On being green

One of my 101 in 1001 goals is to "cultivate five habits to make my life more green." I'm happy to say I cultivated my first new habit this month! Instead of Clorox wipes (which are wasteful, because each cloth goes in the trash post-use, and possibly harmful to my environment or the environment in general), I now use J.R. Watkins All Purpose spray in lemon, paired with old rags, to clean all surfaces. The rags go right in the wash when they're dirty.



Besides smelling delightful and being ammonia, animal-testing, dye, phosphate, and bleach free, this spray cleans like a champ! It's safe for tile, counters, wood, appliances, sinks, and walls, so it's pretty much one-stop cleaning in this house now. Plus, the label is pretty pretty pretty.

Anyone have a suggestion for what my next new green habit could be? Here are a few things we already do:

-- Turn off as many lights as possible, as often as possible
-- Turn the heat down in the winter (approximately 61) and the AC down in the summer (approximately 72)
-- Recycle plastic, glass, metals, and paper
-- Try to ride our bikes on short errands (admittedly, we could be better at this)
-- Use cloth instead of paper napkins at meals (my favorites, usually)
-- Bring leftovers to work in reusable containers
-- Print on the reverse of a used sheet when possible
-- Use CFL bulbs instead of normal incandescents
-- Wash all clothes in cold water
-- Grow some of our own vegetables and herbs
-- Drink water purified with a Brita filter and carried in an aluminum bottle
-- Borrow books from the library or read them on John's Kindle
-- Recycle all old electronics, including cell phones and computers (Best Buy takes them for free!)
-- Carry home groceries in reusable bags
-- Donate or sell old clothes and items instead of throwing them away. We also try to buy used when possible!
-- Pay bills and receive bank statements online

A few ideas I'm interested in trying:

-- Switching from paper towels to unpaper towels (I KNOW J is going to resist this one)
-- Switching from plastic storage containers to glass (coveting these ones)
-- Switching from plastic produce bags to muslin ones (like these, these, these, or this one)

What do you think? Any suggestions? I'm all ears!

Bonus for making it this far: a pretty camellia photo from our trip to the Duke Gardens this weekend (with Meredith!).



P.S. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I would recommend checking out this post, this post, or this NY Times article.

Board No. 87: Plum and evergreen for Caroline

(Click to enlarge!)

My good friend Caroline is getting married next January in Massachusetts. I'm so excited she's having a winter wedding! I think they're beautiful, but quite rare. I'm also excited about her color palette, but I'll let her tell you a bit more about that. Here are the guidelines she gave me when she asked me to put together an inspiration board:

"Colors: some combination of a deep green, plum or violet, silver, and ivory/white. I like the idea of my two bridesmaids in a shade of silver with more colorful bouquets, but I'm also wary of a silver color washing them out...what do you think? I'd also like to keep a winter-y, natural and organic feel but without doing a literal interpretation of a snow-covered evergreen forest..."

Doesn't that sound beautiful? In addition to shades of evergreen and plum, I love the idea of incorporating wood elements to bring in the natural and organic feel Caroline is looking for -- escort cards tacked to a stack of cut wood, silvery birch elements either in centerpieces or framing the ceremony space, pinecones tucked into bouquets or used as boutonnieres, tree stump rounds standing in for cake plates.

I think gray bridesmaid dresses are beautiful, though personally I would steer clear of a metallic silver because I think Caroline's right, it might wash out the girls. Plum, as pictured in this board, is another gorgeous option.

Other things I love about this board? The centerpieces of massed carnations in faux mercury glass bowls, the weathered lanterns (which would also be beautiful as centerpieces!), and the ceremony space, with all that weathered wood and those cream pillar candles.

Caroline, I hope this has been helpful! Ladies and gents, if you like this post, you might want to check out the Pinterest board where I've been collecting ideas. There's a gorgeous bouquet, a beautiful winter portrait, and a pair of perfectly purple velvet heels, to start.

