health & fitness.... & badges.

I've gone a bit exercise mad lately...
I'm still on holidays until mid next week, so that's part of it, trying to get as much in as I can before school starts, riding 'the high' of exercise endorphins, and hoping they'll motivate me to keep going once I'm exhausted from teaching...
And I'm sore- I'm sore and I know my body is asking for a break, but I'm kind of hooked. For once, I'm feeling leaner, looking like I can see muscles in my arms start to appear, doing complicated side-planks with relatively little difficulty, upping my weights in pump classes, doing two classes in a row and walking away fatigued but 'lean'.... Previously, going to the gym every day or other day wouldn't really yield results, so it'd be hard to keep going, so it's really nice to be seeing changes. I've lost a couple of kilos, too, in the last couple of months (I'm not in any rush, and I'm not adhering to any 'wedding weight', and realistically, if I loose another 2-3kg I'll be pretty happy in any case, so it's not like I'm racing to loose 10kg and am going to be bitterly disappointed and eat away my disappointment), and clothes that hadn't been fitting are fitting again - that's super exciting.
But this is where I need to be careful. Because I push myself, I like to be on-top, to get everything right, to be the best, and then I break, and have to stop for a week instead of a day. I just know that even with one day's rest, I find getting out to exercise again the next day is hard for me- I need to ride the wave while I'm on it.

In other news- I've picked my wedding dress!!! It's this one.  Nic knows he's not allowed to click there. For some reason they picked a photo of the model with her leg in a weird position and it makes her look chunky.. or the dress looks chunky or SOMETHING. But it's gorgeous, and simple, and me, and perfect for a garden ceremony, then running around the zoo taking photos. And it's not -too- expensive, comparatively to the cost of gowns in this country.

I also... may have ordered badges.
Yes, ok, this is frivolous (and I basically yelled at my Mum about how hiring a limo was stupid and a waste of money and I'd rather go in my Man of Awesome's Skoda for all I care, a car is just a car), but it's also cool. I figure, people who help out with wedding things/shop for shoes with me/help assemble flowers/just generally look after us, get a badge. eg. Jenny will be shopping for shoes with me. She's not a bridesmaid, and I'm sure she'd like to be, so she can have a badge. Yay! Also my Dad & his partner? Team bride badge. Nic's Dad? Team groom. Right? I think it's fun.
Look, here they are! Sadly enough, the dog on the team bride one is an ACTUAL SILHOUETTE of our dog.
Yes.
I'm not entirely sure is this is lame, or cool.
Possibly lame.
But you can't really get much more 'custom made' than that, can you!?

diy till the cows come home

I saw my Mum (and puppy!) yesterday and talked wedding. My Mum tends to flip-flop between being mildy interested, and completely disinterested in everything ranging from my entire life, to just the wedding, so it's always a difficult call as to whether she'll be engaged or not.
Anyway, yesterday, this is what she said:
"I'd really like to be involved in your wedding"
I nearly fell of my chair. She said it in a sincere way, not because I'd been rambling on and on about DIY that, and 'we'll be making this'.
Next thing I know, we get home and book in a dress-looking-date next week. No procrastination, she wants to get right down to business.
Ah, ok, Mum. This is what I wanted, to be fair, but it's really, really tough to trust that she's not just going to drop off the planet and be completely nonchalant about it again come next week.
We'll see.


I made a list yesterday of all the DIY projects we've decided to do. And thinking about them, I think we're doing them for mostly the right reasons (eg. because we want to, because no shop could make what we want... and occasionally because to buy/have made what we want would be too expensive to be justified ($1,000 minimum spend on flowers? I think not)).
Here's how it looks, and how it's going so far:

A list of projects we’ve decided to take on:

Invitations, RSVP cards, Info cards - printed, addressed
-> also, envelope inners, return address stamp, tied with twine, ribbon or belly band???

Status: Created in photoshop, need to be printed somehow/somewhere.
Streamer background
-> dyed streamers
-> white lace
->free standing structure

Status: Started! Waiting on dyes to arrive from the UK, need to get more fabric and begin making the structure. This is a high-priority project.
Yay flags
-> approx 50. Calico w/ iron on transfer? Or painted stencil? 

Status: Not happening, yet.
Animal place holders
-> wooden animals? Dates written on in silver?
-> Mouths carved.
-> Names printed and cut from cardstock. 

Status: Given up on plastic animals for now. Need to go to the market and look at their cheap imported-from-China wooden animals. Wondering if people should just take their animals home as favours. When I told Mum about our favours idea, she said: "What, is it like a lolly bag?" and had no idea that favours existed. Ah, how things have changed.
Favors
-> Paper bags
-> Animal stamp, thankyou stamp, name/date stamp?
-> Tea (in air-sealed/plastic bag?)
->Tied with twine. 

Status: Not started
Guestbook
-> several yellow streamers
-> Black fabric pens (do these exist?)

Status: Not started
Programs
-> How/what? Vistaprint? How are they going to be interesting? 

Status: Don't know enough of the day-of schedule yet to make these, and need a brain-wave of how to make them nice.
Flowers
-> Bouquet x 1
-> Centrepieces x 12ish?
-> Real or fake?
-> Flower boxes

Status: Made enquiries about flower boxes. Nothing else yet.
Centerpieces:
-> words, painted.
-> mason jars
->table animal pictures.

Status: Words acquired. Need to be painted. Have a slowly growing collection of mason jars.
Seating chart? (some kind of zoo map...!!!)

