Category Archives: décor

décor, DIY, Eco Wedding, flowers, Thrifty Wedding

Grow With Love

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Update on my life: Mr. Veg and I had a romantic reunion at our friends’ Dave and Heather’s lakeside wedding, I passed my written test at the RMV and am now allowed to drive in the USA (with a licensed adult), I have scoured FMIL Veg’s house and barn for wedding items, and thanks to the Salvation Army Mr. Veg finally has something to wear to the wedding.

And now I find myself with a few minutes of down time so I thought I’d keep good on my promise to delve into more detail about our seed packet favors. I’ll let you read the story behind them for yourselves, but I’ll give you a little background on the steps involved.

We bought all seeds in bulk from The Territorial Seed Company. They were very friendly and helpful on the phone. The seed packets from Territorial are so cute that I contemplated using theirs, but buying the seeds in packets is substantially more expensive than buying them in bulk. Like 10x more expensive. So, of course, we went the DIY route.


I designed the packets on good old trusty MS Word with fonts downloaded from DaFont.I then went on an odyssey to find the right paper. It was important to me that the paper was 100% recycled and bleach free, but also that it was thin enough to fold and glue easily. Trust me, if you’re thinking about folding and glueing 160 envelopes, find the thinnest paper available. So I looked in every office supply and craft store I could think of, but kept coming up empty handed. The best I could find was Paper source paper for about 30 cents per sheet. That seemed awfully expensive.

Finally, I stopped in an art supply store near where my sister lived and found handmade paper that was 100% recycled for only $8 per pack. I bought two packs and the lady gave me a 40% discount with a coupon she had behind the counter. Woo hoo! And the best part was that it was already cut in half vertically (hot dog style, not hamburger), so it saved me a bit of time. When do you ever find 4 x 11 paper? Perfect. I love when things like that happen.

So anyway, I know you’ve already seen this picture, but here is the end result.


10 days out now. Yee haw!

décor, Eco Wedding

No time!

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Two weeks to go. No time for a real post right now, Mr. Veggie flew in to the US two days ago and I am on my way up to see him for the first time since mid-June. (Pucker up Veg!, I’m-a-comin’). Then we have a wedding to go to, a conference to present at, family to visit, a driver’s license to renew, a bank account to open, oh yeah, and a few minor details to hammer out before the big day. Marriage license? Yeah, that one should probably get moved up to the top of the list.

So, sorry for the lack of witty and insightful commentary, but the least I could do is give you a sneak peek at some projects I’ve been working on this week.

Vegetable Escort Cards made from recycled craft paper cardstock and fabric scraps from Veggie sister Kale’s quilting room.

Seed packet favors. I should do a whole post on these because the story behind them is really sweet. We’ll see, I’ll try my best.

Birds for garlands. Made from cardboard gathered from our rubbish (pizza boxes, beer boxes, two-year old flowergirl’s birthday presents) and vintage sheets/ fabric scraps.

This shindig is starting to come together. I can’t believe I’m going to be a wife in two weeks. I can’t believe I get to see Mr. Veggie tonight. Have a great weekend everyone!

décor, DIY, Eco Wedding, Thrifty Wedding

I get by with a little help from my…

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…newly-found-internet-acquaintances. Such a catchy tune.
Last week I was the recipient of some major bee love.
There once was a girl so nice that she volunteered to help with cutting and glueing, the two most evil most dreaded wedding crafting jobs. Who is this saint? This happy little crafting elf? This magical crafting fairy-godmother? Why she’s EAQ219, (A.K.A. Em) wedding bee afficionado. We met at the D.C. Bee meetup two weeks ago and she volunteered to help me finish up some projects. You know I wasn’t going to let an opportunity like that slip by. So I invited her over for an afternoon crafting session while my nieces were supposed to be napping.

Still smiling even though her fingers are blistering.
Let me tell you something about Em. She is hardcore. Some people might head for the door when greeted with a pile of 160 envelopes to fold, glue, and stuff. A lesser woman might have balked at cutting corrugated cardboard when the only scissors I could find were hot pink kiddie safety scissors. Not this girl. She is epic. And, not only did she show some mad crafting skills, she also passed on some good words of advice, as only a recent DIY bride could.

