Ring Toss!

Who doesn't love random yard games!  We are lucky that our venue already had several that we could borrow but we decided that we wanted a few more to add to the fun during the cocktail hour and for those who want a break from the dance party.  After searching on pintrest and drinking lots of wine, we made a ring toss game.  I know, so hard to try and make this that we had to drink 12 bottles of wine.

I wanted to use things that we already had or if we had to buy, would use again.  So 12 bottles of wine were easy for the something we already had.  I purchased and stained a milk crate that we bought from Lowes for about $10. Spray painted the wine bottles in gold glitter.  Bought and wrapped 12- 3" rings.

Supplies:

• 12 wine bottles (you could always use pop bottles if you want smaller bottles)
• 1 milk crate
• 12- 3" rings
• scrap fabric
• spray paint
• stain for crate

Directions for bottles

1. Drink enough wine for the number of bottles you need.  We needed 17 so that was fun. ☺

2. Spray paint the bottles in a fun color. We used gold glitter and were sure to be outside.  When we looked from our window outside, it looked like we had gold in the yard for a couple of weeks.  

Directions for crate:
1. We bought a pre-made milk crate for about $10 at our local hardware store. I have seen them at several craft stores as well. I do not suggest making your own for the level of detail that you can get vs the price on the pre-made crates.
2. Stain the color of your choice.  As with staining anything, you will want to apply the stain in thin coats and wipe off the extra stain between applications. I have found typically 2 coats of stain gets me the color of wood that I want.  As you can see, my fiance at least pretended he was enjoying what he was doing.

Directions for rings:

1. Cut the fabric scraps into about 1" wide strips and long enough to cover the whole ring.  

2. Adhere the fabric to the ring; I used a glue gun but really any type of adhesive should work perfectly.   

After all said and done, the ring toss turned out pretty good. I think everyone enjoyed playing at the wedding and we now have a yard game for the house.

Flower Girl Wands

My fiance has the cutest little nieces ever!  I decided I wanted them to do something other than the normal throwing of flowers when they walk down the isle (hopefully they will make it all the way).  Thank you pintrest for the inspirations!  We do not have specific colors for the wedding other than the bridesmaids and groomsmen have lapis (purple) dresses or ties.  Other than that, I wanted bright, fun colors.

For the flower girl wand, there were so many options and ways we could do it that it was a bit overwhelming.  I decided that I did want an actual flower on the wand with some fun ribbon streamers and little bells so that you could hear them coming.

Supplies:
Ribbon- whatever and however much you would like
12" dowl rods
Glue gun
small bells
white floral tape
Pretty Flowers

I would suggest to glue the flowers on the rob and then add the floral tape to ensure the flowers are secure.

Wrap the wood stick with ribbon and... tada! You have some super cute flower girl wands.  Our nieces loved them.  And then of course they got to take them home to play with later.

Don't we have some of the cutest little flower girls.

Photo credit: RachelMyersPhotography

Table "numbers"

My fiance and I LOVE to travel.  Instead of the normal table numbers, we decided to have tables with places that we have been together.  I needed something to hold the papers showing the locations of where people are going to be sitting.  Wine corks! (If you have seen the ring toss post, then you know we drink wine.)

The base of our picture holders needed to be substantial enough to have a wire going about 8-10" high that will hold the locations.

Using 8 wine corks per number stand, we created our table number holders.

I decided that the needed a little extra color, so I added ribbon and then some cute little flowers to each of them.

And tada! Super cute table number holders. This picture is from the wedding and all I can say is AMAZING! (And if you have not already figured it out, we had by far the best photographer wife and husband team!)

Photo credit: RachelMyersPhotography

Marry Me!

I have to have the most thoughtful and best fiance ever!  He knows I like to do "crafty" things and when I saw wall hangings made out of license plates, we made one representing my college.  Baylor Bears!

One night, he tells me he wants help making one for his college so I figured, sure, we made one we can do another one- easy enough.  So he tells me to lay out the letters, we will take measurements and then make it.  He went to Missouri University- the Tigers- MIZZOU for short.  I say this, because other than the M, I kept asking, what are we spelling again? Very confused but not completely usual for me either.

