Monday, October 31, 2011

Harvest over hallowe'en decor

Since being married I've opted to decorate our home with a harvest theme instead of a hallowe'en one this time of year. This is partly due to the copious amount of decorations I have stored in my basement – saved from our harvest-themed wedding. But I also find autumn leaves, colours, textures, etc to be much more beautiful, warm and inviting than the typical gaudiness and creepiness of hallowe'en decor. Plus, not having to carve my pumpkin saves a lot of mess! Here are some pics of how I decorated our front porch this season.






Even though we're not decked out for hallowe'en, we're still stocked with candy and ready for all the little munchkins tonight! – that is, if my husband doesn't eat all the chocolate first ;)

Monday, October 10, 2011

Memories of Harvest Love

Happy anniversary to us!

My husband and I were married two thanksgivings ago on October 10, 2009.  Fall and Thanksgiving in particular is one of my favourite times of year. I love the cool, crisp air, fall colours and wonderful scents of the season (candles, pumpkin pie, warm apple cider...) We named our wedding event "Harvest Love" and had a lot of fun with the harvest theme.

Since I am back at the blogging thing, I thought I would dig into my photo archives and unearth some 'things that are pretty' from our wedding photos. Here are some shots from our harvest-themed day. Thanks to july12th.ca for the wonderful photography!

My husband and I are both designers, so we had fun creating the print elements for the day. Our initials are J and H so we made a custom monogram for the program and a few other items.


The florist did and AMAZING job on my bouquet, better than I could have imagined. You can't really see them, but there are some wheat stalks in there. Those were my favourite part of the bouquet.


The church always decorates really nicely for Thanksgiving weekend, so we lucked out and didn't have to do much decorating in the sanctuary!


As a wedding gift our friend made us cupcakes for the reception. She did such a beautiful job!


In lieu of parting gifts for our guests we made a donation to the Canadian Foodgrains bank. But we also had bushels of apples and paper bags for our guests to fill to take home with them. Our last name is McIntosh, so it was fitting to gave away apples (McIntosh of course!)


We set up this area at one end of the hall for guests to take photos.


After the large standing reception at the church which was directly following the ceremony, we had a more intimate dinner reception with immediate family and a few close friends at a beautiful B&B.

Monday, October 3, 2011

gifts for baby

My sister has a brand new baby boy! A few weeks ago we had a wonderful family shower for her, my brother-in-law and baby. I was put in charge of wrapping gifts - the best thing to be in charge of in my opinion! My oldest sister did all the shopping and supplied me with all the materials I needed – beautiful paper and oodles of ribbon. You can't have a properly wrapped gift without ribbon! (in my world at least). So one Friday evening it was just me, some baby gifts and lots of gift wrap & ribbon for a few hours – bliss! Some of the gift were awkwardly shaped or really soft – making them difficult to wrap. So I made a trip to the dollar store and picked up some nice brown baskets to put those items in. It made them much easier to wrap that way. Plus, now my sister can have some extra baskets for the nursery.
Here's how it all turned out.


I love the contrast of the solid blue and the brown-patterned paper. It was fun to balance out the two and add accenting ribbon.