Trace. Cut. Glue. Repeat.
Also, on the way back to DC from my bridal shower I swung by Mrs. Trail Mix’s house. While my nieces fought over who would get to walk her ah-dor-a-ble little puppy, her and I loaded my trunk with boxes of café lights. 500 feet of gorgeous little beauties, all in two nice nest-like bundles. If you enjoy rubix cubes, do I have a good job for you. Then, because she really is so super sweet, and was about to move into a new apartment in 3 days, she threw in some paper lanterns too. Nice! Gotta love the leftover wedding goodies. After a mere two nights of So You Think You Can Dance, I had those babies untangled and ready to hang. I am so excited about them. Like really really jazzed. Pumped, even.
Three weeks to go and I am loving the bee love. Thanks Trail Mix, thanks Em, I will be sure to pay these favors forward.
décor, DIY, Eco Wedding

Paper Galands – Help Me Decide

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I have had this project on my radar screen for a long time now. I think may even be on the original inspiration board I made about a year ago. So, with 5 weeks until the wedding, I guess its time to get going. Which means its time to decide what shape I want to make the garland. Want to help?

I will be making my garland out of salvaged cardboard boxes and vintage sheets my sister has gathered from Salvation Army and Value Village. One side will stay brown and the other side will be one of these gorgeous patterns. They will be strung from jute twine or hemp.


And here’s where you come in. I can’t decide what shape to make my garland. Originally I thought I would do birds, like the original project. I made a mock up out of paper and baker’s twine and this is how it turned out:

Then I started thinking that even though the birds are super cute, maybe they are a little trendy, and maybe there is something that represents Mr. Veggie and I a little better. So I made a garland made of leaves:

And then once I got going, I thought maybe I could make something a little more “veggie”-ish for us. So I made a garland of beans and beany leaves:
Here are all three mock-ups hanging together.
So what do you think? Should I stick with the oh-so-cute birds? Go with the pretty and natural shaped leaves? Keep it real with the beans? Can you tell what everything is? Does one stand out more than the others? Let me know.

PENGY: Can you please add a poll to this post with the following choices? -Thanks
Which shape should I choose to make my cardboard garland?
Bird’s The Word
Leaf it up to Me
String Bean

décor, DIY, Eco Wedding, lighting, Thrifty Wedding

Eco-Thrifty Lamp

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When I first decided to blog about our wedding I titled my blog Eco-Thrifty Bride. Lately I’ve been despairing about why it is so hard to find products, services, and vendors that can accomplish both. Just like “wedding”; “eco”, “organic”, and “green” are words that, once mentioned, throw up a red flag that signals a substantial price increase is impending, whether it is warranted or not. These price increases stem from a classist, elitist sentiment that “eco” products are desired by and produced for the wealthy. An assumption that self-perpetuates when such products are priced at a premium, thus denying a vast segment of the population access to products and services that healthy for both people and planet.

Well let me tell you a secret hive. You don’t have to be rich to be green. You just need to be a little creative.

Case in point: lighting for our venue.

What I was after was unique and beautiful lighting option. I found Eco (at a cost of $379 NZD) and Thrifty (made of plastic and shipped many miles).

Eco v. Thrifty

And then I thought to myself. “Veggie. You have a lot of time. You know creative people. Let’s see what you can come up with”. And I gathered some amigos and got to work.

I looked at a picture of the David Truebridge design I most admired and made a template for one of the pieces. The trickiest part of this was knowing how big to make it. I guessed 16cm, about 6 inches. Why? I dont know. It just seemed to look pretty good. The next trickiest part was knowing how many to cut. We thought it looked like it was made up of two halves, each comprised of one central flower, surrounded by five other flowers. After careful deliberation we decided on 60, 12 flowers of 5 petals each.

Teresa looks happy, but really she is grinning in the sheer agony of the hand cramps that ensue after cutting 30 flower petals out of corrugated cardboard.

It was a lot of tracing and a lot of cutting. Which brings me to another point. The Truebridge lamps are made of wood, but not possessing the skills to cut wood, nor an eco-friendly supply, we chose to work with a slightly more availble and maleable material, cardboard.

Dang. That was a lot of cutting. I hope 60 was enough.

After we had cut all of our pieces, we assembled them into 12 flowers, and sat and looked at the picture again.

Juan is an engineer. Even he was confused. Mr. Veggie is laughing because we got him to say “cinco”. Don’t know why that’s funny? Ask a friend from Spain to tell you the rhyme they say when someone says “cinco”.

We persisted and eventually the globe started to take shape.

Here we are celebrating the realization that 60 was in fact enough petals, and we don’t have to cut any more. Mr. Veggie is not as excited as we were. He obviously was not involved in the cutting of the petals.

And then we were done.

Hooray! Que Guay!

Here is our final product in action:
From CFL to OMG.

