Happy 2011!!

I hope everyone had a wonderful New Year’s!  Unfortunately FH was back in Calgary, working the night shift, while I was still visiting with my family in BC. 

We went out for dinner at a local winery, Quail’s Gate, and had an absolutely delicious meal.  We then came home, my brother and I squared off on Wii frisbee and bowling, then rung in 2011 with Dick Clark.  Now time for some fun pictures from the night!

With my super adorable niece/flower girl Avery:

My mom and I:

With my sister-in-law/MOH Tanya (both of us rocking some awesome Anthropologie dresses):

The whole family – myself, Mom, my grandmother, brother, niece, Dad and sister-in-law:

Quail’s Gate was offering up a special four course menu to celebrate New Year’s.  I had:

• West Coast Albacore Tuna
  Lightly seared, red quinoa & cucumber salad, pickled asparagus, yuzu dressing

• Wild Caribou Tartar
  Poached quail egg, cornichons, capers, mustard dressing
  I’ve never had tartar before so I figured why not?  This was delicious.

• Arctic Char
  Apple cider glazed fillet, sunchoke & potato gratin, pickled beans, apple purée

• Chocolate Almond Savarin
  Red wine ice cream, vanilla poached Seckel pear

I’ll be back tomorrow to share my New Year’s resolutions (oh what a terrible word) with you! 

How did you spend your New Year’s?

Where Were We?

Wow, has it really been two weeks since I posted last?  Sorry!  The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of time with family, travel, more time with family, relaxing, eating good food…

This was my first Christmas ever bringing a boy home for the holidays!  And that boy just happened to be my Future Husband!  It was really nice spending Christmas with him, my parents and my grandmother.  He had a chance to see and taste some of our holiday traditions.

So, here are the holidays in pictures so far…

We got my parents a digital photo frame for Christmas.  I spent quite a bit of time scanning in old family pictures and I think the folks love it!Future Hubs and I checked out some of the amazing Christmas lights in the neighbourhood.  This guy goes all out!!Future Hubs helped to brine the family turkey in bourbon.  Boy it was one tasty turkey!Christmas Day dinner.  What a feast!My niece helps my unwrap one of my Christmas presents.Learning how to make Finnish pirakka – a traditional savoury pastry of a rye crust filled with rice pudding or mashed potatoes. Wine tasting with the family at Mission Hill Winery.  Yum!I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday.  Can you believe that 2010 is almost over??

On the same wavelength?

This is too funny to not share…

Future Hubs and I decided to open our Christmas presents tonight.  I know, it is only December 15th so we are way early!  He’s working late over the next few days, then we are taking off for my parents in Kelowna and the presents are just a bit too bulky to pack.  So we decided to open them tonight after eating dinner and staring at them…all…night…long.

FH instructed me to open the small present first.  What was inside?  A bottle of Chanel Chance to keep me smelling nice!

Next up FH opened his small present.  Inside was a bottle of Burberry London.  You know, to keep him smelling nice.

Then I opened my bigger present.  Comfy flannel pants and a tank for lounging at home!

For Future Hubs?  A big, fluffy, cozy robe (or housecoat depending on where you are from) for lounging at home!

So…not only did we buy each other very similar presents, but we also accidently left our receipts out at some point this week but neither of us found them.  Funny.

Have you and your SO ever been on the same page for exchanging presents?

Christmas Craftiness

Back in November I was browsing around the WeddingBee boards and I saw a thread for a holiday card swap.  Awesome!  Who doesn’t like to get stuff in the mail?  The only question was whether I’d be able to create three homemade Christmas cards to send to my swap buddies.  I somewhat doubted my creativity.  Thanks to some coloured cardstock and ribbon from Michaels I did manage to come up with something:

I had already purchased the flower punches ages ago for a wedding related project.  Thanks to my trusty compass from my university days I created a round wreath to glue on the front.  I finished the wreath off with a bit of ribbon.  I had some leftover silver letters from my “Will you be my bridesmaid?” cards to finish off the embellishments.

I then printed off one of my favourite Christmas time recipes – Tiger Cake – for the inside of the card.  My mom makes at least one of these vanilla and chocolate layered and swirled Bundt cakes every Christmas and oh, how I love it!

To finish the card off I created a wrap around address label in Microsoft PowerPoint using clipart from weddingclipart.com.  Yup, honestly it was super easy to create this in PowerPoint.  The latest edition lets you change the colour of graphics, remove the white space background and it gives you a lot more control over graphics than before.  The fonts are from fonts for peas – Pea Picky Panda and Pea Valerie.

So there we go.  That was my Christmas card design!  I still managed to clutz up a bit here and there (like accidently trimming off too much of one end of the card trying to make it fit in an envelope) but I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

I think this taught me a bit of a lesson in preparation for making our invitations next year.  I think the invitation design in my head is very complicated!!  I’m going to have to simplify it a bit or else I will go crazy making up 40+ invites (and it will take forever).  I also love the wrap around labels so I think we’ll probably do something similar!

What did you get up to this weekend?

Sneak Peek!

Oh my gosh you guys!  I e-mailed our photographer to ask if we could possibly have a sneak peek of one of our engagement shots so that we could use it for our Shutterfly cards this holiday season.  Yesterday afternoon she sent me two.

They are so amazing and we are so excited to see the rest!  The sky in the two pictures are so different it is almost hard to believe that these were taken on the same day, only 15 to 30 minutes apart.

Within a few minutes I was on Shutterfly, ordering 50 cards to send to friends and family to say “Happy New Year!”

Don’t forget, if you want 50 free holiday cards you have until December 31.  Just go here to get all the details.

Did you squeal with excitement when you got your first look at your engagement photos?

All photos are from Sakura Photography.