Photo taken by Me

Along with the fan came this cute poem:

Thank you for attending Green’s shower.
Now, we are looking forward to that special hour!
Please bring this fan as we celebrate the joining
of Green and her mate, on August 28th!

The fans were given out in little gift bags tied with Green ribbon (of course!) and a thank you charm:

Photo taken by Me

Also inside the bag was a set of Bamboo coasters:

Source: http://www.fashioncraft.com

Definitely some of the more useful shower favors I’ve seen!  Hope this post gave the rest of the garden some inspiration!

It can be a budget solution, also. But there is one MAJOR concern if this is something you want to do. The flowers used to decorate the cake must be edible. This does not mean that your guests will be chomping down the foliage like a horde of ravenous bunnies, but poison + food just DO NOT go together. Luckily, there are a diverse number of flowers that are edible.

These are all flowers you can use, and they are just a start! A little bit of research and you can easily find some that will work for you. Your florist will in all likelihood know what is acceptable, also.

Morgan Boszilkov is the designer for Natural Bridal Collection, and she even donates 5% of the profits to environmental causes. The gowns are made with sustainable fabrics and are handcrafted…not to mention really affordable!

Some of these green gowns are even “convertible” with detachable bottom skirts!  This is a great option for a bride who wants something different for her reception, or plans to wear the dress again in its shorter form.

Check out the rest of the Natural Bridal Collection at http://www.naturalbridals.com/

I’ve been inspired… by my new blog friend A Little Birdie! Go visit her at her blog A Little Birdie Weds. We spoke briefly about being blogging buddies from Canada. While blogs allow us all to communicate from all corners of the world, it is safe to say that most blogging brides are from the U.S.

For the most part, tips, tricks, resources, and suppliers that my neighbourly brides to the south blog about can be accessed and taken advantage of up here in Canada, but there are slight disadvantages… namely, SHIPPING!! While most places will ship to Canada (at a greatly inflated price), some downright refuse to?!?! What’s up with that? Anyways, this isn’t a rant post, this is an introduction post… to my new weekly feature:

2 The North Tuesdays!!

Yep, you got it, it’s my duty as a Canadian Bride-who-Blogs, to give props where props are deserved… to our local wedding elves! I have to be honest though… so far, I have not been the best at taking advantage of our local resources. I hear more about my southern elves, get links to more American finds, and have way more US-based blogging-brides that are downright fabulous… and it’s impossible NOT to get inspired by them!! I do hope, though, that some inspiration can start flowing from the north to the south, so let’s get it started…

2 The North Tuesday – Edition #1

Ecoware Biodegradable Utensils
Now, before you think that I first found these elves in my backyard, let’s clear this one up… I got connected to Ecoware Biodegradable by the infamous Budget Savvy Bride. I mean come on… who doesn’t think these are adorable:

from here

I knew these utensils would be perfect for our welcome BBQ, and our day-after-Danish-brunch, so I straight away got in touch with Darrel at Ecoware, and when I realized they were from Canada… holla… yep, I was excited!! Every small victory is celebrated, and when I knew I wouldn’t have to pay crazy shipping, that the price quoted was in CAD$$ (wahoo!!), and of course, the main bonus, that these babies were green-green-green, I was raising the roof!! Giddyup and sign-me-up! I will post again soon with the details of my utensil package, but just check em out… LOVE IT!! (PS… personal pic taken during the assembly process)

So, whether you live in Canada or not, Ecoware Biodegradables are a great option for disposable utensils… that are friendly to our environment! We are using them for day-before and day-after parties, but if you are having a more casual/rustic/homegrown wedding, I think they would be perfect for that too!! The only reason we aren’t, is because our caterer is taking care of all things utensils!!

Do any of you Canadian brides know of awesome local vendors the rest of us brides should know about?? If you are a Canadian vendor that wants to share your product as part of the 2 the North series, comment below and we can get the word out!!

