wedding sneak peek.

A sneak peek of our wedding photos! I'll be doing a post with wedding photos soon. I have them all in hand (thanks Hollie!!!), but I'm pretty darn busy right now. So one day when I want to spend some time procrastinating in other areas of my life, I'll do a big wedding post. Or maybe a few little wedding posts. SOON!

Also, my camera battery charger is AWOL. I need to track it down soon so I can take photos for other blog posts! I might have to supplement with iphone photos.

we're married!!!

It was an amazing day!! Actually the best day ever. Absolutely perfect. We were so happy to spend it with wonderful friends and family, the food was delicious, everyone was amazing, and we had a super fun dance party to wrap it all up!!! Yay marriage!

I've barely seen any pictures of the actual day, but I do have these photos from the day before when we decorated the barn. All those flowers are from my mum's garden, my aunt's garden, and a very generous amish lady's garden! The milk glass is a collection of mine, my mum's and my aunt's. Oh, and I made my own wedding cake! Mildly stressful, but totally worth it.

Now we're off to my aunt and uncle's cottage in New Brunswick for a week! Solar and propane powered, accessed only by a fire road. Should be awesome!!

I can't wait to see the pictures that Hollie took!

holy poop, it's almost wedding time.

What have I been up to? Oh, you know, just planning and executing the majority of the wedding details in the week before the big day. Cause it's on Saturday.

busy bees!

A couple of week ago, the lovely ladies of The Beehive got together and arranged a beeswax candle making party for me in honour my upcoming wedding! Candles for the tables at the wedding! So thoughtful and sweet. They got two huge chunks of beeswax from the Dundas farmer's market, candle making supplies (wicking etc), and mason jars, and we all gathered together at Hollie's house for the fun event.

The hardest part of the entire process was breaking up the huge blocks of wax. They'd been in Jenna's car for a day or two, and had gotten soft and sticky. First we tried using a handsaw to cut it up - a complete fail as the teeth gummed up immediately. Then Mike came to the rescue with a chisel and hammer, which worked much better. We eventually discovered that freezing the beeswax so that it's hard and brittle is the best way to prepare it before trying to break it up.

Big chunks of beeswax! Smaller chunks work best though, so we broke these ones down even more.

Hollie's cat Tanooki was intrigued by the whole process. At least he was until he fell asleep.

For each jar we tied the wicking to a pipe cleaner to keep it centred and taut.

(Oh, and a Beehive meeting isn't complete without tasty drinks and food! Especially when they're custard tarts from Ola's and strawberry lemonade made by Hollie!)

It took the whole evening to get most of the jars half full (melting wax is a slow process), so we finished the second half at our meeting the following week.

I'm super excited to have these adorable candles on the tables at the wedding. They smell so good, are super cute, and match all my other yellow decor. Thanks girls, you're the best!

cheese louise.

Sampling cheese: one of my new favourite wedding related activities.

in the garden

Our first summer with a vegetable garden, and I'm loving it.



Sweet potato plant, hanging out in a pot. I didn't trust it to not sprawl all over the garden.



Jalapenos.



I can't wait until these tomatoes are ready to eat! Since this heat wave started I've been craving toasted tomato sandwiches. So simple, so delicious.



Lettuce.




Chard.



An onion flower, about to bloom.



The neighbour's grape vine is trespassing quite significantly on our backyard. If those grapes turn out extra tasty, I won't mind.



And the one lone craspedia bloom from my patch of 30ish craspedia plants. I seriously doubt they'll be ready for the wedding, so we ordered some in at a flower shop.

Last night I was in Thornhill meeting with my mum and her florist friend to discuss flowers. There aren't quite as many zinnias as we'd hoped, so we'll be using almost anything that's pretty from my mum's garden in addition to the planned flowers. My aunt Cheryl kindly grew some zinnias too (hopefully they're doing alright), and is also offering anything from her garden (e.g. asters, crocosmia, daisies). So that's great! I'm both nervous and excited to see how the flowers turn out. Only 10 more days!!!!

wedding favours

We're almost done making the favours for our wedding. I had a few different ideas for gifts, but ultimately decided to go with homemade strawberry jam. I've made it once by myself before, and many times with my mum in the past, and it's pretty easy. Plus if you pick your own strawberries and use a smaller jar (we used 125mL), it's not too pricey. It requires a fair amount of time though, so it's good if you can get help with the strawberry picking, hulling, and crushing.

There are lots of different recipes for jam, but we keep it pretty simple. We use Certo for the pectin, specifically Certo Light. It doesn't have any weird ingredients like aspartame, which many "light" products do. It just has a higher acidity in it which allows you to use less sugar in the recipe (4.5 cups instead of 6) and results in a more pure strawberry flavour and a brighter colour.

It's so easy. You just crush the berries, bring them to a boil with 1/4 cup of the sugar and the pectin. Then you add the rest of the sugar, bring it to a boil again and let it boil for 1 min, then take it off the heat and stir it and remove the "scum" (the foamy light coloured stuff - it's delicious) for 5 minutes, then put it in your sterilized jars. Et voila! Jam.

Now I just need to make one more batch and put their cute little fabric hats and bows on.

my weekend, by my iphone.

