My Greatest (Sewing) Accomplishment?

Someone give me an award… this may be the greatest sewing I have ever done and only parts of it were solid luck. I promised Kevin when we moved in to the house (about 18 months ago for those of you counting) that I was going to sew some kick-A roman shades for our windows at some point.

Well, as you can see, these are not roman shades… he got really tired of waiting for me to have motivation, and we bought shades from Ikea instead. But this motivated me to make something I thought would be less complicated (and too be fair, pretty sure it was): valances (look at all the window treatment vocab you are learning!)

I used this tutorial which was pretty easy but I took my time and read it through a kabillion times until I decided that the contrast band and the drapery lining were just too complicated. The most difficult part was doing the math for the pleats. (1.5+1.5+3+hems+allowances+sliiiightly wobbly lines=???)

But look at those corners! Glorious no? Did you see how the patterns match up between the two windows? MATH GENIUS! Anyways, pretty happy with the result and the new paint color in the kitchen. Kevin says I need to pick some non-blue paint colors when the basement is done in a few weeks. BOOO!

You're Invited to DIY

The wedding DIY project that I'm most proud of was our invitations. It's not that I'm picky (yes I am), but I scoured all the usual websites and Etsy and couldn't find anything I really loved. Having someone else design them... so not in our budget. So I decided to design them myself.

Starting with the save the date, we took some beautiful photos that Kevin had taken of the barn where we held our reception and Photoshopped them into something really personal. The background is a repeatable burlap texture and we picked a free font.

When we started thinking about the invites I wanted them to look pretty similar to the save the date. I used the same background and font but just took a different photo from Kevin's collection. I made a simple gingham for the RSVP postcard. 

On the back of the invite, I used a blue-washed photo of us. I thought it was a fun surprise for the back and just made it that much more personal.

For the back of the RSVP, we really wanted to be snarky. Kevin also designed a block print fence which a scanned and added in.

I highly recommend DIY-ing invites if you have even a little Photoshop know-how. I'm definitely not an expert. We printed about 50 of each item for about $120 all told on Zazzle. Overall, I was really glad we went this route!

300% MORE Wedding Projects

The other day when Kevin and I were knee deep in various wedding projects, he asked me what percentage more DIY projects were we taking on than the average couple. To which I laughed... A LOT MORE. It's partially because we're trying to plan a wedding in one of the three most expensive places in the country on a modest budget. It's partially because we're nuts and have five million ideas.

We bought this old window at a barn sale a couple months ago. Kevin painted it (yet again risking life and limb) and backed it with chicken wire. I picked some choice random photos from various vacations and trips to Butler's Orchard and made them vintagey looking in Photoshop. Too cute?

We also got this vintage briefcase at said barn sale for cards. I sewed the little flags with a bunch of blue and white fabric I've been hoarding. See?

The rest of this going to become more little flags once I actually get the motivation to break out my sewing machine again. What you have to realize is that I only get this kind of creativity in spurts so when it happens I have to knock out like four projects in one weekend.

So I also sewed these burlap 20x20 squares to go on the white table cloths. I used a decorative zig zag stitch and I didn't realize that it would eat through two spools of blue thread. So yeah, some of them are different colors... no big deal.

But the good news about zig zag? It's a little more forgiving if, like me, you cannn't really sew in a straight line. So yeah, don't examine that too closely :) More projects to come soon like our invites/RSVP cards that we designed and ordered from Zazzle this weekend.