A sweet treat – Honey wedding favors

By Anna@DirectionsNotIncluded

March 25, 2013

1 Comment

Hey there! Sorry for the lack of posts but the month of March has flown by! Partly because of work and partly because I was helping one of my best friends with her wedding.

I’m so excited to share the honey wedding favors I put together for her. We had a girls night sleepover shortly after she started planning the wedding. Lots of wine and Pinterest time led to deciding on honey wedding favors. Orange blossom honey to be exact. All to pull together a loosely themed orange wedding. I love the way they came out and most importantly, the bride and groom loved them too.

In case you want to recreate these, I used the following supplies. I’ll be more than happy to share exact websites if you are interested:

2 ounce jars with lids
orange blossom honey purchased in bulk
white and kraft paper for the personalized tags
orange and white twine
2.5″ by 2.5″muslin squares
4″ wooden honey dipper sticks

Filling the jars was much less time consuming than I expected. It was substantially cheaper to buy the jars and honey separate. Tip if you decide to do these, keep baby wipes handy to clean up spills as you go. (PS – the next three photos are iPhone photos since I expected to make a huge mess).

All the supplies together ready for assembly. This was time consuming especially since I went with the cardstock backed tags, attaching the wooden sticks, and the muslin on the tops. I don’t regret it at all because they came out just like we had imagined them.

Here is my assembly station on the coffee table in our family room. I watched old seasons of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix while I worked. Perfect distraction and way to make the assembly go faster. Coincidentally, I was watching the season that Marshall and Lily get married while doing this.

And here are the finished honey wedding favors again.

What do you think? Did you do favors for your wedding? We did super involved ones for our own wedding so of course I always get suckered in to help with favors for others

Our DIY IKEA kitchen – A very delayed reveal

By Anna@DirectionsNotIncluded

February 26, 2013

13 Comments

When I look back at the blog, I’m quite embarrassed that it has taken us this long to reveal the kitchen. We’ve been in this house for 2 years this month. By blog standards, our kitchen is nothing spectacular so it really isn’t an earth-shattering reveal. We have a pretty small kitchen and given the layout of our house it wasn’t in the cards to change that. We went with a DIY IKEA kitchen for our renovation. Overall, we love what we were able to do on a budget and with limited space.

In case you need a reminder (or you are new around here) this is what our kitchen looked like when we closed. Laminate hell, hand painted mismatched cabinets, dropped ceiling and broken appliances. Dream kitchen material. There are some great in progress photos in this post: Kitchen Progress

And this is our DIY IKEA kitchen now. This is about as finished it is going to be for a long time, and I’m quite proud of it too.

Now let me give you the tour of our approximately 8′ by 11″ kitchen. I think it might be closer to 9′ by 11′ but I’m too lazy to get up and double check so that will have to do

Our kitchen has a pass through to our dining room. Yes, the oven is on because I was multi-tasking and making myself a pizza while taking photos.

This is a real person’s house so the bag of dog treats, the night light and the printed paper towels stay in the photo. We are real and have a real kitchen. Yes, I could have spent money staging and making this perfect but that is just not the way we live.

This is not a great photo but it includes one of the mutts (Maggie) so I had to keep it. Here is the view from the kitchen towards our bar and master bedroom.
A detail shot of our concrete colored Caesarstone and my DIY subway tile backsplash. Probably my two favorite parts of this kitchen.

The controversial hardwoods in the kitchen are also a personal favorite. We have the same floors through the main living areas in the house. Our kitchen is tiny so chopping up the floor plan to add tile in the kitchen would have changed the flow of our home. Do we regret it? Nope! I LOVE the way they look against the cabinets. There may be a bit of extra maintenance required for dark floors but they are worth it. And so are our plastic rugs from Huset Shop.
Peeking into the kitchen from the bar. Before we starting designing the renovation, I was never a huge fan of white kitchen. I wanted the dark hardwoods and the hubby wanted lighter ones. I won the hardwood battle and he won the kitchen battle. It ended up being the perfect match.

So there you have it – our DIY IKEA kitchen. What do you think? The only items pending are an exhaust hood and a tiny custom edge-type cabinet we need to make to cover up the side of the stove. Both will require some creativity to get them to work in the space so they are on hold for the moment.

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Bachelorette weekend favors – DIY hangover kit

By Anna@DirectionsNotIncluded

February 21, 2013

2 Comments

Since I know we are going to get our drink on this weekend in NYC to keep ourselves warm (at least that will be my excuse!), I put together these DIY hangover kits for the girls. My bestie that was married last month had them for her out of town guests. I thought it would be a fun addition to my bachelorette weekend favors.