I love how our prototype turned out. There are a few things that I might do differently in the next edition, but overall this project was a win! Total cost was $10 NZD for a package of brads (those gold little attachment thingies) and about 3 hours of our time. Eco thrifty success.
décor, flowers, lighting

You may have gone too far if…

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…after searching the internet for hours for pictures that sum up how you want your tables and lighting to look, you decide that none can accurately express your vision and you sit down with your trusty MS Word and create something like this:

Umm, yeah. I’ve clearly fallen over the edge of the bridal abyss. Time to come back to reality.

(On the other hand. I’m getting really excited about how the tables will look. Grey things= mason jars from FMIL Veggie’s barn. Blue things= vintage bottles that my sisters and I dug up in our backyard when we were little. Cylinders= Canned Veggies. Globes= Home made lanterns. Strung lights= Cafe lights if I can miraculously find them for free, or christmas lights.)

When did you know you had gone too far?

décor, flowers

Adding Greenery without adding Green

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Veggie sis Kale and I spent a marathon wedding skype session yesterday talking about wedding details that need actioning, need revising, and some that hadn’t even crossed my radar screen yet. Don’t you love older sisters? They’re so organized and handy.

One thing Veggie Sis Kale brought up was a back-up plan for centerpieces in case our flower growers came up a bit empty handed. I don’t mean to doubt the fabulous efforts of our flower team, but stuff happens. Hurricanes. Frosts. Drought. Forgetfulness. Wilting. All of these things could majorly effect the outcome of our home-grown lovelies.

While perusing the internet later that day I think I found a good solution that can supplement our flowers, uses recycled materials, is cheap, and is doable in the short 7 weeks that I will have in the U.S. before our wedding.

Bingo. How cute are these?

Hooray for beautiful edible greenery. Arrugula, chard, lettuce, yum. If I plant them right when I get home I can definitely have some lettuces, chards, and possibly some herbs by wedding day. They are pretty small, so packing them into boxes and driving them up to camp shouldn’t be a problem. And, if our guests get a little hungry and feel the need to add some roughage to their diets, they can dig in during the reception.

To make them a little less fiesta-y and a little more “our wedding-y”, I’m thinking about wrapping them in paper like this. I could even try to find an old horticulture book with fun diagrams to wrap them in.

Sweet. One issue dealt with. Or rather, planned to be dealt with. About a million to go.

décor, lighting, venue

Questions Answered. Questions Formed.

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Mamma Veggie came through big time this week. You see, we are about 4 months (yikes! 3 months) away from wedding day and I still hadn’t seen actual pictures of the inside of our venue. There are numerous reasons for this. Because of the whole double booking debacle, we were in a bit of a rush to book a new venue. Which meant booking based on website pics only. Granted this picture is gorgeous, but it leaves a lot to the imagination… namely the entire interior.

I’ve been asking for interior pics, but the camp director’s wife just had a baby and so he’s been a little out of the loop lately. Which is totally understandable. Oh yeah, and then there’s the fact that we are planning from approximately 8 billion miles away and so there’s no way that we could actually go visit the venue ourselves.

I was starting to freak out a little.

How could I plan lighting like this without knowing what ugly fluorescent monsters we might be dealing with?

How do I know how many poufs I need to make to make this dream come true, without knowing what the ceiling is like?

But, true to form, Mamma Veggie pulled through. Thanks to her driving what I am guessing was about 2 hours out of her way on a recent trip, I now can put to rest some of the nightmares running through my head.

Here is the interior of the dining hall.
Looks great! Dinner on one floor and dancing on the other. I think my DIY lampshade idea will work perfectly with their existing globe lights and my poufs might just work along the slanted roof of the lower level. Ugly Chairs. Hmph.

But wait. What’s this? Pics of our rainy-day ceremony backup location, the Play House.

Photos by Mamma Veggie.

And some new questions have emerged. The biggest of all being, “Can I let a beautiful room like this go to waste, or should we move our reception here?”. Of course it would be easier to have it in the dining hall where there is a kitchen, and tables, and chairs, and cutlery… and a parking lot. But its just so pretty. It makes me think of my original idea of having our reception in a barn.

Convenience or beauty? I’m torn.

décor, lighting

I Love Lamp

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I have been in love with this lampshade ever since it enticed me to enter my favorite store when we moved to Raglan about 2 years ago. It has been sitting there in the window teasing me ever since.


But wait, it has cousin. A beautiful cousin. A cousin that I must have.

I think I can. I think I can. I think I can… do these myself. Or something like them. I’m thinking cardboard instead of wood veneer would make these beauties a bit more affordable, easy, and recycled.

I certainly don’t want to take away any business from the amazingly talented kiwi who created these masterpieces, so please, someone who can afford one of these, buy one, or several. I’m sure they are much prettier and better constructed than my cardboard counterparts will be.

I’ll keep you updated.