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

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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.

Sharing at Link Parties:

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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!

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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!

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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!

The post DIY Wedding – My very first attempt appeared first on Directions Not Included.

For these people in my life, the many others fighting it now, and those who have sadly lost their battles, I’ve volunteered to help my friend Rachael raise money through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Man & Woman of the Year campaign. Rachael is one of the nominees for Woman of the Year in South Florida. The 10-week campaign is a competition for each nominee to raise a minimum $20,000 – all of which goes to fight cancer. The nominee who raises the most money wins the title but in reality everyone wins because it all goes to a great cause.

I’m so excited to help drive this campaign to bring funds to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. It even let’s me get crafty How easy is it to miss donation request envelopes from charities? A plain letter-sized envelope will always get lost in the sea of bills and junk mail so I used some washi tape and stamp to get the recipient’s attention. Hopefully this helps us get the donations rolling when we send them out this week to our personal contacts.

All I ask of you, is to consider sharing this link and campaign to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. If you have a dollar to share, please consider taking a minute to donate through our page. Every dollar is a dollar towards a good cause.

The post Crafty for a cause – Crafty envelopes and a call for donations appeared first on Directions Not Included.

These paper heart chains are one of the easiest projects out there. Mix up some of your favorite color combinations and you have a perfectly simple Valentine’s Day craft. They would also work in other colors for a bridal or baby shower.

I cut up red, white and pink paper into one inch strips from the 8.5″ side of regular sized paper. I then cut those in half. No need to be perfect with the cuts. I promise you that once these are hanging you will not notice.

Match up two pieces together and then fold them over to form a heart.

Then attach to more pieces to the bottom of the heart facing up. When you staple them all together, they will look like this. 

Keep on going following the same steps until you reach your desired length. I mixed up the colors to keep it interesting without paying too much attention to the pattern.

I’m so happy how quickly this came together and how cute the final product is. The paper heart chains are simple without being overly cutesy. We are going to hang these in our reception entrance at the office.

Do you decorate for Valentine’s Day? Have any Valentine’s Day crafts you have finished? Share your ideas!

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It is really not a big deal but it drove me crazy. Cleaning under the cabinets, the ugly cabinet feet showing, and dragging the cat from under the cabinets on a regular basis were enough to drive me to nagging. And nagging I did. This is a project I would have done on my own MONTHS ago but I needed him to use the table saw at work to trim down the pieces to fit. So I stared at this gap forever….

I’m happy to announce that after maybe 45 minutes of work that looked something like this…

We ended up with finished edge under our cabinets. Woohoo! I know the cat is probably pissed beyond belief that she cannot crawl under there anymore but I am happy.

Stay tuned. I still have not done a full reveal of our kitchen but I’m prepping to do it soon. Just need needs a few finishing touches. Do you have any projects that have taken forever to finish?

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Source: Suncrest Sheds

This room needs a huge amount of work before we can move in but unless I win the lotto, it ain’t happening. In the meantime, the one project I want done is to close off the master from the family room. There used to be double doors there but the entrance to the room is on the other side now and there is no need for this hole. I hate having to explain this randomness every time someone new comes over. Or the “Why isn’t this closed yet?” questions…or maybe those are just in my head

This room has come a long way but still needs a bit of work until I can cross it off the list.

The ceiling. We did a ton of work on the exposed beam ceiling last year but stalled on the finishing touches. It still needs to be stained completely and the finished edge needs to be added. It is painful work. Try standing on a ladder all day doing that. No fun at all but it has to get done.

What’s on your list for this year? Any fun weekend plans? I’m a bridesmaid this weekend so it is wedding fun all weekend long

The post The list that probably won’t happen – 2013 house goals appeared first on Directions Not Included.

I had every intention of finalizing it yesterday but instead I was showing a good friend and her husband around Miami and indulging in one very large mojito.

Hope you had a good weekend! Hopefully I’ll be sporting a brand new look in the next few days.

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