Reader Question: The Fascinator

Reader Question: My question for you is specifically about your fascinator flower and veil. I love it! I'd seen and saved the image months ago but could never find where it was from. Did you make it/buy it? Do you have any advice about how I could make or buy the same?

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I made my fascinator and intended to do a tutorial ages ago, but after attempts to make fascinators for a few friends I realized I couldn't recreate what I did well enough to feel comfortable sharing my methods. But, with the help of a few other tutorials, I'm going to do a quick write up of what I did here.

To start with, this tutorial seems pretty good, as does this one. If what I'm writing makes no sense, maybe try one of those?

Both are similar to what I did, in that i started with a felt base (mine was two layers glued together). I then glued my first layer of feathers down and waited for them to dry, then my second layer of feathers and let them dry.

For the flower I took apart a fake flower I liked the shape of and used it as a template to cut out new "petals" from raw silk I owned (you could just use a pre-made flower, but I liked the color/texture of the silk I had). I sewed and used a tiny bit of glue to attach the longer feathers to the center of the flower, and then sewed the stones I used (they were actually stone beads) through the center of the petals to stick them all together. I wrapped ribbon around the top of a hair comb and sewed that to the felt on the bottom of the fascinator.

The veil was actually entirely separate. For that I removed a piece of vintage veiling from one of the way too many vintage hats I own. I scrunched up one side of it until I liked the shape, sewed that together with white thread, and then attached it to my hair using bobby pins!

I did base my fascinator design on the ones made by k. autumn, so she'd be a good place to start if all of this looks totally overwhelming. One of my friends had a k. autumn fascinator and loved it. I will say it might be worth trying to do it yourself first if you are on a budget. I spent a total of about $15 making mine, and I know the pre-made ones run at least $100. Hope that helps!

On my feet

By far the most frequently asked question I've received from readers about my wedding is where I found my red shoes.

The shoes don't say on them and since the box is long gone I wasn't really sure. Until person number one-hundred or so asked me today and I realized I should stop sending y'all to Anthropologie, begging them to sell you shoes that I'm sure they haven't had in months. So I got my act together and realized they came with a cloth bag that I was sure I didn't toss. I dug around a bit, and Ta Da! I have answers...

The shoes are by UK designer Miss L Fire. And while I didn't see my particular shoes on the website, she makes some other dang cute shoes.


Hope that helps!

DIY: Polaroid Photobooth

Like many who have come before us, we really wanted a photobooth at our wedding. But, the cost of renting a "real" booth was far too high, so we went diy.

We wanted people to take pictures for us to keep, but also be able to take some home, so we decided to go the Polaroid route. We already had the camera (we found it by the side of the road, in a junk pile, right after we started dating).

Of course this came right around when they decided to take the film off the market, so the price of Polaroid film shot way up. We bought some of the film before the crisis, but we ended up scavenging eBay for most of it. All in all I believe we purchased around 200 shots worth of film for 100 people (we didn't use all of it). I've also heard that Fuji is now making Polaroid 600 film, so that should make it easier for those of you who want to try this.
While some people have a designated picture taker, we knew our friends would be all over taking Polaroids so we figured they could switch off being picture taker and model. That worked out just fine and the booth was literally full all day while people were setting up, all night, and into the next day as we were cleaning up!
To make the backdrop for the photobooth we purchased two sheets of fabric (three yards of each). One was a regular sized fabric, and the other was upholstery fabric from Ikea. I'd recommend upholstery fabric because the heavier weight hangs better and the extended width allows more people to stand in front of it.

To our advantage, we were able to just tack our fabric to my parent's deck and use their porch lights to light it. You could also make a wood frame to attach the fabric to, hang a line from trees and attach the fabric to that, or nail it to a wall.

On the deck we put a table with the film, a board for people to post pictures on, and several costume items. For the costumes we used things I had lying around my house, plus a few purchased pairs of crazy $1 glasses. And yes, I have hats and fur coats and eye patches just lying around. The felt mustaches I made.

