Wednesday, February 25, 2009
I'm not dead!
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Spiffing up our invites - the envelope liners
After making several test liners, I ended up deciding that I wanted to get the actual invites before deciding on a final liner. I'm glad I waited - some of the liners I liked the best by themselves actually didn't look as well with the invitations as the final liner I went with.
Here's the liner we went with in the end:
Last tip - when making these, don't stack them in a pile while drying. I managed to stick several together because I was dumb enough to do this.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Ready to mail!
I'll have pictures and directions for the rest of the parts of our invites tomorrow.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
My weekend project
Friday, September 19, 2008
Our Cake Topper
We will be having a doughnut cake like above (ok - maybe a tiny bit smaller) on our junk food buffet at midnight. I'm on the hunt for a rather large vintage cupcake topper in a wedding theme to throw in the top - the uglier, the better. Anyone else looking for something fun for their cake?
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Hot Chocolate & Hot Apple Cider Bar
MIX-INS:
•Coffee options - instant espresso powder or Espresso Shots
•Crumbled up candy bars (Heath, Milky Way,3 Musketeers, Snickers, or Butterfingers)
•Truffles (cappuccino, dark chocolate, raspberry)
•Miniature baking chips (semisweet, peanut butter,white chocolate, butterscotch or mint)
•Caramel syrup or caramel squares
•Peppermint candy pieces, smashed
•Eggnog
•Flavored syrups of all sorts by Torani or Da Vinci
•Peanut Butter
•Red hot candies
TOPPINGS:
•Cinnamon sugar
•Candied ginger
•Orange twists
•Chocolate shavings
•Cocoa powder
•Fresh mint leaves
•Grated nutmeg
•Cayenne pepper
•Marshmallows (regular or chocolate ones or try online for coconut, cinnamon, caramel and peppermint)
•Whipped cream (regular and flavored - see recipe below)
STIRRERS:
•Rock-candy swizzles
•Peppermint sticks
•Pretzel rods (dip them into melted chocolate and coat with candy sprinkles)
•Cinnamon sticks
LIQUEURS:
•Grand Marnier (orange flavored)
•Kahlua (coffee flavored)
•Frangelico (hazelnut)
•Godiva chocolate liqueur
•Malibu rum - sounds weird but tastes heavenly!
Flavored Whipped Cream: Whip 1 pint of heavy whipping cream to the soft-peak stage. Add 2 tablespoons powdered sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and the flavoring of your choice. Store chilled (up to an hour) until ready to use. Here's an example of a flavor combination: To make chocolate-pecan whipped cream, add 1 tablespoon pecan extract and 1 tablespoon cocoa powder.
I couldn't find much for hot cider. Of course you've got to have cinnamon sticks for stirring. I did find a few liqueur suggestions. Any other ideas?
•Hotdamn!
•Applejack in cider is my go-to fall thermos sipper. It's great for hay rides and haunted houses!
•Whiskey
•Apple brandy
Email woes
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Spiffing up our invites - the leaf inserts
That's the Boy burning the copy onto a Gocco screen. I suggest ordering extra screens when you buy a Gocco. It's much less nerve wracking if you know you've got several backup screens at the ready.
Inking up the screen with gold ink. We bought this ink from Northwood Studios.
Printing the first one!
Getting into the groove now. That's the drying rack with cards stacked up. If you're going to be doing a lot of big Gocco projects, you might want to think about buying one or two more.
That's a leaf that's been printed and cut out. We used scissors on the first few but quickly changed to an exacto knife.
This is where the Boy thought he might need to reink the screen.
As you can see above, using the Gocco wears your ass out!
LESSONS LEARNED:
If you're going to cut out a shape, if it wouldn't be a hard shape to line up with the words on the screen you burn, cut the shape out first, then Gocco it. Since we were going to have to squeeze our words into our leaf shapes, it seemed easier to just Gocco the leaf shape on the paper as well. That almost made it impossible to cut out the leaf shape with scissors without leaving some of the gold leaf outline around the edges. We remedied that by cutting out the leaves with an exacto knife. This isn't quick but it does look nice and the Boy watched football while doing it. The differences aren't really noticeable in pictures but they are in real life. The leaf we cut out with scissors was also fussed over several times, just to get most of the gold outline gone. The exacto knife takes a little longer at first but then it's done.
Above is the scissor leaf
Above is the exacto leaf