rest either didn't respond at all or thought that it was the actual invitation to the wedding! GRRRRR!

The problem is that sometimes you want to send an invite to people even though you know there isn't a snow balls chance in hell that they will make it. It's more than irritating having someone write on your event wall, "JACK AND JULIE SMITH WILL NOT BE ATTENDING!!!!!" Names were changed but yes, that happened. In all caps. Thanks for being subtle Julie.

So I've deleted those who already given me their address and those who decided they will not attend. I'll send out one more message and then the whole disaster will be going away.

Thankfully my very lovely sister- and mother-in-law to be got together the huge list of addresses from his family. It was 50 some people, and I'm very sorry but second cousins aren't getting the automatic invite. There are a few that he is close enough to that they bothered to give me their address so they will get an invite.

In the end I decided to go through the list of originally invited, have Mr. Get Lucky do the same and sent them individual messages asking for their address which worked much better.

Now I have a list of 125 households and such that need to be sent invites. I know that about half of those won't attend. After all this is a second marriage for the both of us, his family lives 1000 miles away and they all attended the first one. I'm sure that most of my side should attend since my first wedding was more of like a backyard picnic and dinner for our immediate family (all 10 of us including the officiant). So I designed the invites and realized that the postage cost more than the invites! I have to fight the urge to cheap and not put a RSVP card in with the invites going to people I know won't come. Or to put the RSVP card in but not stamp it..... Also it is a good thing that I have til May to get these things put together as well.

So there is now way I'm paying someone to do Calligraphy on 125 envelopes, inner envelopes, return card envelopes, etc. Not when there are enough pretty fonts out there that I can run them through my printer and have a nice result. But now I'm trying to figure out exactly what the proper way is to write so and so's name. Should I address it to Mr. and Mrs. Jack Smith? Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jane Smith? Mr. and Mrs. Jack and Jane Smith? I'm supposed to include children's names on the inner envelope but even Mr. Get Lucky doesn't know all their names. Do I spell out Northeast or abreaviate NE, do I right out Sixtyfifth Street? It gets a little long when I have to write 122345 Sixty fifth Avenue Northeast Number 23456. Why is there no consensus on the right way to do it?

So what is your biggest invitation pet peeve?

New fun easy and quick hat

Kind of improvised the first version of this hat. You know cast on a number of stitches that I think will fit my head using some left over sock yarn that I hand spun doubled up. I figured out the math later. The fist version was ok, but I wrote up the pattern quick and figured I would share.

Materials
Size 3 circular needles or double points
Couple hundred? Yards of sport weight or light worsted yarn
Gauge...not real sure.

Cast on 80 stitches using a stretchy cast on. I like long tail. Join making sure not to twist. Insert marker at the beginning of the row. P one round. Start knit one below pattern:
Row1: k1, k1b to end
Row 2: p1b, p1 to end

Here is a link to a pattern...not exactly the same but hopefully it gets you the idea. Instead of using two colors you use one and because it is knit in the round you can't knit both rows, but instead have to purl as stated above.

Continue for 7" ending on a row 2. Begin decrease rows as follows:
Row 1: k1, k1b, k1, S2KP, k1, k1b (10 times)
Row 2: p1b, p1 to end
Row 3: k1, ssk, k1b, k2tog (10 times)
Row 4: p1b, p1, sl1, p1 (10 times)
Row 5: k1, S2KP (10 times)
Row 6: p1b, p1 to end
Row 7: k1, S2KP (5 times)
Break yarn and thread through remaining stitches pull tight.

Stitch abbreviations:
K1b - knit one below
P1b- purl 1 below
Ssk- insert needle as if to k1b, but slip the stitches instead, knit one, transfer slipped stitches over like a regular ssk.
S2KP—slip two tog, knit one, pass two slip stitches over

Wow it's been so long....

Oh how life has changed since my last post!! I was messing around on Ravelry (no they didn't let me back on, but Alters are wonderful things :).... Let me be perfectly clear, the only reason why I was on was to find some pattern ideas. I think it's time I picked up the needles again and more often. Of course I got a little curious to see if any one was knitting my patterns that I published on there and holy hell they are. There are even forum links! Well hot damn! I feel bad, it looks as if it had been abandoned :(.

As I reflect on the whole Ravelry drama, the ban wagon and what not, the only thing I miss about Ravelry is my presence as a designer. I don't miss the forum all that much. But what I did do was build my presence in the knitting community and I do miss that very much.

Well I haven't done a whole lot lately. I made a coat for a now ex friend's baby boy....



I made one glove.....


Been doing a little leather work....




a few socks at Christmas and a little of this and that, but not much.