Mane Tales

Once I figured that a wedding might be on the horizon I decided it was time to start growing my hair.  For the last few years I have kept my hair around the same length, varying within an inch or two and resting around my shoulders.My hair is super fine and I really didn’t know how to deal with it so I mostly wore it in a ponytail all the time.  As my hair has gotten longer I’ve tried to branch out and learn how to do new things with it.  I’ve learned how to do a top knot/sock bun:I’ve been playing around with curling my hair and figuring out how to create waves with a flat iron:

Photo by Bridesmaid D

I’ve been trying to embrace my hair as it has been getting longer:With all of this extra styling I’ve been doing I’ve also been trying to take care of my hair.  Gotta watch out for those split ends!What are the tips I’ve picked up along the way?

Getting regular trims is a good thing!  My stylist helps to keep the ends in check and only trims the tiniest amount possible.  She also helps to confirm that my hair is still in great condition as it gets longer.

A heat protectant is a great item to have in your arsenal.  I really like Tresemme’s Heat Protection Spray.  It doesn’t cost much, and you can spray it on both wet and dry hair.  Spray before you blow dry, then spray again before you curl.

Image via Tresemme

Learning not to wash my hair every day.  This is a big one.  A few months back I would have told you that my hair had to be washed every day.  It gets oily, my scalp gets itchy and the only way to deal with it if I haven’t washed it is to put it in a ponytail. 

Not washing your hair every day takes a bit of time and patience to get your scalp used to it.  With the help of a good dry shampoo you can keep your hair looking and feeling fresh.  I’ve tried out Tresemme’s Fresh Start Dry Shampoo which made my hair feel oilier.  I also tried out TIGI’s Rockaholic Dry Shampoo which worked fairly well but it is also quite expensive.  Honestly the best I have tried so far is plain and simple baby powder:

Image via The Gloss

If you are looking for tips on how to extend your time between hair washes yet still keep your locks looking great I highly recommend checking out Veronika’s Blushing.  Her blog post is so informative!

Have you got any great hair care tips to share?  Are you going to great lengths to keep your hair healthy if you are trying to grow it out?

You’ve Got Mail!

Guess what hive, you’ve got mail!  Your invitation to the Gazelle wedding has arrived!We went with a square invitation so we used 6-1/2” square matte linen 80 lb. brilliant white envelopes.

I love the look of wraparound address labels.  I wanted to tie them to our envelope liners so I scanned our envelope liner paper into a jpg.  I then used it as a border for our address labels that I set up in PowerPoint.  Can you see the bikes?To address the labels I used the Pea Catherine font from Fonts for Peas.  I loved the handwriting feel of the font, yet it was still easy to read.

Let’s flip the invite over shall we?I wanted to make the envelopes easy to open so that our guests would be sure to see the envelope liners.  I had some custom stickers made up by Vistaprint with a bike on it.  I’m sure you are wondering why I had Vistaprint make the stickers instead of doing them myself.  We own a laser printer and I could not find round labels for laser printers, only for ink jet printers.  Since a laser jet printer gets hot I was worried that the ink jet labels would get ruined in the printer.  I wasn’t willing to risk spending cash on an entire package of labels in case they wouldn’t work with our printer.

Let’s pull the invitation out of the envelope now.We went with a black matte 6-1’4” square pocket fold.  For the closure I used a circle of purple cardstock attached with an eyelet.  Purple and white bakers twine wound around the eyelet to hold the invitation closed.Attached to the end of baker’s twine is our mini moo card.  We used a heart shaped hole punch to create a hole to thread the twine through.  On the back of our mini moo card we had a link to our website where we give all kinds of information on where to stay and what to do while in Vancouver for the wedding.Here’s a peak inside our invite:

Oh HAPPY day…when Miss Gazelle and Mr. Gazelle become husband and wife
Brock House Restaurant
Vancouver, BC
Cocktails, dinner and dancing to follow”

The majority of the font on the invitation is in Fontdinerdotcom from dafont.  Our names are in Fontdinerdotcom Sparkly which have the added stars on top of the font.  Brock House is in Champagne & Limousines.What you can’t tell on the photo is that the invitation is printed on the most lovely shimmery quartz white text weight paper.  I absolutely love it.  It is glued to a dark purple shimmery cardstock.  For a little bit of visual interest there is a faint floral watermark in the bottom left corner.At the top is a pewter floral brad.  On to the pocket fold side! I tied in our bicycle theme with our embossed bicycle stamp (which matches the graphic on our circle sticker).  I ultimately went with the pearly white embossing powder over white ink.  I thought that it showed up the best on the dark cardstock and I loved the look of it the best.  Inside we have a map!I traced a map of Vancouver and included the major roads and pointed out some of our favourite spots including Granville Island and Stanley Park.  I coloured the map in with pencil crayons, scanned it and then printed multiple copies at home on high quality glossy paper.