Status: Emailed brother who is a wiz with photoshop to see if this will be easy for him to make.

Photobooth
->Props!

Status: Yeah, not yet.
Menus
-> Painted and stuck books. 

Status: Lower priority, have a small collection of cooking books to use, but need to finalise the menu before doing too much with these.
Ring pillow book:
-> Book with centre cut, ribbon, painted or covered.

Status: This isn't a hugely high priority, so, we'll see. We have plenty of op-shop (thrift shop?) books so we can paint and use one of those.

In the meantime, we've booked appointments to meet with 3 celebrants over the next week or two. I found it a really weird experience to be choosing celebrants. You go to a website, right, look at photos of people, and try and decide who you'd like to look at, if they have a website, etc. It's shopping for people. It weirds me out.

We know who we want as our photographers but they said they don't book more than 8 months out, so I'm holding out from hassling them, hoping they hold true to their word and don't book our date before March (8 months before the wedding).

streamers!! pt.1

Before we begin: anybody around here use a Mac and have iLife11? Specifically iPhoto? Does it make anybody else want to rip their brains out with a fork? Mine seems to be having issues importing 10 photos.
10.
I mean, one of the main features of a photo program has to be the ability to get photos from point a to point b (program), right?
If you can't do that properly, you're in serious trouble, my friend.
In fact, it's at the point where, as I'm importing my 10 photos, I might as well go have a long shower, take a nap, or go for a jog because everything else is freezing.

Anyhoo. According to the Interwebs I'm not the only one having issues, so I suppose that makes it less frustrating.
On to wedding-y-related stuff.
Over here, we've kicked into high-mode DIY.
We have a lot of projects coming up, so we might as well ride the enthusiasm while we still have it!
This was our project this weekend, resulting in blue and green stained hands when we went to the gym.

Streamer background! So, at the moment it's just the dyed cotton streamers, and probably about 1/3 of the total we'll end up making. But it was sort of our test-run, and I think they turned out beautifully! We want to hang them from a dowel or rail, and maybe use some yellow streamers as our 'guest-book', for people to write on with fabric pens, and then we can add those ones to the other and have a beautiful bright wall hanging. We're both super excited about this project. We imagine them behind us during the ceremony, then moved inside to cover the dark weird wall in the reception room... plus, if we have to go indoors due to the weather, we can use this behind us so it's not like we're just having our ceremony in the entry-way of our reception room. I think we'll be making some darker ones, and possibly having some cream/white ones in there, too.
Super excited.

Also, along with the invite (which I've changed a little since I uploaded it here), I now have RSVP and information cards to go along with it. Can you guess the colour theme?

(our surnames are not Antelopes nor Frog, but they fit)

(tempted to move the 'What's to eat?' question up, turn it sideways, and have it coming out of the tiger's mouth, there... but then the other ones would probably have to go wonky, too)

 Plus we also bought 6 wooden word signs (I'm a literacy student/English teacher. I looooove words. I love words on signs. Oooh, and these are caligraphy signs too. Pretty!) which we're going to paint white, maybe with a pearlescent finish? Or maybe just shiny white? Or something else. I don't know yet. The words are, from memory: love, joy, forever, imagine, laugh and dream. They'll be going on the tables somewhere. Possibly on books (words leaping out of pages! Yeah!) or between, or something or other. Not sure yet.

But it's all super exciting. Apparently at some point in the next couple of months I'm meant to book a florist (if we go down that route). How does one go about booking a florist???

so the diy bonanza begins...

So, since we now have a location, we decided to start getting things rolling on the wedding side of things.
Contemplating colours, we considered macaw birds, rainforest-type things, and then I found this picture:

{via}

And I liked the colours- the dark blue, the turquoise, the yellow. I put them into kuler, it gave me colours. I figure they might be a tiny bit seaside for our rainforest-room wedding, but whatevs. We also want a splash of purple in there. We're not really going traditional, here, we want to brighten up the room.

So then we started thinking about us. About our lounge room full of books. I'd seen books used as centrepieces before, I figured we go down that route.

Cue spending $40 on $2 books (that's a lot of books) from op-shops, and a heap more money on sample pots of house paint in said colours, glue, brushes and sponges....

We now have books drying in the colours. We figure we'll stack them up, maybe 3 or 4 in a pile, then put some tea-lights or flowers on them. 

We also got some tall & skinny cookbooks, which we'll glue most of the pages together (leave some select few non-glued and 'white wash' over the writing and pictures) and in the middle, have a ribbon marker, and the menu. Menus in books! How novel. (get it? That was an UNINTENTIONAL pun, y'all).

The last project I started working on this weekend was a wacky idea based on this image:

And I thought: yes! We were already going to incorperate plastic animals into the setting somehow (the wedding is at the zoo after all). So we bought a pack of 5 wild animals for $1 (so, if we have 50 ppl that's $50 on place-holders + some card stock and better textas than I used below) and I painted them- one test white lion who has taken FOREVER to dry, and one test silver gorilla, who I wanted to come out more chrome than shiny, but oh well, I think he looks more 'classy' this way.

Cos, y'know, having plastic animals feature at your wedding is high class.

All I had were whiteboard markers, so the writing on the cards looks terrible, and I don't know if I'd have coloured or white card, but you get the idea. Test run! Also, the lion needs another coat of paint, so he's a bit splodgy. But you get the idea.

When the books are dry, I'll stack 'em up and see how they look, too. It's all happening! How exctiting!