j's faux shower

A few months ago, a good friend of ours visited from DC and decided to throw J a faux-bridal shower because she won't be able to make it to the real shower and wedding. Planning this faux-shower was accomplished remotely with W from DC and M and I from Boston. We had the aid of Google Docs for logistical detail spread-sheeting and Google Wave for sharing inspiration boards and getting everyone's comments in before making decisions! Online share sites are the way to go with event planning among multiple people. 

Now on to the faux-shower! Our theme was Fondue and

and Yellow and Orange DOTS. Since this was a surprise shower, we weren't able to tell J to cancel her dinner plans, so we tried to make our party light and dessert like... but as you can tell, we planned a full meal. J two dinners that night that's fo-sure!

The first couple of times I made letter signs, I ran out of letters or had the letters flip upside down whenever someone walked by and exposed the white backside. This time, I learned and printed double sided! Twice the amount of letters making them 3D and okay to be seen on all sides!

The dot banner was a new creation, and after making them, I realized printing double the circles to hide the ribbon would make it look even better. I have a huge spool of fishing wire that I wasn't able to to locate for this event, but I suppose that would be a good solution too.

Now J was at a dinner that was roughly about 2 hours long... in that time we decorated the place, prep-ed all the food and W baked this Chinese Cake in like 45 min! yup! You got that right! Chinatown Chinese Cake in 45 min! And Tasted fabulous!

M also made her famous mango pudding! Every party has to have multiple desserts!

And finally, to end the night, a party favor and activity....

Fabric? Fleece? Yup! Tie-Blankets... One for each of us! :)

And that concludes are wonderful faux-shower! Thanks to W and M for joining me in putting this faux-shower together! I had fun, that's fo-sure! =P

how to blog when you have a full time job

The hardest part about keeping a blog is posting on a consistent basis. Consistency is key because you don't want your readers to go for months without seeing any new content or grow tired of checking your blog (if they don't RSS) and then all together stop checking your blog for new posts. And of course, to continue to professional develop, sharing one's work and getting the collective comments of the crowds is key.

So here are some tips i've gathered along the way to make consistent blog posting easier.

1. As ideas come to mind I always try to log-in to my blog and write a post with the title and a few words in the body to remind me to go back when i have more time to fill the post out. Then just save the post, and wait to publish later. This way, I don't lose good ideas and i'll always have a backlog of blog posts to write and not be dry of post ideas!

2. Scheduling posts, helps with consistency. I work full time. So when I finally get home and have time to write a blog post and publish it, it's usually in the late hours of the night and the wee hours of the morning. I suppose i could just have the posts pop-up on my blog at like 3am, but there's a nice feature that I like to take advantage of. I talked about saving posts for later just before, but let say you're not just saving an idea, but you've actually completely finished writing a post? Well, I usually save and then choose a time for the post to publish, go live on my blog. I like to pick around 10 or 11 in the morning to get folks both on the East Coast and West Coast as they are starting off their days checking out their blogs. I tend to think that getting people at the beginning of the day might be better because they are more focused rather than at the end of the day when they are tired of work. But, that of course is a matter of opinion :) And to get back to the working full time thing, i'm usually too tired to write a blog post when I get home from work? So what do I do? I set aside a few hours on the weekend to write all the weeks blog posts, and then schedule them throughout the week. Isn't that great? You can schedule the time of day and the actual day you want your posts to go live :) This scheduling makes you look like a super productive individual huh? oops! gave out my secret!

3. Keep a list of templated blog posts. So let's say you've run out of new ideas and you don't have any more saved blog ideas to fall back on. What do you do? You need to keep the blog rolling right? Well, I keep a list of templated blog posts that I can write when i'm stuck. Not every blog posts needs to be the most innovative idea and in a fresh format. For example, I have a template for blogging about "event details" it usually starts with a summary of an event, then pictures with descriptions of the event details. Thus, i have a template saved that goes
[Event description]
[photo of overall event]
[description of event detail]
[event detail photo]
....and then rinse and repeat until you're done talking about the event :)

In the end, if you've taken a hiatus from blogging, don't be afraid to just jump right back in and start posting. Life happens, even with all the tips and tricks up your sleeve.

Happy blogging!

