Love Letter and Wine Box pt 2

After our misadventures in woodburning, Mr. Warbs stepped up to stain the box. We originally ordered the unfinished box online knowing that we would eventually stain it. We went to Home Depot to pick out a nice rustic looking color, a drop cloth and some paint brushes. While the box's lid was being worked on by BM Tata's dad, Mr. Warbs went to work on the rest of the box. Staining is pretty easy to do, but if you're going to stain wood here's a tip to make it easier on yourself: sand the wood first! It helps the wood absorb the stain better. Totally a foreign concept to me, but apparently everyone's part of a secret club that knows about things like this!

Anyway, we neglected to do that and it gave Mr. Warbs a bit of trouble to get the wood dark enough. The first couple coats of stain seemed to roll off the wood like water. I think he must have used four or more coats in order to get the box dark enough. When we got the lid back, (which BM Tata's dad had sanded) it only needed one coat of stain. If we had added another it would have been a completely different color than the rest of the box.

After giving the box a couple of days to dry we were happy with the finished color!

The next step was adding in the foam inserts. Sure we could have skipped this step as it's not really necessary. But, I was afraid the glasses would rattle around in the box and break so we chugged ahead. Every tutorial I found online recommended closed cell foam, but I couldn't find that anywhere so we settled with ordinary building foam from from Home Depot. In my opinion, it worked fine and was a lot cheaper, but if you can find the other stuff good for you!

Cheap foam

I cut out two pieces, one to lie on the bottom of the box and one to cut out the wine glass shapes. The piece on the bottom keeps the glasses from touching the wood, adding extra protection. I tried to cut the pieces to match the inside of the box, leaving a little wiggle room. 

I wouldn't recommend cutting this on your carpet. It took forever to clean up all those little foam pieces.

Next I laid the glasses and the wine bottle we're using on a piece of foam and traced the shapes. Make sure to trace the shapes of the actual glasses and wine bottle you're going to use! Since the shapes are going to be pretty precise, you might run into a problem later if the new glasses you won't to use don't fit snugly. 

Both the wine and the glasses were bought at Costco. Did I mention how much I love Costco?

After I traced the shapes a couple of times, I cut out the shapes with an X-acto knife. As you can see, I kind of messed up on the left side a bit, but the felt covers up any mistakes. Thank God. Next I glued the two pieces together to create one thick piece.

Here's the part where I made a simple idea much much harder. Originally I planned to glue the felt on. I actually started by gluing the felt into the shapes first. I was then going to cut out pieces of felt to fill in the rest. I. Was. Nuts. I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea. Halfway through it looked like a weird felt patchwork quilt. Nothing was even and it looked bad, Hive. Real bad.

 I can't even bear to show you photos of anything after this point.

While I was slowly losing my mind, Mr Warbs came in with the assist. He basically told me to stop making it harder than it was and just cover the whole thing with felt. At this point I was so frustrated I said, "If it's so easy, why don't you do it then?" And he pushed me aside and went to work. And finished what I had struggled with for two days in about 15 minutes.

He ripped out the stupid pieces I glued in and covered the whole foam block with felt. Then he put the glasses and wine bottle in their respective pieces to create the mold. He secured the pieces together on the back with glue and then placed the foam into the box. Then he was done. Like some kind of wizard.

See that blurry hand? That's how fast he worked!

Finished mold

Finished project!

It's good to have someone to call you out when you're being crazy. If I had told Mr. Warbs what I was planning from the beginning, I would have saved a lot of time and energy. DIY projects don't always have to be done by "yourself". Sometimes doing it together (tee-hee) works a lot better. And there's your cheesy lesson for today.

Has anyone else run into trouble turning their DIY project into reality?

All photos are personal

Love Letter and Wine Box pt 1

Remember how I talked about using a wine box for our ceremony and then promptly never mentioned the subject again? Yeah, I've been a bad bride. We bought an unfinished wine box with the intention of staining it and wood burning our names on it. Well, the box has been sitting in our apartment for months now, just begging to get all fancied up. Long story short? We lacked the motivation to get going on the thing. Every now and then I would get short bursts of motivation. One day I went out and bought a wood burning kit. Then something came up and I didn't think of the box again for two months. Another time I bought foam inserts and a X-acto knife...and the box sat for months. You get the idea. A few weeks ago, I set aside a specific day to tackle this project. I was tired of looking at the unfinished box with all of the tools stacked on top of it. So I grabbed the wood burner and practice wood and went to work. Yeah, it turns out wood burning is a much harder skill than I thought.

