Behind the Scenes

I haven't posted any crafty pics in a long time, so I thought I'd show you the inprogress pics of the favours I put together for Jane's bridal shower on Saturday. I had a ton of ideas, but after sourcing out supplies, containers and weighing in the amount of time I actually I had, it all came back to hurt me at about 1am Friday night. Let's just say that in the interest of working within a budget, I was a little ambitious with my DIY talents.

I used mod podge (or as I like to call it "modge podge") and gloss varnish to create coasters. I cut up scrapbook paper to cover some cork coasters I got at IKEA. This was a last minute inspired plan that ended up being emergency trip #1 on Wednesday night. My original idea was to SEW some fabric coasters but seeing as I still don't know how to use my sewing machine, these were my back up. It's a good thing they worked out too since I have difficulty enough drawing a straight line and cutting along a line... sewing a straight line would have been a whole other exercise in frustration.

*my handy bathroom floor*

*drying and waiting to have it's final coat of varnish*

Since I'm always looking for an excuse to use my button machine, I decided that I was going to make magnets for Jane's guests. I didn't have all the magnet parts that I needed so that was emergency trip #2 down to Babble to pick up supplies on Thursday night. Ninety magnets later...

The colour theme was pink & brown. Just FYI to future brides, not a whole lot of pink & brown out there that won't remind you of neopolitan ice cream. I had to incorporate other colours.

Churning out the 1" magnets was a lot of fun. I was partially engrossed by watching Mission Impossible: 3 and almost punched out my index finger, but other than that, it was good times.

These magnets got hotglued onto cardstock. (Thanks to a tip from TheBon!)The tag reads:

"Thank you for coming! Love is brewing... See you on November 3, 2007"

The theme of the shower was "High Tea". Get it? Brewing?

So even with a paper cutter and borders drawn onto the paper itself, I can't cut a straight line. Note the rounded corners. The rounded corners were my saviour. It gave the whole tag an illusion of being cut on a straight line. I LOVE my rounded corner punch. LOVE. IT. (Btw, Risto got roped into glueing the tags together. This is what he did after coming home from the movies. MUAHAHAHAHA)

And here is the sea of favours put together. The tags were hole punched at the top and got threaded with a wire. At the end of the wire, I glued pink hearts (which Risto spent a whole evening punching out for me in a manly way) that were stamped with the letters "J" and "L".

The pouches hold some organic tea bags and I also added chocolates to each mug. The whole sch-bang with the coasters didn't get assembled until the next day because I had to transport everything to Oakville.

FYI #2 to future brides... pink and brown seem to be pretty hot colours in Toronto. Only two out of the four stores I went to had the brown mugs. Now, none of them do. And there aren't any pink ones that don't say "oink" on them. I wasn't originally going to use white in the favour, but there just weren't enough pink pouches. There was plenty of purple though. Or even green. And do you know just how many shades of pink there are? Lots. So if you have your hopes set on matching your pink cardstock to your pink tablecloth... forget it. Use your energy for something else.

Typically, I brought my camera to the shower, but forgot the battery. So I'll try to snag some pics off of Jane pretty soon. The set up for the shower was just gorgeous.

So there you have it... my own little sweat shoppe. If you find this unimpressive, I will eat you.