Yellow Going Away Tea Party

*repost from other blog, still trying to figure out how to export my old blog, but since the party planning season is beginning i thought a refresher from last year would be a great way to start! I have three large events i'm coordinating with many details that i hope to sharing with you in the coming few weeks! Stay tuned!*

2 months ago i said that decorations from the tea party would be coming up soon... well... at the time i didn't think it would actually take me two months... but at least now i have some funny commentary about the decorations to share with you too.

so our theme was love in  yellow and grey :) you'll notice from before that all the foods were yellow. well i tried to stick to that theme with the decor.

since last season's centerpiece rage was all about the lemons and limes, i decided to give it a try. whenever i think of lemon/lime centerpieces i think of the jennifer aniston, vince vaughn movie (Jen: what are these? (holds up brown bag with 3 lemons) vince: you asked for lemons. what my baby wants my baby gets. Jen: there are 3 lemons. i asked for 12. baby wanted 12!) so with that in mind, i went to russos and bought 10 lemons and 12 limes cause lemons were 5 for a dollar and limes were 6 for a dollar).
no close shot of the lemon/lime centerpieces cause well.... they didn't actually look like i wanted them too. with the smaller vases you can only fit like 5 limes/lemons and then there's soo much empty space still left in the case. for lemon/lime centerpieces i would recommend tall long vases or candy jars. though i would have to say that the centerpieces were the easiest to do of all the decor that i did. you just stick them in a vase :) and maybe wash the fruit if it was dusty.



fresh flowers. i can't say enough about having fresh flowers, when done right really brings a different air to the room. the intention was to make carnation balls over white square vases (ala spring martha stewart inspiration), however, we ran out of time. thus, just a normal display of flowers this time.



i tend to see carnations as a cheap flower that i wouldn't want in any nice arrangement (ala devil wear's prada and meryl streep specifically requests not a single carnation be seen). however, recently i've seen large clusters of carnations put together that have changed my mind about the versatility of these cheap fresh flowers. so for those of you who don't like carnations as much as i don't... i recommend using them in large, closely arranged, bunches, makes them look much classier like a peony or small english tea roses.

along with fluffy flowers, i tried my hand at tissue paper flower pomeranders. in theme with the grey and yellow...and finally we put our "interesting," vintage mirror in our living room to use!


cheapest of all my decor purchases! tissue paper comes in like 50 sheet packs for like a dollar at ACMoore. so we've had these hanging up for the last 2 months and many people have come through our apartment since then, and the only person who recognized what these were, were of course jarsofc1ay, thank goodness cause the were for her party. but one resounding question from guys has been... "why do you have loufa's hanging up in your living room" or "why do you have sponges on strings here?" yeah... oh well i guess these are lost on some people.

oh what do you do with leftover flowers that don't fit into a pomerander?

stick them on a plate =P

to add a little to the cupcake plates one of my roommates decided to cut out designs out of tissue just like we would cut designs for snowflakes! brilliant! fast, easy, and cheap! and look sooo classic!


i guess that concludes the first tea party at newberne adventure :)
thanks for following along!

its in the details

some call it quirky,  some find it slightly obsessive, but, i admit, details at weddings always make my heart flutter with glee! here are some details from a wedding in Seattle that i attended at the end of march. this was a beautiful spring wedding with many intricate details of cherry blossoms and pink and green accent colors!

the bride added a personal touch by taking photos of numbers from her life and her husband's life and using them as table numbers. on the back of each the table numbers where stories of where the numbers came from.

for the sign-in guest book, guests were asked to write wishes, notes, and fun things for the bride and the groom. each guest put a sheet of paper in a numbered envelope. each number corresponded to a day in the first 100 days of their marriage! what a great way to keep their wedding memories going even past the big day! also notice the cherry blossom theme in the framed instructions and flower cutouts on the envelopes!? and of course the matching gray ribbon with the pewter dresses that the bridesmaids wore!

i love when the cake theme matches the rest :) wonderful spring cake with cherry blossoms made of fondant.

you can't see it in the picture, but the cranes have cherry blossom or some sort of flowers on them :) these cranes were used as seating cards for each of the guests and doubled as wonderful table adornments!

down to the lovely favors... cherry blossom embossed glass coasters and a beautifully hand stamped tag with of course... an embossed cherry blossom!

menu cards were backed in pewter paper with the themed cherry blossom stamp :)

the lovely romantic glow of candle light with lanterns and cherry blossoms cast a beautiful shadows of cherry blossoms on our table as the sun set for the night and the reception went on.

thank you for such a beautiful wedding j&h! often the small details that the bride sweats over for days and weeks and months don't get noticed by anyone but herself. so be sure to take a closer look the next weeding you attend and enjoy the small ways the themes and personality of the couple is weaved into everything. and tell the couple how much you appreciate all the effort and thought :)