Buy your Linen, Rent your forks

In the early days of wedding planning I swore I could get it done for $5000.  I was quickly disabused of this notion. But it made me mildly nauseous as I realized how much money could be spent for a few hours of our lives (even if it will, blah-da-de-blah, last forever in our memories). So I made a few early decisions which I'm fairly certain, kept me to only doubling, not infinitely multiplying, my original figure. Here are the wedding planning rules I lived by: 1) I'll make what I can 2) I'll buy local and antique whenever possible 3) Instead of renting, I'll buy things we'll want to keep.

Aside from loving Drew to infinity in the eyes of the State, item #3 brings me to my favorite part: I'm doing my own linens. The theory being: 1) Renting linens is insanely expensive and generally uninspiring 2) If it's fabric, I can reuse or re-purpose it, 3) Vintage cotton and linen are outstandingly lovely and create exactly the aesthetic I want. More proof?

That said, I had planned on buying my forks too. Oh, and all of the china. Can you imagine dozens of sets of mismatched silver plated silverware and a variety of vintage china on the linens above?
I can.
But I had to stop somewhere.

Going Somewhere, Sweethearts.

The best part of any mass mailing is the mailing. Holding plump little packages in your arms and imagining all of the doorsteps they'll cross. When I was living in DC, I took a stack of valentines for post. A woman asked me if I was getting married. I said nope, they're just valentines. She said "well, you've sure got a lot of sweethearts." It was one of the nicest things a stranger has ever said. I think about that every time I drop 50 some-odd envelopes into the mail. There's something so rich and sweet about real mail.

Generally, with the valentines the envelope is an exhausted afterthought. For these invitations, the envelope set the scheme. The innards took some serious time to wrangle and might have been way more labor intensive than I assumed, but the satisfaction of seeing them all together was worth it.*  By chance, the teal scrolling on the stamp matches the envelope and the little orange heart matches the reply card. Little twists of design luck. Delicious.

Not all of the invites have reached their doors, so I won't post the entire design, but here are the envelopes, each tip-tap-typed by hand (a few with the help of a 5 year old! The typewriter, in all of its glory continues to be an object of fascination).

All of the insides also lined up richly with their golden bobbles. 

*NB: The mailing of these envelopes in any capacity would have been impossible without my Mom, who drove up here special to join the assembly line to get them out.  She's the best.

Going Somewhere?

File this under: things I wish I bought but didn't because I don't really have anywhere to put them, but now picture all of the things I could do with them. Also file under: Things that probably look better all together.

Bike Parts & Little Orange Hearts

My camera's broken. Drew's camera runs out of batteries. And frankly, they take dull photos even when they're working. I want to get a nice camera, but no breath is being held on it. Since I don't believe in telling without showing, I don't have much to show. I do want to share all of the fabulous blogs I've found. Amazing people out there, super aesthetics (if only I could be a super hero). [See new blog links to the right].

I don't usually think about design. I just make and hope the design falls into place. Then I had the super idea to make my own invitations. Seemed simple enough. I make my own valentines by the dozens every year.  It's not the same.  I spent time scrolling through magazines and blogs. Good ideas ended up in pieces and in knots. I bit off more than I could chew.  I kept measuring once and cutting twice.  I got frustrated. I had a loving man often wondering when we'd get our kitchen table back.

Luckily, something clicked a few days ago and I'm on a roll. The rsvp envelopes matched the tiny orange hearts on the stamps.  I was off.  Hopefully.

In the mean time, I dug deep for some good old photos of my own that make me want to make something. This is from a trip to Brooklyn in 2008. I love double bikes, though I never want to be the person in the back.

If I had to do it over again, I'd draw a little pen and ink of this bike and use it for invites. Maybe for Valentine's day.

Making Silk Flowers Out of a Swine's Flu

Everyone in the house except for me and the girl dog has the flu.

That's two boys and one man down.

We sent everyone to bed early and made flowers.

Ingredients:

White flowers with linen, silk, white parchment & pearl beads.

Green leaves of silk and pages from an antique book about wildflowers.

&

an early bedtime, a juice medley and some of that oscillococcinum.

 

All together now!

Pick-You-Up

I saved our coffee grinds this morning and tried to remember a bath scrub I'd made a few years ago. I couldn't, so I made it up again. It's a perfect morning pick-me-up, if you like that sort of thing. Plus it takes 3 minutes and you can ignore my amounts and ingredients and make your own*. The key is: something scrubby, something oily, something minty. (Not necessarily in that order.)


Here's today's Coffee Morning Scrub
1. Find a small container with a lid
2. Mix:
   -Yesterdays coffee grinds +
   -1 big spoonful of brown sugar +
   -1 tblspn of oil (I prefer Alba's Kukui nut oil, a mix of a few oils, but almond, coconut, etc will do) +
   -Few drops Dr Bronners liquid Peppermint soap (or a minty essential oil)
3. Use as a morning body scrub (shower may also require a rinse)
4. Since this is a textile focused blog, here's the link: Put scrub a nice glass container, tie with ribbon, make your own sewn pouch, tie with another ribon, share with friends.


* Mitch Hedberg has a joke that he tells that goes nowhere so he says "I'm going to take all the words out [of that joke] and add new words. That joke will be fixed." If you don't know Mitch Hedberg, you should youtube him, and watch it after your morning body scrub.

Summer, revisited

I forgot to post these wonderful linen finds from a summer Church sale in Middlebury. The masthead photo on this blog is a shot I took of the thread spools after purchase on what must have been one of the only sunny summer days. The linens are vintage floral dying to be refashioned into something new and I can't fully express my love for wooden thread spools.

All for $31.