Greetings from Boise!

Now that I am retired (well, at least until after the wedding), I have all kinds of time to craft and travel. And that is exactly what I have done on my trip this week back to my hometown of Boise, Idaho. I have so many fun projects to post. First up, we finished our ceremony aisle decorations! You might remember the pomander flower balls from this post a while back. Well they are now finished, and here’s how they turned out:

Not too shabby! We figured they actually cost slightly less to make than the ones we could have bought at the store. They do however take quite a bit of time, but I think it was worth the work. One quick note, they did take quite a few more flowers than we thought they would to make and we had to make a couple of extra trips to the dollar store to buy more. So if you are thinking about making some, definitely plan for more flowers than you think you’ll need! For instructions on how to make them, just visit the previous post here. Now we just need to finish spray painting the shepherd’s hooks to hang them on and the ceremony decorations are taken care of!

We also found our card box for the reception. Originally I had wanted to do something like this:

Source

Cute, simple, how hard could it be to make something like that? It actually probably isn’t that hard, but with our mounting stack of DIY projects to finish before the wedding (which is now only 6 weeks away! Eeek!!), I decided maybe we should just go with something we could buy. Unfortunately those type of card boxes are either ridiculously overpriced (the one shown above is $108!) or kind of ugly and cheap looking (sorry Michael’s). I had seen the idea of using birdcages to hold cards, and I wasn’t sure if I liked that or not, but then I happened across this birdcage at Tai Pan Trading:

I really liked the retro look and the bright color. And I figured after the wedding we’ll have a cool art piece for our house. So we bought it. And now I have another item checked off my list!

Boise Trip

I took a trip to my hometown Boise over the 4th of July. My main goal for the trip was to find my dress, which I did! I also wanted to try a couple of DIY crafts I had been saving on my Pinterest board.

First up were some coffee filter flowers I found that I thought would be great for our rehearsal dinner. We actually tried two different methods. The first one you can find the instructions for here. And here’s how they turned out:

I think they turned out pretty good. We just did white filters to try it out, but you can dye the filters as well.

After we made our first set of paper flowers, I found a second tutorial online. I think it might be a little easier to use, and the flowers look relatively similar.

For our second DIY project, we attempted some hanging flower balls. I had this picture for my inspiration:

Source

I found some instructions on Pinterest that said an easy way to make them is to buy fake flowers, take the stems off, and hot glue them in the holes of a wiffle ball. Easy peasy, right? Kind of. It was really hard for me to find flowers that would match the color and style of the wedding (I decided on orange and pink flowers for the balls). After hitting up all the craft stores in town, we finally found some at the dollar store. The other problem we ran across was it used a lot more flowers than we had anticipated for. We were able to find more pink flowers, but the store didn’t have more orange flowers. So we will just have to keep an eye out and cross our fingers that we can find some similar in color and style. Here are the pictures from that project:

We didn’t quite finish the flower balls, I need to make (another) trip to Great Falls to measure the ribbon for hanging them from the chairs we are going to use for the ceremony. I am pleased with how they turned out so far. Once you have all the items to make them it was pretty easy, however I did find them on Etsy for (probably) cheaper than it will end up costing us to make them. Just some food for thought for other brides in the same boat!

Great Falls Trip #2

I think I’m just gonna start numbering the trips now, since I have a feeling there will be many, many more to come this year. Right after we flew back from Myrtle Beach we jumped in my car and drove two hours to Great Falls. I had a lot of things I wanted to accomplish during our visit. First up I had meetings with two florists in town. I met with My Viola Floral Studio first, I was very impressed with the florist there. I told her my colors and some of the flowers I liked and she put them together so I could get an idea of what the bouquets would look like (with more flowers, obviously).

It’s exactly the colors I wanted from the picture I found online. She e-mailed me the quote a couple of days later and it was even under the budget I had set for flowers. The other florist wouldn’t set up an actual appointment with me a year out, she said she didn’t like to set them up until 6 months before the wedding and I didn’t really want to wait that long. And judging from the price list they gave me, it looked like they might be more expensive. So we booked My Viola Floral Studio. And I checked one more thing off my list.

Next up was heading out to Ryan Dam to check out the reception hall that we weren’t able to take pictures of the first time we were there. Luckily no one was using it this time and the groundskeepers were able to let us in.

There is a TON of space in the hall. Also I love the benches that go around the inside of the room. The one bad thing is there are no beams on the ceiling for me to hang things from, but I think I should be able to either tape or pin to it.

We also took another trip out to the island to look again at where we want to do the ceremony. I decided on two areas I liked, either in front of a really big beautiful tree:

Or in front of another, smaller tree:

We also happened to find a little friend slithering about:

(My mom would have died had he been there our first trip).

We also checked out the rental shop, bus transportation, and visited Amigo Lounge to book our rehearsal dinner.

And today I’m ending this post on a bonus picture, my Fiancé acting like a goof in his dad’s glasses.

This is the guy I’m marrying, people.