I purchased these little muslin bags on Amazon for cheap. There are tons of places you can get muslin bags in bulk from but Amazon was fast and easy. I used a simple freezer paper stencil to put the first aid cross on the bags using craft paint and fabric medium.

I pulled together little items that are always useful when you are hurting the morning after a night of fun. Everything was purchased at the Dollar Tree and Target so these make for very inexpensive bachelorette party favors.

Instant Starbucks Viva Coffee
Emergen-C
Advil
Pepto Bismol

Here are the DIY hangover kits all filed up and ready for our weekend of fun.

Did you have a crazy or laid back bachelorette party? We went on a weekend Bahamas cruise for mine. Living in South Florida has its perks. It was about the same cost as spending the night in a hotel but with so much more to do. It was a good mix of fun and relaxation because I’m not the crazy partying type.

P.S. – I hope you don’t mind, now through the end of this campaign in April, I’ll be reminding you all to help me share and collect funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Man & Woman of the Year Campaign to support my friend, Rachael Witte. Help us raise money for this important cause!

Bachelorette party favors – Weekend welcome bag

By Anna@DirectionsNotIncluded

February 19, 2013

1 Comment

Next month one my besties is tying the knot here in Miami. For her bachelorette party this weekend, we settled on New York since she lived there for years, many of the girls are still local, and it always is a good time. A few of us are not local so we are flying in and staying in a hotel together for the weekend. What better excuse to get adorable weekend welcome bags together as part of the bachelorette party favors.

I pulled together some cute (and inexpensive) girly items for our bachelorette party favors. Here is the round up of what I got -

Sofia sparkling wine
Natural mud face masks
Travel sized lotion
Lip glosses
Mints
Natural lip balm
Dark chocolate treats

I wrapped up all the goodies into mini white favor bags. Added some red and orange baker’s twine and a simple tag with each of the girl’s names on it. The wedding colors incorporate red and orange so it was a simple way to tie it all in.

These bachelorette party favors took no more than 15 minutes to put together. You can easily personalize these favors with goodies that fit with the theme of the wedding, location of your night out, the bride’s favorite items, or anything else you want.

I can’t wait to set them up in the hotel room when we arrive in the city. I’m getting in a day early to spend time with my uncle and a few other friends so I’ll organize everything before the girls get in.

I’m looking forward to a weekend of fun. What I’m not looking forward to is the freezing weather. At least I get to see snow!

PS – I hope you don’t mind, now through the end of this campaign in April, I’ll be reminding you all to help me share and collect funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Man & Woman of the Year Campaign to support my friend, Rachael Witte. Help us raise money for this important cause!

DIY Wedding – My very first attempt

By Anna@DirectionsNotIncluded

February 12, 2013

9 Comments

Weddings have always been one of my favorite events to plan. They are time consuming and stressful but all the DIY touches that you can do just make the day even more special. The first ever DIY wedding I planned was my very own. I think it started the addiction. Of course this was way before I knew about blogging, and Pinterest was not even on the radar. Thinking about it now, that is probably a good thing since I’m sure I would have gone a little nuts. My wallet thanks me.

I decided to dig out our wedding box from the closet to take pictures of all of our goodies from our 2005 wedding. We bought all of our paper supplies from Paper-Source, and another place that seems to have gone out of business. Paper-Source has a beautiful assortment of paper and once I used them for our wedding I was hooked.

These are the envelopes for the save the date (left) and invite (right). The colors in this particular photo came out a bit off but I’m too lazy to take the picture again. The others ones in the series are truer to color.

I designed and printed the save the dates at home. No fancy design programs or printers – just Word and a regular old laser.

Here is a glimpse inside of the invite pocket fold. The top part had our invite and the pocket held the directions and RSVP card.

Being married to a potter has its perks. Ray made over 150 bowls for our favors. Red is a really hard glaze to get right in the type of kilns he uses so we went with a light turquoise since it is my favorite color and went well with our beach wedding.

Here are the tables with our favors all wrapped up, menus which I designed and the table numbers with my favorite furry boy. Isn’t he the cutest? I wish our photos had pretty chairs in the background but alas a hurricane hit right before the wedding and those were some of the casualties of the storm.

I didn’t have anything to do with the flowers but I did love my bouquet so I’m adding a picture of that too just for kicks.

Did you make any details for your weddings? Was it before or after the age of Pinterest and blogging? Do you think there is more pressure for weddings being planned now?

P.S. – If you are thinking of planning a wedding or other event where you need to buy paper in bulk check out Paper-Source to get 30% off Paper Source solid paper & envelopes when you buy 50 packs of the same item, in the same color!

P.P.S. – I hope you don’t mind, now through the end of this campaign in April, I’ll be reminding you all to help me share and collect funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Man & Woman of the Year Campaign to support my friend, Rachael Witte. Help us raise money for this important cause!

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