*Funny side story: I spent the better part of a week printing and trimming all of the components for our invitations.  Mr. Gazelle printed and trimmed the maps.  I got a text message from him complaining that the trimming took forever.  Somehow I didn’t have much sympathy…but that meant he was doing it right.  Thanks for your help Mr. G!

And last off, our RSVP card!Rather than printing these up myself I chose to take advantage of another freebie event from Vistaprint.  The coloured, glossy front of the card had our address on it.  The back black and white side had our RSVP information on it.  The floral graphic ties in to the watermark on our invitation.  BM-D also had a corner rounder that she lent me for us to use.  I love the touch the rounded corners gives to our postcards!

I plan to chat about why our RSVP date is so far ahead of our wedding, fun things about some of the RSVPs we’ve gotten back, any regrets, and I’ll talk about a cost breakdown for the invitations.  I’m really happy with how our invitations turned out.  I think they really represent us and our wedding.  I definitely am glad that I chose to DIY our invitations!

Did you decide to make your own invitations?

Inspiring the Invitations

Mr. Gazelle and I perused a bunch of invitations online but we didn’t find anything that we really loved.  That meant that I would definitely try to DIY them, I just needed to get inspired. 

My first source of inspiration was courtesy of the awesome Ms. Stripes.  I fell in love with her bicycle motif envelope liners:

Image via Ms. Stripes

Envelopes would most definitely have to be lined!  I found some awesome bicycle scrapbooking paper at Michaels that would be perfect.

Next up, my MOH passed along a ton of crafting supplies in case they would come in hand with our invitations.  Included were these little guys.

What on earth could I do with them?  While shopping for paper supplies I found this inspiration photo on Paper Circle:

Image via Paper Circle’s Inspiration Gallery

As for the meat of the invitation itself, I found my inspiration at a local bridal expo in the fall.

I loved the simplicity of it.  The whimsy in the fun font.  The fact that you let your guests know right away that the day you are getting married on is a happy day.  I also loved that it was square.

With all of these elements in mind I purchased some supplies from Paper Circle so I could create a mock up to see how it would all come together.  Stay tuned because we’ll be revealing the Gazelle invitations soon!

Where did you find your invitation inspiration from?  Did you decide to create a mock up to see if the ideas in your head would translate to paper?

How now moo cow?

I totally fell for mini moo cards.  I blame Mrs. Pretzel’s invitation suite for that one.

Image by Mrs. Pretzel on weddingbee

I thought this might be a great way to incorporate our engagement photos into our invitation suite.  In case you have never ordered moo cards here is the dealio.  You can use up to 100 different pictures for the front of the card, but the same design will be printed on the back of each card.  Perfect for showing off engagement photos on the front, yet displaying helpful information on the back of each card. 

The online software is so easy to use and it shows you the bleed (or non-safe) area for the front of the card.  For the back I chose to create my own design using their template as a guide:

Image via us.moo.com

I was so excited when these little guys arrived in the mail.  Want to see?

We chose to go with 8 different engagement photos:

And then put a link to our website on the back of our cards:

I did make one mistake though.  The way our pictures on the front worked out meant that I would punch a hole on the left side of the card.  On the back that meant punching a hole through our picture.  In hindsight I would have moved our picture to the left on the back of the card. 

Speaking of punching……is that a heart shaped punch I spy?

As for the cards themselves, the paper is thick and of fantastic quality.  Shipping to Canada was reasonable and the turn around time on my order was faster than initially promised.

Are you bombarding your guests with your engagement pictures like we are?  If so, how are you doing it?

All engagement photos on our moo cards are by Sakura Photography.

Practice makes perfect…

My hair dresser in Calgary is also planning a destination wedding right now.  At my last hair appointment we talked about wedding hair, up dos and hair trials.  She encouraged me to get a hair trial done when we went to Vancouver for our food and cake tasting in the spring and to not wait the week before the wedding.  This way I’d know how I felt about the stylist and if there were any problems I’d have plenty of time to figure out a backup plan.  I’d also know how I felt about the style I had chosen!

Trying to find someone who is good at up dos when you don’t patronize their salon frequently?  Tough.  Trying to find someone good who works on a Sunday, plus has multiple coworkers also good at up dos that work on Sundays?  Tricky.  Luckily a lot of the bigger salons in downtown Vancouver are indeed open on Sunday so I had a variety to choose from.