And of course, as some of these pictures exhibit, our photographer couldn't help but snap a few pictures of people using the booth as well. They loved it!

DIY: Gocco Invitations

How did I not write about our invitations? Perhaps I blocked them out because they were so. much work. After they left my house I was happy to have them out of sight, out of mind.


Our invites were entirely designed and created by little ol' me (using purchased art...I'm not an artist!). P. bought me a gocco for my birthday so the invites were really my first project using the gocco. I highly recommend practicing a bit more before you create your invites. The gocco isn't hard to use once you get the hang of it, but we burned through several frames and lots o' ink before we figured out how to burn the screens to create clean, crisp pictures on the other side.

Gocco, straight out of the box, with computer tutorial.

There were papers everywhere. Everywhere.

Our invitations had four components. The actual invite, the response card, an info sheet, and the envelope.
This image is probably the closest to the actual color of the paper (which came from Paper Source). For the envelope I handwrote a screen using the gocco pen and then printed them so we wouldn't have to handwrite a return address on each envelope. As a sidenote, we no longer live at that address so good luck stalking me there :)

While I wanted to use vintage stamps, that ended up being a cost that I couldn't justify. My way of getting around using the flag stamps (the only stamps available when I was sending out invites), was to use a variety of smaller amount stamps. This involved running around to four post offices who looked at me like I was a crazy person for buying hundreds of 5cent stamps.

Our invitations were simple, using an image from Nikki McClure, one of my absolute favorite artists. The text is in a dark brown color, with gold ink for the image.

Our info cards used two screens: one for the image done in gold ink and another for the text, done in a raspberry color. We intended to have driving directions on the back of this sheet, but for some reason could not get the screen to print clearly so after several ruined screens we just scrapped the idea and stuck directions on the website.


You may notice that on our reply card we didn't really make it clear that people should still write their name if they weren't planning on attending. Several people responded with "no" responses and no names. We had to guess based on postage and process of elimination who those people were. Kind of a pain.

So all in all I really liked how they turned out. They aren't professional. They aren't letter pressed. But they were fairly cheap. For save the dates, all the gocco supplies, paper, and stamps we spent a total of $310.

And, since I'm sure someone will ask, here is our save the date. We made my sister take the pictures of us lying under my parent's apple trees holding blank pieces of paper, but wouldn't tell her why. She thought we were crazy. I added in the text after the fact. We printed them using VistaPrint, with a discount code, and I think we paid around $15 total.


Thanks for all the questions! Keep them coming!

DIY: Making Mason Jar Lamps

Several people have asked how we created the mason jar candle holders. While I don't have the tools here to do a good step-by-step with pictures, here's what I've got using one of the already made holders.

Tools:
-Empty jars with labels removed
-Sand
-Tealights
-Wire (I *think* the wire we used was mostly 20 gage...we found two different spools of wire in my parent's garage, so we used that.)
-Wire cutters or planting sheers (something that will cut through the wire you have).
-Needlenose pliers

1. Wrap the wire around the jar, under the lip, leaving about an inch of slack in the wire and cut.
2. Twist the wire together to close the loop, but still make sure that the wire is a bit slack.

3. Cut another length of wire to use as the "hanger." Mine were all around a foot long, maybe a bit longer. We did different lengths so they'd hang at different levels. Bend the wire into a big "u" shape.

4. Twist the ends of the hanger wire so that they form a "u" facing out. The pictures show the ends closed already. I felt like having the hooks face out made them more securely attached to the lip wire, but maybe I was being crazy.

4. Hook the hanger wire onto the wire around the lip of the jar (this can be slightly tricky if you don't leave enough slack in the wire around the jar).

5. Tighten the lip wire by twisting it more with the pliers until it feels securely on there.
6. Close the hooks on the hanger wire with the pliers (the pictures show this step already done).

7. Fill with about an inch of sand and stick in a candle!

Let me know what questions you have. We used one of the long lighters to light everything so we could put the candles in ahead of time, but if you don't want to buy one of those you could just stick the candles in as you light them at the wedding.