The Details:

First row, left to right: ceremony photo by Thayer Allyson Gowdy via Snippet & Ink, photo by Carla Ten Eyck via Elizabeth Anne Designs, rootbeer milk photo by Aaron Delesie via Martha Stewart Weddings

Second row: carnation centerpieces by Blush Floral Design, boutonniere photo by Anna Sawin via Style Me Pretty

Third row: lantern photo by Steve Steinhardt via Style Me Pretty, birch and plum bridesmaid dress photos by Justin & Mary Marantz

I stop writing the poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.

-- Tess Gallagher

Image by Beaux Arts Photographie via Style Me Pretty. Read up on other Friday poems here.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

As an Irish dancer for many, many years, I figured I'd share this video with y'all today because I love it. In case some of you are wondering what this video has to do with Irish dancing, it's a weird thing we do with our hands to practice steps -- I use to do it all the time in class, and my teacher always made us do it if we were sitting down in the studio while others were dancing :) Enjoy!

Maine Squeeze: We eat lobster!

First, a story. We knew we wanted to do a Friday evening welcome event, because guests were coming from far and wide to celebrate with us. We immediately decided to hold it at my family's favorite lobster shack, the one we've been going to since before I can remember. It has a huge open air deck, a counter-ordering system, and a great Maine vibe. Perfect, we thought. My Mom got in touch with them the summer before, and then over the winter, and was told both times to wait, that they weren't booking yet, but that it wouldn't be any problem. Duh-duh-duhhn.

Fast forward to the week after the Fourth of July. The invitations had already been sent out for K + C's August wedding (and welcome dinner). We went to the restaurant to confirm, and were basically told (rudely) that there was no way our event could be held there. Cue controlled panic from the Mom, sisters, and cousins that were in the car.

Happily, there is a great ending to this story! After putting our heads together, we drove over to the Boothbay Lobster Wharf, which my Mom had been to when she was younger but hadn't seen in years. They were so nice, and had all the benefits of the old place, plus more: a rooftop room we could rent for $100 (wow!), live music, a waterfront location, and a bar and counter where people could order their own food.





So! On the Friday before the wedding, we all headed over to BLW. My fabulous cousins and aunt had headed over before everyone else to set out a few decorations, and everything looked great!







We kept things VERY simple, with just a few red-and-white gingham glassine-wrapped hurricanes and a few strands of bunting. And a cheesy sign made by yours truly :)

Friends and family from near and far were greeted...







Lobsters were investigated...



And outfits were admired:



(Yep, that's my Dad. I'm pretty sure both the aviators and the shorts are at least 30 years old.)

People ordered food and drinks at their leisure, and most headed up to our room to eat. The system worked perfectly!











Yum! After an hour and a half or so, my Dad stood up on a bench and asked for everyone's attention. We figured he was going to thank everyone for coming, which he did. But then! He pulled out a large book.



Kate looked nervous:



Everyone else looked excited.



Turns out my Dad had collected Kate's "refrigerator art" since preschool, and assembled the best pieces into a scrapbook! It was as adorable as you would expect. The best part? For some of the more... abstract drawings, he asked Kate at the time what they were, and then wrote down her description on the back. Everyone loved looking through the book for the rest of the night. Good job, Dad!! Love him.





Jenna pulled Kate and Cormac away for a few portraits on my uncle's boat later that evening, which was super nice of her to do, especially since they chose not to have engagement photos taken.



Then the bride and groom pulled their bridal party away to give us our gifts! The ring bearer got a Nerf gun and a few books:



The guys got boat shoes (Sperry Topsiders) to go with their wedding day outfits. VERY well received.



The girls got monogrammed L.L. Bean bags, initial necklaces from Etsy, flip flops, and Maine chocolate! Two thumbs up, Kate!



