Crafty Bitch

Despite totally crapping out on the day of Kristin's shower, I had done a lot of work prior to my night of binge drinking. I'm not sure why I felt the need to be so damn crafty, but I think I did a pretty good job for not really being a crafter [patting myself on the back].

First - I made the shower invitations from scratch. I don't know why I insisted on doing this and I definitely took the hard road to complete it. Who knew you could purchase blank white folded cards? I wish I had known that prior to wasting several sheets of cardstock trying to figure out how to put a nice crease in the card (a butter knife is how, in case you're wondering).

So here is the outside of the invite:


That was a picture of Kristin and Jackson back when we first got our Nikon D80 camera. It always cracks me up. I printed the photos out separately and attached them to the cardstock using one of those 3-D glue dots. Oh yeah - I'm fancy.

Here is the inside of the invite:


This is probably hard to read but I included instructions for the guests that probably left most of them thinking, "What the hell is wrong with this girl?" I asked the guests to not wrap their gifts in traditional gift wrap and bags mainly because I was trying to go a little "green" with this wedding and because I wanted to spark some creativity with people. Well - half of the guests, as predicted, didn't bother to follow my instructions. But others wrapped their gifts in dish towels, pillowcases, blankets or they put things in reusable grocery bags, baskets and storage bins. So I was pretty pleased.

I had asked guests to bring photos of them with Kristin because I made an interactive shower guestbook.


Kristin likes the idea of scrapbooks but suffers from the same lack of motivation that has inflicted me when it comes to scrapbooks. So - I thought this was a cute way to incorporate her love of scrapbooks while being able to handover a completed book without too much work from me! Whoo hoo! And this was the pain in the ass print job I needed from Sir Asswipe Speedy last week. I needed this printed in scrapbook dimensions (12x12 inches) and apparently that's not easy to do.

Crafts galore!

Then I thought it would be an interesting twist to collect an assload of wine corks to serve as little place card holders (to identify food) and just to scatter around. Thanks to my kickass friends who drink lots of wine or work in establishment where lots of wine is served, I was able to collect to shit ton of them.



Can you guess how many wine corks fit into this giant cookie jar? The answer is at the end of this post.


Wow. Writing this stuff out is actually wearing me out…

So my last craft project and gift to Kristin was a giant wine bottle. Jackson proposed to her with a message in a bottle so she really wanted to incorporate this somewhere in her wedding. Someone suggested that instead of having a traditional guestbook or signboard picture, she use a bottle and have guests write down "advice" and slip them into the bottle.

Cute!

I started my quest to find a gigantic bottle. This wasn't easy. Lucky for me, the fab Italian deli we go to every Saturday for lunch has gigantic wine bottles. The owner was so nice and gave me the bottle for free (after I explained what I needed it for).

I didn't want to give Kristin just a plain gigantic wine bottle. I thought etching a "B" for her married last name would be a nice touch. And I also thought etching was going to be easy. Well I was at least right about one thing.

After I practiced on two other wine bottles (at The Mr's suggestion), I finally mastered the art of etching glass. Holy fuck - this is a pain in the ass.



Theresa gave me some shelf liner to stick to the glass. I had originally used sticker printer paper but it didn't work very well and my first 'B" looked like a big blob.

The problem with shelf liner is that it's not meant to be printed on. See those smudges? That's from my hands smearing the ink around when I was cutting the "B" out with an exacto knife. My hand was black.



To make sure all of the curves looked good and nothing was missed, I took a damp cloth and wiped off the smeared ink after I finished cutting the pattern out with the exacto knife.



The etching cream! This shit stinks.


Voila! Sorry for the craptacular picture. I think I was too excited to hold very still.

Here is a shot of my practice bottle. I don't know if you can tell, but there are several "B"s etched onto the bottle.


Look - its mama bottle and baby bottle:


The clear bottle is actually a large-ish normal wine bottle… I'm telling you, the bottle I gave Kristin is frickin' huge.

Lastly - since I was feeling poetic (I'm not sure why my craft projects all had to rhyme), I wrote up an instructional poem for the guestbook and printed off the little note cards for the guests to fill out. I included pictures of what the guests should do because according to The Mr, my poem was too long and people wouldn't read it. Thanks, hon.


Oh and if you've made it this far in the post (wow - it's really long, huh?) - there were 270 wine corks in that cookie jar.