From www.printablepress.com

It figures that the week I mail my wedding invitations, I find out about a brand new, stylish, budget-savvy suite of wedding invitations. A Practical Wedding tipped me off to the launch of Printable Press, a line of semi-DIY invitations. The designers had been making custom print-it-yourself invitations– via digital file– for friends when they decided to start their own online stationery store. They have dozens of designs in eight different categories, enough to satisfy even the choosiest of design snobs.

From www.printablepress.com

What I love– besides the drool-worthy designs– is how flexible using digital files can be. You can print them yourself on your home (or work) printer. Or you can take them to a local print or copy shop. Or you can use an online printer like Vistaprint. You can use fancy paper or stuff on super sale at Michael’s. You can put them in a pocketfolder from Cards & Pockets or make your own belly band from decorative paper and ribbon. You can even e-mail them as PDFs to your guests– a great green option.

From www.printablepress.com

I could seriously design an entire wedding around each of these fabulous designs! Pricing for invitations and response cards starts at $80. I love how this company puts great design within reach of just about every bride. It’s swoonworthy!

1. Plan a ZeroCarbon wedding

Use CarbonFund’s carbon calculator to determine the level of carbon dioxide your wedding events will emit into the air and give your guests the opportunity to contribute to your ZeroCarbon Wedding.

From carbonfund.org

2. Go paperless

Send out digital save the dates and invitations to reduce your paper use.

From pingg.com

3. Select environmentally friendly vendors

In this day and age, many vendors are going green. You can find eco-friendly rings, wedding dresses, flowers, and wedding favors just to name a few.

By Morgan Boszilkov

What are some other ways you are going green for your wedding?

weddingwire.com

Luckily, I found WeddingWire – a bride’s dream come true. It gave me the ability to create our wedding website, create a guest list (complete with addresses and a seating chart), search for ideas, and search for wedding vendors (only downfall – they don’t have any vendors in Italy).

I created our website right after our engagement and sent out an email notification to our friends and family. It was the perfect place to announce our engagement and tell the story (I didn’t have the energy to call every single person to go through the romantic story in detail). When I was ready to send out our save the dates to all of our invited guests, I edited the content to include more details such as the location in Italy, date, guest book, and our contact information for questions.

Finally, when our invitations were going out, I added our registry (both American and Italian), a wedding weekend schedule, travel agent contact information, contact information for accommodations in Artimino (our wedding location), and some fun extras – spa information in Artimino, etc.

It seems to have worked perfectly to help carry a lot of the load that a bride tends to hold on her shoulders. Rather than deal with all of the phone calls, emails, and repetitive questions, I simply post our website address on everything.

The important things to remember are: 1) keep the content clean and easy to read 2) think about what your guests might need and want to know – the more small details you cover the better 3) if you’re getting married in another country that speaks a different language than English, try to cater to both – we wrote in a mix of English and Italian and included an American registry and an Italian registry.

Thank goodness for technology…honestly, how did brides do this before???

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcymPYLdjz8[/youtube]

Hours of work later, our Save the Date postcards have arrived. I’m thrilled with how they turned out, but it was very odd to open them, and find them exactly as expected. I’m not sure if I thought they’d arrive differently, or if they should be more exciting than I’m giving them credit for. Maybe it’s that I want to have invitations and a wedding now…not in 9 months. Or that I was standing in my kitchen by myself with no one to “Ooohh!” over them.

The quote is from my favorite movie, a cute romantic movie called Chungking Express. Dahlia Dude rented a movie theater and played the unseen-by-him funny film on the night he proposed. Not sure if the family and friends will get the quote. I guess that’s what the website is for. This image is from an early draft, and now they have the date and time of our actual engagement, as well as changing expiry to expiration as the quote is taken from a translation.

I used Greenerprinter.com for the printing, and a good friend/graphic designer to design the images. I’m happy with the job of the printer, and would recommend them for people looking for an eco-cheap way to print (over Vista print, for example).

As I’ve said before, we’re getting married in a movie theater, and having a somewhat movie themed wedding. So these postcards are “setting the visual language” for the wedding, says my graphic designer friend.