Well, come to find out, we were not spelling anything to do with his school- he proposed!

Now to actually make the sign from the proposal because we do want it our wedding.

Wedding Invitations

There are so many things to do in order to get ready for a wedding. Find an officiant, make a list of who you are going to invite, and the invitations so you actually have people there!  Kind of an important detail to not over look- you need those witnesses.

My fiance and I looked at several websites known for wedding invitations and while those graphic designers know what they are doing, none of the designs really struck us as something we really wanted.  We wanted something elegant but knew we were not going to pay $5+ per invitation for what we wanted.  So came our crazy idea- we create them!  After lots of trial and error, we finally came up with a design we absolutely love!

We used a wax seal, tissue paper, and corner cut outs for a "fancy" invitation.  We even went all out with the envelope and included a liner in there.

Items Needed:
- Invite design (we took to our local print shop and had it printed on 110 lbs card stock in a cream/ivory color)
- Corner punch- you can pick anything and can find them on amazon or any craft store such as Hobby Lobby
- Paper cutter- You can have the print shop cut the invitations to size but with as many as we had and doing trial and errors at home, we decided to spend the $40 on a pretty nice new paper cutter. I tried my scrap-booking cutter at first but quickly realized that it is not meant for cutting that many invitations and the blade dulled far to quickly.
- Wax stamp (we bought ours off of Amazon for less than $10 shipped)
- Wax- we tried several different ways to actually put the wax on the ribbon and found that for as many as we were making, the most efficient way was using the wax sticks.  They use the small glue guns which you can buy for less than $10 amazon or target.  The wax we purchased from Oriental Trading under their wedding part of the website.
-Glue gun (small and regular)- we used the small glue gun for the wax and the regular glue gun to hold the ribbon together.  If you do not have a large glue gun or two different glue guns, no big deal it will likely just take a little longer. I would suggest doing all of one part and then moving to the next step if you only have one glue gun to not waste any of the sticks.
- Clear glue sticks
- Ribbon- the silver was 1.5" wide and the purple was 1" wide.  We experimented with several different widths and went with those as the wax looked great and did not spill over to the actual invitation

Directions:

The invitations was the easy part once we figured out our design.  We printed them to a 5x7 size.  I would suggest investing n a nice paper cutter for a very clean and crisp edge.  The print shop will usually also cut these for you as well for little to no charge but I am kind of OCD and wanted complete control.  If it got messed up at all, it was only my doing.

After the invitations are cut, sit down in front of a good TV show or movie and start punching out your corners!  Make sure you have a trash can near by for all of the scraps- you will have lots of them.

     

Now onto the ribbon and wax seals...

I used a 5x7 card board as my template to make all of the wax and ribbons.  Each ribbon was cut 11" in length- just enough to overlap but not waste the ribbon.

We used a regular glue gun to adhere the ribbon on the back side.  We did an assembly line version and had several of the ribbon backs being glued and drying while the front was getting the wax put on.  Once you get the hang of it, it actually went fairly quickly.

Next, we added a small dab of the colored wax (not to exceed the size of the smaller ribbon) to the front of the ribbon band and quickly placed the wax seal on the wax.  I would suggest letting it dry for at least a minute and then in between each time using it, I would also suggest putting it on ice.  When we did not let the stamp cool, it progressively took longer for the wax to set.  If you find that the seal starts to stick to the wax to much, we took a paper towel with a little bit of coconut oil (the only oil we had in the house) and rubbed it on the metal part.  This helped to keep it coming on and off of the wax much easier.  I found reapplying the oil every 6-8 seemed to work the best.

 

   

For the tissue paper, we cut it ever so slightly smaller than the 5x7 invitations.  This was to prevent the paper from getting to crunched when inserting it into the envelope.  

We really liked the way the invites ended up turning out.  My sister even made the best RSVP cards for us! Way more on the fun side than the fancy and formal invitations.  (The invitations in the wedding I think are going to be the most formal part of the whole day)