Saturday: slept in a tad too late, then as we left the house in search of garage sales it started pouring rain. Went to the Ottawa Street market in the torrential downpour and bought some rhubarb, asparagus, and carrots. Then we went to Detour for lunch. Mmm, macaroni and cheese, homemade burger, raspberry lemonade, then some coffee and this delicious carrot cake for dessert.



Buskerfest was happening in Dundas while we were there, so we watched some performances. Then we came home, installed a new clothesline (yay!), and had a delicious cobb salad for dinner that included freshly picked lettuce from our garden. The first thing we've eaten from it this summer! Yum.



Sunday: co-ed bridal shower at my aunt and uncles' house in Oakville. My uncle John collects vintage cars (he has around 12, mostly Citroëns). He decorated his Morris Minor for the shower, it was tres cute. My aunt Linda made tons of delicious food, and Erick's family met my medium sized extended family. Very nice.

I should really make more of an effort to bring my camera around with me on weekends. Iphone photos will have to suffice this time.

wedding invitation prototypes!

Over the past week I've been trying to get the design of our wedding invitations figured out. My first sketch was the image on the left. I scanned it into my computer and fiddled around with it in photoshop. I did a few more doodles and played with those too. I'm definitely not a pro at this (really, I barely know what I'm doing), but it was fun to play around with the colours, layout, etc.




These are by no means finished pieces, but one of them might resemble our final invitations! Who knows! Cause I don't. The end results might look completely different. I'll likely fiddle around some more. But I MUST FINISH SOON! We're going to Halifax for a friend's wedding on Friday, and are staying out there for a week (fun!), which means this needs to be done ASAP.

p.s. if anyone has suggestions for a good place to get this sort of thing printed in Hamilton, I'd be much obliged.

p.p.s. thank you oncewed and green wedding shoes for lots of invitation inspiration.

engagement.

This past Sunday, Thea, Hollie, Mike, Erick, and I headed up Hwy 6 to visit the Aberfoyle Antique Market. It was the opening day for the season, and I had desperately missed it while it was closed over the winter. We went up with the intention of doing a little engagement photo shoot with Hollie in addition to checking out the wares. We decided that if there was an absolute downpour (which was forecast) we could always take pictures later. Well, it did rain. A lot (though you can't really tell from the photos). But we decided to give it a go regardless.

Hollie is amazing! Even in the pouring rain, with a foggy lens and no umbrella, she managed to produce a selection of really great photos! She was absolutely drenched, and it was cold, so we're very grateful. And we're super happy with the results. Especially since we were mildly apprehensive about engagement photos initially. We're not big PDA people, and the thought of expressing affection in front of a camera (without being slightly inebriated) was sort of scary. But I'm glad we did it. It was a practice round for the big day, which I'm really looking forward to. Only 86 more days! Holy poop. I hope it doesn't rain.

p.s. I don't know what we're doing in that last photo.

photos by Hollie

the dresses that didn't quite make the cut.

Since I'm getting back into the swing of wedding planning, and since I have officially figured out my wedding dress, I thought I'd share all of the dresses that I tried on that didn't quite make the cut. My friend Amanda and I spent a day dress hunting back in January. It wound up being the only day that I tried on dresses, because a couple of weeks later I saw the one that I had to have in the new BHLDN collection. Which made me very happy, because the whole dress thing was stressing me out.

Anyways, my budget was around $600, and all these dresses were within that price. I really didn't have a specific style in mind when we set out, I just knew that I did NOT want it to be satin.


Numero uno: the flowy dress from The Brides' Project. Located in Toronto in an old house on Broadview Ave near Gerrard, this place was pretty neat. All of the dresses they sell are donated by generous former brides who don't need their wedding dress anymore, or bridal stores. And all the proceeds from their sales go to cancer research! This made me really want to find a dress here, but unfortunately none of the dresses that they had in stock at the time were exactly what I was looking for.


After visiting the Brides' Project, Amanda and I went to Vintage Bride, which is located in Mirvish Village, just South of Bloor on Markham St. I was really looking forward to checking out this store, and it did not disappoint. The owner also runs another vintage store called The Refinery, and when we called to let her know we were coming by, she closed up The Refinery and we had a private appointment with her at Vintage Bride. She was very nice, and her selection of dresses REALLY impressed me. She had so many dresses from a range of eras, so if you're interested in a vintage wedding dress I highly recommend checking this store out.

Anyways, this was the first dress I tried on there. A 1950s tulle number, which was quite adorable, if a little large.


This dress was a little bit too 1950s prom for me. But very fun!

Now this dress was almost a winner. I absolutely loved the shape, and it fit perfectly! It was flowy and comfortable and pretty! In the end I decided not to get it because the ruffles were a tiny bit too much for me. And the fabric on the bodice was this sort of silver grey satin with tiny grey circles, which was cute, but made the dress just a tad busier than I would have preferred.

Amanda lives just around the corner from Vintage Bride, and she said that she saw this dress on display in the window a couple of weeks ago. So if you're interested, it might still be there!

This was the last dress, and it was more boho chic than the others. I didn't really expect to like it, but I did! It was cotton and very airy, so it would have been an excellent dress for a hot summer day. But it was too short and a little bit more casual than what I had in mind.

So there you have it. The dresses that were pretty great, but not quite perfect.