hooray!!! our wedding was featured on Off beat bride!!

I am so happy our wedding was featured on Offbeatbride.com!! How exciting!! We have gotten some lovely comments too! You must go check it out at once!

http://offbeatbride.com/2012/07/new-zealand-toadstool-wedding 

My wedding cake

I am so proud to show you my wedding cake, made by the amazing Kirsten Howat of Auckland, New Zealand. She did such an amazing job. it was just what I wanted! I have always loved the Mushroom Cake made by the amazing Erica oBrien and Its highly possible the theme of the wedding stemmed slightly from this cake! It is just so beautiful. Kirsten did a beautiful job, taking some of the ideas from Ericas cake and changing it slightly to become her own, and to suit our Toadstool theme. Its is so delicate! She is one to be watching... Auckland look out! Kirsten is currently working at Sweetbite cakes in Auckland while setting up her own business.

Absolutely stunning!

Fabric Flower Bouquet

One of the biggest jobs of the wedding was my decision to have fabric flower bouquets. I just love all the neat ideas out there, button, brooch and fabric bouquets.I found amazing pictures and tutorials.. one of which I wanted to feature on here, and now I cant seem to find it all. (typical!)I really wanted to make this a large part of the day, with an original feel to it. But of course as always, I wanted to make things harder for myself by making all the flowers. And when I say all.... I mean ALL of them, I made HUNDREDS!!! In fact I possibly went a little overboard.. But I think it paid off and I think you might agree! Earlier I posted this photo:

I made all the flowers using a "yoyo" maker that I bought from Spotlight. I bought loads of different types of material, all in the colours that would suit our dresses, and sewed like a champion. Every night on the couch ...sew sew sew. Now every time you buy a new cardigan or dress and you get the little packet with the spare button in it, do you keep it? It turns out that I do. Cleaning out my jewellery baskets, I found all these buttons!! I even found buttons that I had bought while travelling through Europe made of pottery. So I sewed all the buttons to the yoyo's to make them look like flowers. If you haven't found those amazing $12 bags of mixed buttons from Spotlight, then just you wait... they are awesome, and they were a great way to get more buttons of all different shapes and sizes.

When I got to NZ for the wedding my sister and mum and I all sat around with cups of coffee and made the bouquets together. It was such a beautiful afternoon, and a good way to start the week leading up to the wedding. We were able to catch up, organise, plan and be creative!  Sarah made mine, Mum made Sarah's and I made Erin's and Zoe's (flower girl extraordinaire).

Now to make the bouquets, using the ideas I found off the tutorials, I bought some cheap wire whisks ($2 each!) and using our hands just pulled the wires out to make a globe shape, then filled the inside with teddy bear stuffing. We then tied the flowers onto the whisk wires with very fine beading wire. Once the globes were fully and tightly covered we used ribbons to wrap around the stem and tied a bow. 

Each of the bouquets had colours to match our dresses, so mine was more blue and black. And being the bride I got to choose my favourite buttons (hahah). 

We also used the flowers on a few extra things around the place. The groomsmen and groom all had a button hole, as well as my mum and dad, and Alan's mum. My favourite thing was my birdcage veil. I bought a clip with a flower on it and sewed on a few extras of my own! The flower girl Zoe even had them sewn onto her wings!

If you have the time pop over to my sisters blog to see her post on her bouquet, and check out the photo of all the flowers lain out....Epic!   Sarah's Bouquet

This was a huge project, but totally worth it! And the best thing is we get to keep our bouquets forever! I have so many flowers left, I am contemplating another project with them. I was thinking of sewing them onto a blanket maybe??? Got any Ideas?

Hope you like these as much as we do!

Gx

Cupcakes In a Jar Bonboniere

Cupcakes...In...A...Jar......What else is there to say? Just when you thought cupcakes couldn't get any sweeter!This little project was another one of those things I've always wanted to do. I thought I was being a little over excited by doing this as my Bonboniere, but for a wedding of our size (45 people) I think it was just the right amount. 

You'll start to see over these posts, the rediculous amount of work my sister did for me. And just how talented she is.  These little treats are another perfect example of her design amazing-ness! I loved how I could just mention an idea, how I thought it would look, and of course I would do the baking side of it all.. But she would bring it to life.

Production Line

Layering

Erin keeping us all entertained

Signage to stop early dessert eaters!

The gorgeous Labels Sarah designed

Cute!

These were super easy to make! Knowing that we had quite a lot to do, I just made 3 sheets of cake to slice and layer up with Raspberry buttercream. My sister made The labels, and tags to stick on each one. She had every guests name printed so they could find their own! On one side of the jar it says "cupcakes in a jar" , and the other side "Alan & Gina". Pretty cool huh?

Remember the beautiful invites that Sarah designed? Well she made all the labels, and signs and tags all in the same theme! Isnt she amazing!

There are so many variations, and ways to personalise these little treats, and to be honest, aside from the design work and printing, they were quite easy on the pocket to produce! Bonus!

Gx

Toadstool Biscuit cutters

I really love You tube tutorials. I use them for everything. Doing my hair, doing my make up, and even make cookie cutters! Genius! I had been on the look out for a Toadstool cutter as I wanted to make Toadstool cookies for the wedding day dessert table... ( you will see as the photos keep coming... there was quite a toadstool theme happening!) And I couldn't find a Toadstool cutter anywhere!!! So DIY it is!





Now I cannot take any credit for this as...My sister made the cutter! At the time of "cookie cutter creating" I was elbow deep in cake mix, cake pops and kilos of buttercream. So Super Sarah made me the cutest little cutter, to the shape of my very terrible scribble of a shape, and this is what she came up with....

Cuteness!

Hazelnut chocolate chip...My favourite

My bridesmaid Erin practising on the rejects!

 

Delicious!

They turned out just as planned! And you've got to love the team effort! The mix made plenty of cookies, so we pretty much ate them all day long... Even during getting our nails done at the Salon! And crafters.... the possibilities are endless with the DIY cookie cutter!

Gx

Hello there!

Well I'm back... It has been a wild month of wedding craziness and new beginnings. There are plenty of things I want to share from my wedding but first, and although I am a couple of days late...I just have to thank my mother ( happy Mothers Day) for the amazing job she did for us. She did all the girls hair, took all of us girls to an amazing high tea, she opened up her home to everybody and basically got thrown into a whole lot of chaos with us around! I cannot stress to you how amazing our hair was!!! Here are a couple of photos.... There will be more wedding stuff to follow too... still waiting on the pro photos to comes through (eeeeee) but there is plenty of crafty yummyness !! Hope you are all well, and gave/received a good hug on mothers day. 

The beautiful french roll mum did in my hair, and my sisters beautiful victory rolls!

The master at work

Me and my awesome mum

My sister is awesome!

Do you have a sister? Is she awesome??? Cause mine is! This has to be the craziest time of my life at the moment...Wedding is 5 weeks away, and all the wedding plans seem to be rolling together nicely... But I couldn't do it without my sister... She is like my ears, my eyes and my hands. Im sure every bride wishes they had two pairs of hands, well I do! I know that when I tell her an idea... she is always 2 steps ahead in how we are to do it, and what will improve it... I couldn't be more happy! Organising a wedding from over seas, is always going to be difficult... I am so so so grateful for her right now... and It makes me feel even better knowing that she is enjoying herself.

She also made me these super sexy invites.... check out her post on her cool blog here

She's pretty sexy too!

Just wait a month and I'll be able to show you even more cool things she's done....

Love you sister! xxx

Fabric Flowers

Here's a sneak peak of what I have been working on for the wedding... a lot of fun but very time consuming..... I cant wait to show you what they are for! x