Guests started to trickle out after that, but not before taking a whoopie pie for the road:



This was such a fabulous way to kick off the wedding weekend. Completely low stress, super fun, and not very expensive for my family to host. I HIGHLY recommend doing something similar. And to top it all off, we had Jenna there to document everything! I highly recommend her, too :)

All photos by the talented Jenna Cole, except the girls and ring bearer gift exchange!

Previously:
We arrive
We prepare
We raise the tent
We rehearse and play wiffle ball
We jump off the wharf

P&P packaging

As orders from my Etsy store have been picking up, I figured it was about time to step up my packaging (hence my 101 goal!). Nothing too fancy, just an address and return address label with consistent fonts and my little peach, so customers would know they were getting something special. Here's what I came up with:



So, if you were to order drink stirrers, cupcake flags, or moving announcements, your package might look like this! Speaking of drink stirrers, I've been making a LOT of them lately, and it's always so fun to see what colors people are looking for! Here's a sampling of the orders I've filled over the past few weeks:



Quite the rainbow! If you're interested in ordering your own drink stirrers/food picks, just send me a convo!

Making an inspiration board

On Tuesday's post, Amanda asked how I put together inspiration boards. There are many, many tutorials out there, but I thought I'd share the process I use.

Inspiration boards can be useful for so many things, and they can be both very practical (pulling together interior design ideas for your living room, testing out color combinations for new website branding) and very whimsical (piecing together photos that inspire the kind of life you want to live). I love them all!

No matter what sort of board you want to make, the first step is pulling together inspiring images. If you're making a board for your wedding, don't feel limited by using only wedding images! Feel free to pull from interior design, food photography, etc. Just look for images that make you pause, images that you can't let go of.

Since I make a wedding inspiration board (almost) every week, I need a lot of inspiring photos. I find that for me the most useful way to organize is by color, and for years I sorted images in folders named by color on my laptop. (Sidenote: Always save an image you love, even if you don't have a use for it at the moment -- you'll kick yourself trying to find it later if you don't!) I'd name the files with keywords designed to make searching for the credit to link to easier later on (i.e. "Janet and Mark on SW," which would be from Janet and Mark's wedding on Southern Weddings), which worked most of the time but was not perfect.

Now, however, I have a MUCH better system, and it's called Pinterest! I still organize by color, but each image links directly to the source, so it's SO easy to go back and credit an image later. I can't recommend it highly enough.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Pinterest, here's what my home screen looks like:



As you can see, I have all different sorts of boards, from clothes that inspire me to party ideas to inspiration for my future farm :) I also have the color boards I pull from for wedding inspiration boards. Here's a snippet of green:



And yellow:



So easy! So, once you have a few images you love, it's time to start piecing them together. There are many, many ways to do this (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Polyvore, even Microsoft Word or Powerpoint), but the program I use is called Microsoft Publisher.

To make a board in Publisher, I open a normal 8.5x11 document and begin pasting in any photos I'm considering using. It might look like a little like this at this point:



Then it's just trial and error -- moving things on and off the board until everything is in roughly the right spot. After that, all that's left is to sharpen everything -- making sure that the space between photos is even, that the color balance is right, etc.



To finish, I export the board as a .jpg and then resize it for P&P in Publisher. And that's that!



Tips for making your boards look a bit more "pro":

-- I know it can be tempting, but don't try to cram 8,000 photos onto the board. An inspiration board is simply supposed to evoke a larger event, room, or idea, not detail it out. Simplicity will always look better.
-- Likewise, try to keep all of the photos roughly the same size.
-- Make the spaces between photos even -- you can do this using white lines, but I usually eyeball it.
-- If you're posting a board on your blog or in another public space, always, always, always credit your sources. And no, "Google Images" and "via Style Me Pretty" are not acceptable credits. If you're unfamiliar with how to credit a source online, check out this post.

If you have any questions at all, I'd be happy to answer them! You can see all 86 previous inspiration boards I've posted by clicking here.