Crafts from our wedding!

We're recently back from our honeymoon to Italy & Turkey (another post on that soon!) but I wanted to share some of the wedding stuff. I made so many crafts and I thought some of them might be fun to make just for your home. All the photos in this post by the amazing Sargeant Photography :)

Here are the little foxes cake toppers! One of my favorite projects, fun to do and I love how they turned out. My sister made that beautiful strawberry cake!!

I made these pompoms out of felt, fabric, paper, wire and floral tape. First I used this tutorial to make the pompom flower out of felt (except I cheated and just used hot glue instead of sewing it.. you know, wedding planning is time consuming and hot glue is fast!) and then I cut out leaf shapes out of fabric with a paper backing and sewed them together so it would have a little more strength. You can curl the paper a bit and it will hold the shape. Then I just attached everything together with wire and wrapped floral tape over all the wire. Done!

We made 3 of these fabric garlands -- one for behind the dessert table, one for the photobooth background, and one as a ceremony backdrop.

I made my bridesmaids little animal necklaces and I chose each animal based on their pets or animals they love or just animals that remind me of them.

Me & my friend Heather made the ring bear head!! We did papier mache for the nose, and I bought a bear scarf/hat thing on amazon and cut it up to use for the head part. This was one of the most fun projects I did because it was so fun to work with her. I will definitely be doing a weekly artist featuring her work because she's super talented!

Here's the bouttonieres for the guys.

I also made these little poms to go on cakes & pies at our dessert table.

My bridesmaids helped me with the flower arrangements, they are yellow & pink ranunculus flowers with pepperberry greens, craspedia flowers, and some branches from a tree outside my house.

Here are the menus, programs and postcards that we used as escort cards.

I had a year and a half to do all the crafting, so it wasn't quite as crazy busy as it seems :) I wanted to make a bunch more things, but I ran out of time. I had such a great time crafting stuff... maybe I'll open another etsy store for this kind of thing!

New Influenster Freebies!

From influenster.com this week some members were lucky and got this set of 3 full size Palmolive dish soaps for free. I love free stuff. As a designer, I have to say it's a big improvement on packaging! So much better than those bloated weird shaped bottles and these will actually look good in my house (as some of you may know I choose most things in my house based on packaging... yeah, I admit it)

The scents are Lime Basil, Lemon Thyme, and Ginger White Tea. I think Ginger White Tea is my favorite cause I love ginger, but they all smell good.

I don't know if it's eco friendly or not, it says "naturally inspired" but I'm not sure what that means. I usually tend to buy either eco friendly cleaning products or the basics to make them myself, and so I don't know where this product stands as far as that goes.

As far as effectiveness, it works well! Just the same as the other types of palmolive dish soaps pretty much. A little goes a long way, I've been using them for weeks and they still look pretty full. Overall, I'm happy. :) If you want an influenster invite, comment with your email and I'll send you one.

#PalmoliveFreshInfusions @Influenster  |  This product was received complimentary from Influenster.

[Weekly Artist] Stacie Bloomfield

Love these adorable works by Stacie Bloomfield, especially her animal illustrations. They're so cute and I love the detail in the fur.

Eco-Emi October Box

I recently subscribed to Eco-Emi, a monthly box of organic, eco goodies delivered to your house. It's been a really fun way to get used to and more knowledgeable about green products and living in a more sustainably. I look forward to my eco box every month but it also has increased my general awareness about how to live in a more environmentally friendly way. It's really helped me start thinking that way and I've even started composting and trying to grow some veggies (although I'm terrible at trying to grow plants).

This month's Halloween themed box was really fun and I enjoyed this week's picks! Especially the organic smoothie fruit snack (But I don't need to tell you that, with my sweet tooth!) and they're vegan and made with real fruit juice and no hi fructose corn syrup. And good! The granola looks good too, I haven't tried it yet but I'm looking forward to it. Yep it's always about the food for me :P I also tried the curl defining cream this morning and it worked pretty well, and smelled great, kind of like lime & coconut. yum! Also really excited to try the cleaning concentrate. It says that one 16oz bottle makes 48 gallons (!) of cleaner. My house is an absolute mess right now; wedding planning and then our honeymoon has meant absolutely no time to clean the house! Now that I'm back I've just started to give it a good cleaning and I've been trying to donate lots of stuff I don't want to goodwill. It's starting to look more normal, but I'm planning on trying the new cleaner this evening.

Istanbul Treats...

We just recently got back from Turkey & Italy for our honeymoon (more photos coming soon!) but in the meantime, since I've got sweets on my mind due to all this Halloween stuff, I thought I'd post some of the delicious treats we enjoyed in Istanbul!

Composting Fun!

I got a composter from a good friend as a wedding gift and we've been composting everything! It feels great to do something so good for the planet and it's been great for my side yard plants. 

This is my composter and it's so small it fits under the kitchen sink and it doesn't smell at all until you open it to add more compost. You can put almost anything in it... newspaper, hair, coffee grounds, eggshells, whatever. It's been fun watching it break down. I meant to get a composter so long ago and now that I know how easy and not smelly it is, I regret not doing it sooner!