Week #16: MPP - Wine tasting and friends

It's been a while since I last posted images from My Photography Project. This doesn't mean that I haven't been taking new shots and practicing every week though...

Today I want to share with you some pictures I took last weekend in Franschhoek where we went wine tasting with my husband and friends that visited us from New Zealand. Even though we are in the middle of winter, the weather was just amazing and we had a great time. We all drove to Franschhoek and there jumped on the local bus/tram and visited 5 different wine farms. Here are some picture I took on the day. Not my greatest collection, but everything was shot in manual mode after lots of wine tasting ;)

Happy weekend everyone!

Our wedding | Souvenirs and Special Gifts

As you all may know, I like making jewellery. Unfortunately as I’ve been quite busy these last few months with design work, I haven’t been able to work on my sterling silver creations. But for the wedding I made some special gifts...

For all the girls that attended the wedding I hand made some colorful bracelets as souvenirs. In Argentina we have a tradition where the wedding cake has many ribbons sticking from the middle of it. At one point of the night all the girls get together and each pulls from one ribbon at the same time. At the end of each ribbon (inside the cake) there's a little charm for them to keep. One of the ribbons thought, has a ring at the end of it. In our case I made a sterling silver band and the tradition says, that whoever gets the ring, will be the next one to get married. My friend Zarah got the ring, we’ll see how long does her boyfriend take to propose… The rest of the girls who got a charm, could attach it to the souvenir bracelet they got.

For my bridesmaids I also made some special gifts. They all got a box with earrings, bracelets and pendant with their initial… I made everything in sterling silver and brass and then gold-platted it: I wish I could have been able to afford to do them all in gold but it would have been extremely expensive...

And finally for my groom, I made cufflinks and a boat shaped pin, both in sterling silver with our initials. He didn’t know about these things I’ve made for him so arranged with his brother (best man) to give it to him when they where getting ready. It seems that the surprise and letter I wrote to him, brought some tears to my man’s eyes.

I hope you also like these special gifts and souvenirs I made for our wedding...

Our Wedding Décor

 

This was the most fun part of all the wedding preparations as we did all the décor ourselves. I started about 10 month before the wedding making story boards, checking for references, mainly on Pinterest, and doing plans layout of ceremony, cocktail and main reception area. And little by little filling up boxes with all the “stuff” I’ve done. Seriusly, If I had left this to the end, we wouldn’t have made it on time.

The concept for our wedding was simple: we wanted to celebrate, we wanted a party! So we focused everything around the dancing… Our wedding was all about having fun and being happy combining both South African and Argentinean’s traditions.

Regarding colors, we love color in general, so the wedding was a carnival of color. The main colors where coral and turquoise but we included some pastel ones for the beach part and then for the reception we brought in brighter colors.

I think that sometimes people under estimate DIY but for me it was one of the best parts of our wedding. When I was standing on the dance floor and saw all the things we’ve done ourselves I thought, “This is just the start of what we can achieve together”.

Here are some pics by Maree Louw from Natural Light photography, of the general décor of our wedding day: I hope you like…

Our Wedding | DIY

I think we took wedding DIY to the next level, hehe… We didn’t only sew all the buntings, flags, pompons, ribbons and pinwheels for the decorations, but we also made all the table cloths, the tables, the bar, the gazebos, the door where I walk through at the beach, the boards where the food came out, the stamped serviettes, all the wiring of the lights, the black boards, cake toppers, souvenirs, photobooth props and backboard... I made and sew together with my mom in law, each of the cushions for the benches where the guests sat at the ceremony, painted al the vases and hand picked all the items for the table décor and of course designed and made all the stationery for the day amongst other things. But don’t get scared, this is kind of what I do for a living, heheh…

Even thought we both worked really hard, we can’t thank enough our amazing friends and families for helping us… we wouldn’t have been able to pull off this wedding without them. We literally had a team of mates helping us setting up for 3 days prior the wedding – we all worked hard but alsol had a great time…

Some pictures of the finished décor coming later today...

Our Wedding Invitations

For me, wedding invitations are a great part of a wedding: is the one thing you can work on way before your wedding day and when you send the invitations out, it's a sign that "this is really happening". 

I've seen it in many brides: that look when opening a wedding invitation and realizing that it's yours and your husbands to be names that are written there: wow! It really is magical.... From that moment on, you start feeling and experiencing a taste of what the big day is all going to be about.

I've been designing wedding invitations for many couples that have got married in the last few years but the invitation I am sharing with you today is a special one: this is our wedding invite!

I must admit, one of the things that I was most excited about the whole wedding preparation, was the idea of designing our very own wedding invitations. I've spent quite some time helping other people getting beautiful invites for their weddings and I always wondered how ours was going to look like. You might think that it was an easy job, but not at all; I think that it was the most difficult design I've ever worked on because there are so many things I like and playing the role of  both bride/client and designer, wasn't easy, hehe.

We wanted to do something special for our invites, and even though I love keeping wedding invitations in my "keepers box" where I collect all sort of beautiful papers, I'm aware that most of the people throw away the wedding invites after a while. That's why I wanted to do something that our guests could use and something so precious that if the smallest idea of throwing it away crossed their minds, they would feel really guilty, heheh.

Our wedding invitation consisted in a box with a few goodies inside:  3 cards screen printed in 2 colors on craft paper, a little tag and map to the venue and a tote bag to carry around everywhere! Of course, there was an English and a Spanish version for our guests. 

The colors we used where sea turquoise and bright coral combined with white. The theme was "Take me to the Seaside" and the mood was happy and energy-sizing with a friendly and approachable tone. Of course we played with fonts and incorporated some fun illustrations and nautical icons.

I hope you like it as much as I do!

Thank you Maree from Natural Light Photography for helping me with the photos for the post.