FAIL!

I did a horrible job. I called MOH J5 to try his hand at it and he gave up too. He did better than I did though, the cursive names are all his doing. The weird boxy names and "die" were my attempts. All we could do was laugh, it was so bad! We showed our sad attempt to BM Tata via Skype and after she stopped laughing at us, she said that her dad does wood burning projects all the time and could do ours. Um, yes please! We wanted to keep it simple, so I just asked for our name and the wedding date. What we ended up getting was way more than simple, it was fantastic!

Hot damn!

He did an amazing job and put so much more detail into it than I could have ever done.  Seriously, how cute is that heart?! After seeing how poor my practice attempt went, I'm pretty sure I would have destroyed our wine box. And I thought wood burning was going to be the fun part of the project. Silly Warbler. Next up: wood staining and foam inserts galore. 

Did anyone else have a hard time starting DIY projects?

We Forgot the Ceremony!

 Image via Chicago Now

It seems like with everything that goes into planning a wedding, sometimes the ceremony is overlooked. Just me? Fine! I've put most of my energy into picking the right photographer, food and minutiae that I forgot all about the ceremony. Like, seriously. Whoops!

Somewhere during the initial stages of Operation Wedding, I briefly scribbled down what I wanted for the ceremony. In fact Mr. Warbs and I sat down to write separate lists of what we wanted for the wedding. We then read over each other's list and crossed off three things we didn't agree with. At the time Mr. Warbs thought this was a list of what we wanted in life in general. Which is why his first pick is Shakey's Bunch a Lunch. Never make your fiance do wedding activities on an empty stomach ladies.

My list might have been a tad longer.

Aside from my horrible penmanship and spelling errors, I'm really sad that I didn't include anything regarding the actual ceremony. You know that thing that actually unites us as husband and wife? So Mr. Warbs and I sat down to talk about what we wanted. We both agreed that we didn't want a super long ceremony. Surprisingly, Mr. Warbs agreed that we would write our own vows. He is painfully shy and doesn't usually like being the center of attention. But he is dead set on writing vows that will either make me cry or make my face melt from the super awesomeness. We have a bet going to see who will cry first. 

Aside from writing our own vows, I also wanted to include a small ceremony within the ceremony. At my cousin's wedding, she used the ever popular Unity Candle. I'm not sure if this is a component in every Unity Candle ceremony, but my cousin had her mother and her husband's mother each light a candle. The mothers placed their candles on the small table at the altar and the bride and groom lit the large candle with their mothers' candles and them out. Mr. Warbs was NOT a fan of this, because to him it represented removing the mothers from the bride and groom's life.

Image via A Perfect Little Wedding

Next up, we looked at Unity Sand. It is basically the same as the Unity Candle, except you're pouring different colored sand into a container. You then display the sand somewhere in your home. I wasn't a fan of this one, because it just didn't seem to fit our personalities. And I could just see one of us knocking over the sand one day.

 

Image via Lynchburg Bridal Guide

Lastly, we checked out the Wine Box and Love Letter ceremony. I've never heard of this or seen it at another wedding before so I was intrigued. During the ceremony, the bride and groom place two glasses, a bottle of wine and sealed letters to each other in a box and nail it shut. If the couple should ever have trouble in their marriage, before making any rash decisions they would open the box, drink some wine and read each others' letters. If the couple doesn't have any problems they can open the box on a major wedding anniversary. 

 Image via Heather Neckers Photography

This tradition appealed to us the most, not just because we drink a lot of wine (we drink a TON of wine), but also because it's realistic. More than half of marriages end in divorce. Nobody is perfect, everyone has problems whether they're big or small. I think it's honest to acknowledge that sometimes we all need a fail safe to get through it.

What traditions are you incorporating in your ceremony?