The Joys of Being Engaged

Steven proposed to me on December 15h and the planning hasn't stopped since. One of the fun things we needed to do was get our engagement pictures done by our best friend and Steve's best man Judd.  Judd is an amazing photographer, but with his work schedule, he doesn't have a lot of time to take pictures other than what he sees on the adventures of his job.  So we had  to wait awhile to coordinate a day that we could all three get together when it was light outside.   We've gotten together a couple of times since he's been home from Florida.  One photo session was a random moment where Judd texted me and said he'd be there in 45 minutes and we only had 30 after that to take them. I was still at work and had about 25 minutes to get ready once I got home.  Short notice yes, luckily my hair wasn't too nasty and I had time to curl it and get dressed. Then Judd worked his magic.  

Some of these were taken on Steve's family farm and others were taken around where Judd lives. 

 This is one of my favorites (above) because it cracks me up.  Look at Steve's face.  Judd interpreted it as "don't touch my Ging" which is Steve's nickname for me. 

 We had a pose similar to this (above) when we started dating. Steve and Judd went to my parents with me and Judd took a picture of us two while we were standing in the corn crib.

 This one (above) is on of Steve's favorites.  You can guess why... firefighter t-shirt.

 This one captures us pretty well. We're always screwing around and laughing. The one below is one of my favorites too.

These are just a few.  We still have more to take too.  Its nice to be best friends with a good photographer isn't it?  I'll keep you updated on when we get more pictures.

Fabric Flowers

 I love Pinterest. Its great. I've blogged about it before. It's a great distraction and its a great place to borrow ideas. Especially for weddings :) So, I saw this little number on there on how to make cute little fabric flowers. You start out with fabric and cut it into little rectangles.

 Then, take those little rectangles and cut them into petals.  After that, make a running stitch (I think that's what its called) and pull the petals together.  Circle them up, attach the last petal to the first, tie a not and you're done!  It took no time at all and they are super cute in my opinion. 

These little pretties may cause me to stray from the paper flowers that I created.  You can read about it in my post about Centerpieces - Being Crafty Again .

 These two pictures above are of a test centerpiece that I made.  I liked this one so much that I just left it together and put it in my apartment.  So this let me test the flowers out.  The flowers are a little hard to see in the first photo and there are only two so far.  But I'm thinking that I like the fabric over the paper flowers.   The pictures below are from another post, but its just to give you an idea so you can compare the two.

Annnddd this is what Steven did while I made the flowers.  He loves his iPod.

Let me know what you think!

The Most Perfect Wedding Shoes

I'm now taking donations for the "Steph Wants These Shoes To Wear When She Marries Steven" Fund.  I affectionately call it the S.W.T.S.T.W.W.S.M.S. Fund.  I'm even going to make t-shirts for the carnival that I'm going to host to raise the money for these shoes.  Is that a bit too much?  Maybe so. Perhaps, just perhaps, I'll do what any normal person would do, which is just save up for them.  That's not as fun though.

Aren't they pretty? They're ORANGE! And PRETTY! And PERFECT! Well perfect as long as they fit properly and don't really kill my feet :) Then that would be the most amazing thing, pretty orange shoes that don't hurt my feet.  Oh and marrying Steven.... did I mention that?

Kitten would be proud.... I got crafty!

My sister, Kitten, (a.k.a. Katie) is a crafty one.  She creates great things, she's a little machine of wonder if you ask me.   I, on the other hand, am not so crafty.... I don't usually have the attention span to complete a project in one sitting. There are always exceptions to the rule however. 

So, if you read the previous post, you know that I'm busy planning my wedding, and its being planned on a budget. I don't want to say small budget, because to me, its not small at all.  Its amazing to be how much cash people can drop on a wedding.  So, to help save on some of the costs, I'm not going to have all, if any, 'live' centerpieces.  I LOATHE, DESPISE, and  DETEST silk flowers. Bleh. No. hn and NO! Funny side story, my dad doesn't like silk flowers either, he once told me that if I put them on his grave he would come back and haunt me.  Maybe that's where I get it from :)  Anywho. So, I'm getting crafty.  I've decided that I want branch centerpieces with homemade paper flowers. Here are my test babies.

This is just a circle cut into a spiral, then wrapped around itself and glued at the end.

This baby is a bit more time consuming.  You see all those petals? Yep, they're all individual petals that are individually glued and cared for.  I'm sure there is a quicker way to do it, but I did it in about a half hour or so.

Sorry for the poor lighting in the pictures...  

So, what do you think? Would you like to volunteer to help make some :)

These are the colors I plan on using to create more of these little guys.  It's good to do when watching a movie I've learned.  I now realize that I may be watching a lot of movies in my future.  Any recommendations?  I may need to go raid some movie collections so I don't watch the same thing over and over.