Wedding Notes: Our Love for Pumpkins

{Location: Pumpkin Patch in Bonita}

Charlene, Kristine and I headed over to the pumpkin patch to 1) Buy some regular ol' pumpkins as part of the wedding decor 2) Buy a fairy tale pumpkin for the sweethearts' table and 3) Buy lots of baby pumpkins to include in the guest table centerpiece elements. Yup...that's a WHOLE LOTTA pumpkins!

{Side Note}

Here's a quick little glimpse of the guest name cards...Charlene printed out each name and attached it to silk autumn leaves.

Wedding Notes: Succulents & Such

Charlene & Enrique decided to do succulents and other desert plants in tin cans as their party favors for the guests. We bought the plants from a vendor at Kobey's Swap Meet about 2 weeks before the wedding date.

{Side Note}
These desert plants were super easy to take care of. We just watered them once a week and placed them under sunlight. They'll look as good as new on the day of the wedding :)

Charlene, along with our good friends Joann and Kristine, potted each plant into the tin cans with soil. We collected the cans over the summer (from regular canned food that we used)...a lot of people pitched in and contributed their emptied canned goods :)

Of course, Charlene & I bought our own plants to keep and care for! Funny...I think they totally match our personalities :)

{Love} Left = Charlene's and Right = Mine

Wedding Notes: A Pop of Color!

Yet another gathering this past weekend, but this time we started working on element 1 of the table centerpieces. For this element, Charlene decided to include paper flowers made from coffee filters and fabric dye. These will be placed inside a wooden crate for a nice floral arrangement.

The attendees for the first workshop this week was a family affair! Plus our good friend Kristine (who is like family already of course)!

{Love} It seems that lace was the trending theme for today's outfits :)

{Side Note} Our little junior bridesmaid here was SO ready for arts & crafts time :)

Down to the gritty work (just kidding)! We dyed a whole bunch of white coffee filters in blue and yellow. We left the brown coffee filters as is.

Charlene boiled some water, poured it into a tub and then added the blue fabric dye. We all put on our safety gloves (well, safety from getting blue fingers) and took 3-4 pieces of coffee filters, folded them in quarters and then dipped them into the blue water. We let the dye seep in for about 4-5 seconds in the tub and then pulled the coffee filters out. As we pulled it out, we positioned it upright so that the dye could seep in further into the core. We then placed the blue coffee filters on newspaper for the color to set. We did the same steps for the yellow fabric dye.

After about 5 minutes of setting, we carefully separated each layer of the coffee filters and opened them up. We placed them all on top of newspaper (on the floor) let them dry for about an hour.

{Side Note}

The floor was so pretty covered up with these blue and yellow circles!

While the coffee filters were drying, a few of us began to paint glass bottles. Charlene wanted us to only paint them half way up from the bottom. These will be used within element 1 as well.

{Love} We had a little bit of fun while glass bottle painting ;)

[Day 2] 

We continued with the centerpieces for element 1 after our bridal brunch on day 2!

After drying the rest of the coffee filters, we began to create the paper flower arrangements. We cut out the mesh wires to fit into the wooden crates. As we did this, we tried to mold the wire to create volume and height. Once the wire was secured inside the crate, we then added the brown and dyed coffee filters by wrapping it around sections of the mesh wire. For the paper flower, we twined floral wire around the base of each florette (3-4 pieces of filter paper folded together).

We were able to finish two crates today! This was so much fun! I wanted to do more but people were starting to get hungry so... hahaha! You know me...once I get something started, I want to just go go go until they're done :)

{LOVE. LOve. Love.}

Wedding Notes: Hauling in the Vintage Finds

{Location: Kobey's in San Diego}


The past two weekends have been busy busy busy. Charlene, Enrique & I have been cracking down on the wedding decor stuff and we're really trying to get all of the things we need so that we can get started on making the centerpiece elements. Charlene and I decided to create 4 different centerpiece elements, which we will vary across all of the guest tables. So...we definitely have our work cut out for us!

{Love}

Look at these pro-thrifters :)

{Location: The Antique Market in Orange County Great Park}

{Love}

The Antique Market was SO awesome! I can see how some people become so addicted to antiquing/vintage finding. Uh-oh...I could seriously see myself getting wrapped up in all this :)

All of the decor will be DIY projects hand made by myself and Charlene (with a little extra help here and there from the bridesmaids too). We bought a lot of great things from both locations. 

I'm super excited to get my hands on them and start creating already :)

Wedding Notes: Wandering in Country Roads

{Location: Downtown Orange}

This past weekend, Charlene and I went to downtown Orange to check out some vintage/antique stores. We were looking for specific items for her centerpiece elements/decor (Charlene and Enrique had recently been to this one store in downtown Orange, called Country Roads, which she also wanted me to check out with her).

Country Roads is AMAZING...it looks like a regular store from the outside, but when I stepped inside, my mouth literally dropped. It was HUGE inside and there was so much stuff to look at, I felt a bit overwhelmed but at the same time, I was in awe of everything there. All of the items were set up in sections, almost like exhibits really...and I guess each section was set up by their own vendors (i.e., different vendors selling their antiquities and vintage finds in one big warehouse).

I couldn't help but take some snapshots as we were shopping around. I love this place...I want to go there again already :)

We found a few things that we really liked (and could afford) for the wedding decor. Overall, pretty happy with what we purchased! It would have been great if we could have bought ALL the things we laid our eyes on...but this place had its share of fairly reasonable and ridiculously unreasonable price tags ;)

{Side Note}
I like these Mickey Mouse twin chairs...yet at the same time, I'm kinda creeped out by it...

This place also had an outdoor/garden area...LOVE...

I have a pretty good feeling we'll be coming back here (multiple times) for wedding decor items and just plain inspiration for ideas! I'm really excited to get started on the centerpiece elements.