I decided to try Suki’s salon on West Georgia.  Why?  Mostly because they were across the street from the hotel I thought I’d be staying in (although those plans have since changed).  And because the one time I had been there I swear I had the most amazing shampoo experience in my entire life.  Luckily Suki’s website is really informative and all of the stylists have a blurb about their expertise and their prices.  I called to find out who worked on Sundays, picked one of the stylists with the most experience and booked a hair trial.

Everyone says you should arrive with day old hair, but I just couldn’t do it!  My appointment wasn’t until 5:30 pm and my scalp gets mega-itchy if I don’t wash it every day.  Turns out that this was okay with my stylist.  She told me that on the big day I should arrive with dirty hair and that she’ll wash and dry it with multiple round brushes or set it on rollers to give it body.  When I showed her my inspiration picture she looked at it and said the words I so wanted to hear, “No problem!”

Initially I thought I wanted a low side pony tail, but as I thought about it more I started to change my mind.  If it is a warm day hair on my shoulders will drive me nuts and the curl has the potential to fall out if I get sweaty.

(Itchy scalp, getting sweaty, what’s up with all of this information Miss Gazelle?  Sorry!  Just trying to keep it real!)

Anyhow, my new inspiration came courtesy of Scarlet Johansson.

PR Photos / Image via Haircuts Hairstyles

After some quality time with a curling iron and 32 bobby pins later, we have a hair do!

The hair flower could be positioned better, but the hair stylist was a little leery to fool around with it too much yet.  I like the structure of the bun but I think it maybe needs to be pulled to the side a bit more?  What do you ladies think?

The one thing I’m disappointed about is that I never got a shot of the hair do from the front.  I thought when she was taking pictures that you’d probably be able to see my reflection in the mirror.  Then as soon as we were done I hightailed it off to dinner and was too busy eating to think about photos.

Were you 100% happy after your hair trial or did it mostly give you an idea for things to improve on the big day?

I’ve been invited!

I’m so excited you guys – I’ve been invited!  My super awesome maid of honour and bridesmaid are planning my bridal shower.  The girls know that I love tea.  This is my shelf at work, full of a ridiculous amount of loose leaf tea.

I also love me a good afternoon tea!  We celebrated MOH-T’s birthday a few years ago (when she was prego with my niece) with afternoon tea at the Fairmont in Banff Springs.

And my mom and I got off a red eye flight and went straight to tea at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City a few years ago.

The girls were savvy and knew that a tea themed bridal shower would be totally up my alley.  They were so creative with the invitations and I may have squealed as I opened it up. 

Put on your hats, gloves and pearls
It’s tea-time for the girls
In honour of
Miss GazelleThe back of the invitation…  Can you spy our bicycle stamp that was used as a watermark on the paper?
Need an excuse to go shopping?
Prizes will be awarded for best tea-time ensemble.

And a tea bag inside with all of the details printed on its tag.  Seriously, how creative were the girls?  I absolutely love it.  Thanks ladies!!!

Time to find me a hat….I wonder if Kate Middleton has one she can lend me?

Were you bowled away by your bridal shower invite?

Versatile Blogger…

…and seven random things about me!

The wonderful Elena at Caffeinerd gifted me with the Versatile Blogger award.  In order to accept it I have to tell you seven random things about me.  Here goes!

1. I love style blogs….namely Anthro style blogs.  I’ve thought about starting one myself but I’m not sure I’m a natural at taking outfit photos.  Many thanks to Mr. Gazelle for snapping this shot of me today in one of my favourite outfits.  The Anthro Mendoza Codex skirt, J. Crew Dulphine Bling Button cardi and an ancient black shirt from Club Monaco.
2. I keep all of my nice shoes at work in a filing cabinet drawer.  I started tweeting shoe of the day pictures since I’d show Mr. Gazelle all of these awesome shoes I owned but then never wore around him.
3. My hair has just gotten long enough where I now want to play with it constantly.  Normally this would be where I would cut off a few inches, but I am going to keep growing it!
4. The very first musical instrument I ever played was the snare drum.  Can you tell how excited I look here?  That only lasted one year.
5. The next year I took up the clarinet and played for many years.  In grade 9 I joined the jazz band and we wound up taking a trip to Germany and Austria to play a few concerts.
6. I tried skiing for the first time last year and slip sliding down icy slopes kinda freaked me out.  I want to like it but it just hasn’t come naturally.
7. I have a terrible habit of falling asleep on the couch with my feet in Mr. Gazelle’s lap.  When I fall asleep I start kicking.  Mr. G a good sport for putting up with me constantly kicking him!

Tag, you’re it!