A few people have asked why we’re not doing a ‘black and white’ movie wedding. I have two reasons. The first being, that both of our venues are the cream/brown/red color stories in the furnishings. Why fight it? And second, because I think it will look harsh against the fall backdrop of Wisconsin in October. I hope that these postcards will be a preview for our awesome invites. I asked my friend to design the invites to look like an old, faded movie, one where the black and white is now cream and brown. Like Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator.

Photo from isadoraclothing.etsy.com

Photo from isadoraclothing.etsy.com

Photo from isadoraclothing.etsy.com

It’s like several dresses in one! I love that concept because I am a big fan of reusing things and whenever wedding items pull double-duty, you end up saving money.

And the versatile fun is not just for brides to enjoy: With both full- and knee-lengths available in variety of colors, this could also be a great options for bridesmaids as well. You can browse this wonderful collection on Etsy.

While I’m not really in the market for another wedding dress, I did have to talk myself out of buying it . Who knows, it’s become trendy to change dresses for the reception, so maybe I could be a multiple-dress bride for this dress…

I had so many extra flowers after the wedding since we did the flowers ourselves. Shortly after Christmas I decided to make handmade paper and tossed in a good portion of the leftover wedding flowers.

Photo from instructables.com

The materials needed:

• a blender
• screen
• 2 wood frames
• staple gun and/or hammer and nails
• a large tub wide enough for the frames
• several handfuls of shredded/torn paper

I also used dryer lint and leftover holiday wrapping paper in my paper. We only had a few loads worth of lint (about 1.5 cups maybe). To begin, I soaked the lint and paper scraps for about 20-30 minutes to soften it and make it easier for blending. While that was soaking in a bowl, I created the screen for the paper. I found the window screen on a huge roll at my local hardware store for $5. Of course, you only need enough to cover your frame. I chose an 8×8 unfinished wooden frame at a craft shop for $10. I used a staple gun to attach the screen to the frame. The screen needs to be tight across. The other frame is your deckle (used as a barrier or stencil to give shape to your paper).

After your paper scraps and lint have soaked, put one cup of paper mush in the blender. This is when I threw in petals of dried hydrangea from my centerpieces. The more flowers, the better as they will add pretty texture to your paper and naturally die the paper. My paper turned very green since my hydrangeas were green. I added enough water so that the blender was almost entirely full. Blend the materials until they make a soft, smooth soupy texture. You may have to do this multiple times so that you have about 3-5 inches of the pulpy water in your large tub. When you have enough of the mixture in the tub take the frame with screen and the deckle on top. Pretend you are panning for gold, swirl the screen and deckle until you have a consistent layer of pulp on the screen.

Take the deckle off and flip the screen onto some fabric, paper towels, or newsprint so that your sheet of handmade paper can dry. Before removing the screen, you may pat it down with a dry sponge to try to remove some excess water. Or you may want to put another piece of fabric down and take a rolling pin to get the paper flat and free of water. If you can do this outside during the summer it may not take but a few hours to dry.

The paper is unique and really beautiful. I plan on using the handmade paper in greeting cards and framed art. It’s a very subtle reminder of the natural joy and beauty of that day.

If you’re having trouble following my cryptic directions, this site was super helpful to me with their step by step pictures.

From offbeatbride.nearlyweds.com

If Plumeria Dude and I didn’t already have a wedding website (which I will post about at some point), we’d definitely consider this new service from Offbeat Bride. When we were looking the wedding website templates out there, they all seemed pretty generic if not completely cheesy. Which is why we did our own thing. (Yes, there are benefits to marrying a geek!)

With this new service, the technically challenged can have a cool-looking wedding website with robust features like blogs, online RSVP (great for green weddings!), guest list management, photo galleries, music and a timeline. I particularly like the designs, some of which have coordinating invitation suites if you want a cohesive look.

All of this does not come free, however. After a 14-day trial, $49 will get you two years service. Honestly, when you add up the cost of hosting your own website for that length of time, plus the time it would take to design and build a site with all of those features, it sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

What are you using for a wedding website?

Gerber Daisy Dude and I made a decision that turned us into an eco-friendly couple without us even realizing it…until now! This decision was creating our website through WeddingWire. I checked out many different websites and even though I’m sure it’s impossible to check out every single option, I found their features to be the best and reasonably priced – FREE! Other websites would offer basic things like posting your story, wedding info and a limited about of pictures, but if you wanted more (RSVP capabilities, guest book, links, more pictures and videos) you needed to pay more.

What was the driving force behind it all? Gerber Daisy Dude and I knew right away that we were not going to be bothered with mailing save the dates or invitations. Nothing about ordering or creating these got us excited. They seemed more like tedious projects than anything else. Please don’t take offense to this if you like that sort of thing. It just isn’t for us. Plus, all of our family and friends are well-versed in the ways of the World Wide Web so no worries there. We knew that we wanted to use our own wedding website to communicate to our guests and that was that. We have been so happy with the website capabilities and love that Wedding Wire is always trying to create new and easy ways to manage the website. Our engagement video is also streamed on our website.
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=_hcBi6PXLLE[/youtube]

We have a main page that contains updates to guests, special events/holidays we’ve shared, even the scores to all of the Patriots games and other New England sports updates. There is also a photo slideshow, monthly polls/trivia, our personalized gift registry link, accommodations info and we will have the RSVP page available a few months before the wedding.

We emailed our guests our “Save the Dates” with a year to go until the wedding. It came in email form and was a chance to announce our wedding website. We asked that our guests sign the guest book on our website as a way to confirm that they received the email. We recently sent another email to wish our family and friends a Happy Holiday and let them know we added some new info to the website. Once we open up the RSVP page, we will be able to view who has not responded and at that point, we can just delegate close friends and family to follow-up for us. It’s really as simple as that!

It’d be great to hear other ways you other “buds” used a wedding website to your advantage… or a blog… or online invitations.

BLOG JOKE:

Types of Computer Viruses:
Adam and Eve virus: Takes a couple of bytes out of your Apple.
Arnold Schwarzenegger virus: Terminates and stays resident. It’ll be back.
Nike virus: Just Does It!
Paul Revere virus: This revolutionary virus does not horse around. It warns you of impeding hard disk attack – once if by LAN, twice if by C.
Politically correct virus: Never calls itself a “virus”, but instead refers to itself as an “electronic microorganism”.

However, now that we are researching invitations and trying to plan our design, I’m starting to wonder if we made the right decision. Does it make us look cheap?

I really like the types of invitations that come with a pocket for enclosures, but I don’t know what our enclosures would be without a response card. Our reception is at the same location as the hotel, so I don’t really need a reception card. Also, we have full directions complete with custom google maps on our wedding website, so I’m not really sure if we need a directions card.

That would leave a sort of RSVP instruction card asking people to RSVP online (or via phone for those 2 or 3 relatives who don’t use the internet very often).

A friend of mine said that they regret putting everything online and not putting some info in the invitation (for example, directions), because they got some negative feedback that no one knew where to go since not everyone actually visited their website. So, I’m debating adding a direction card to the invitation.

As for a reception card or response card, what do you think? Is it acceptable in this day and age to ask people to RSVP online or via phone? Does it make us look cheap or just current and green? Are directions required in the invitation? Help!

I ordered their sample pack of printed products, and was impressed at the range of services. They even had a save the date post card example, which you can see above! They calculate, based on how much you order, the amount of resources saved by using their services, not to mention the recycled paper and soy based ink. Now we have not ordered anything yet, but plan to use them for the save the dates, and anything else we need. They are incredibly cheap, and take small jobs (we only need about 200 postcards).
I realize I’m still creating paper that wouldn’t be used, but I plan to minimize the actual invitations, programs, menus, etc. Dahlia Dude is in agreement that we minimize the toss aways for this ONE day, because we are conscious of it every other day.

As for the save the date designs, we’re planning something that looks like an old movie still picture. Here are a few inspirational photos. Let me know what you think!