Felt Trees

These cute felt trees were made by Amanda Carestio. Her designs can be found in this book.

You can find more info about her, as well as other neat stuff on The Long Thread Blog.

How I like Hope Gangloff's World...

One of my friends sent me a link to Hope Gangloff's drawings and I keep returning to them over and over again.



I find her work oddly moving.

(this one reminds me of Bjork's swan dress ... or women from Japanese woodcuts)




... and I just love her use of red against blue.



You can read more about Hope Gangloff here.

Lovely lovely drawings...

One of the reasons I love Etsy is because you can find so many wonderful handmade things and original works there.



I found these amazing drawings in Corid's shop.

There are so many others, too...











From top to bottom: Corid, Beth Fuller, Dead Pan Alley, Sara Harvey, Annette, Nan Lawson.

Felt Clouds, Bees, Birds...

These adorable creations can be found on Jenny's (Sea Pinks) Etsy shop. They can be pretty sweet at Christmas ornaments (and I'm all about handmade decorations this year).



Jenny's work is pretty special. I can't decide which I like best. Still, my two favorites have to be the felted clouds and the busy bee :)



I just love the raw handmade quality of these. They may look childlike and innocent, but I'm sure they took a lot of effort to create. That bee is just stunning!

These sweet creations were made by Amy Atlas. Her work is absolutely fabulous!!!

Handmade Tree

This tree, which I'm currently enjoying instead of a Christmas tree, was constructed out of artificial floral branches.

First, I removed the flowers and wrapped the branches together with double-sided tape and hot glue. Then, I wrapped each branch with blue satin ribbon, and added paper and fabric flowers, a silver butterfly, as well as some interesting handmade ornaments.

We had something similar for our wedding reception: a tree made out of cherry branches with crystals and lots of light-blue butterflies and paper flowers.

Dress Cards

I got the inspiration for these cards from looking at bridal gowns in magazines.



I used high-quality card stock to make the cards, as well as a variety of designer papers, shimmer accents, paper and fabric flowers, pearls, and other small embellishments.

You can see some of them in my Etsy shop.

Making Cards

I love making cards, especially for friends and family. There is something very precious about a handmade card - somehow the message it carries seems more meaningful (.. well, at least to me).

Anyways, these days I'm into making tree cards for the holidays.

I think I got the inspiration from my 3 handmade trees (will post pics of them at some point here), one of which was our wedding tree with crystals.




These are my latest Christmas creations.

Last year it was all about ornaments dangling from snow-covered branches, and the year before that I was pushing snowflakes.

This year it's trees.




... more cards are on their way..

Crochet Christmas Ornaments

In the spirit of handmade Christmas ornaments, I found these amazing crocheted birds and animals on Anna Kristensen's blog.



I just love how detailed her work is.

This winter I'm all about unusual ornaments around the house, including paper ornaments and lovely white and blue paper flowers.

Paper Christmas Ornaments

I know this is not wedding stuff, but I wanted to post my latest interest: handcrafted paper ornaments.



Each ornament is constructed out of fancy card-stock paper. I like to use designer printed papers, or make my own pattern using paper flowers, jewel accents, glitter-glue, gel-pen swirls, etc.



You can see some of these ornaments in my Etsy shop.



You can hang them on a Christmas tree (or a wedding tree - just for fun!), or use them as decorations around the house.



Either way, they're lovely.

I'll post more of my handmade ornaments in the next couple of weeks.
Stay tuned...

I just love this photo of my husband, mother-in-law, the best man and one of our close friends on their way to my parents' house for the traditional "taking of the bride" ceremony from her father's house.

This was two days before our actual wedding ceremony.

Usually, in Macedonian weddings, the two events take place on the same day, but since my husband and I come from different parts of the country, we decided to spread it out, so there was plenty of time to get from one place to the other, and back again.

My parents threw an awesome party at their house, and we had just enough time to sober up for our wedding day :)

More pics are on their way...

This is what our Save-The-Date card looked like.

In a green effort to save paper, we decided to send it via email to friends and family. We sent out our Save-The-Dates at least 6 months before the wedding so our guests had time to plan for their flights to Macedonia.

The official invitations were sent a couple of months before the wedding.

Confetti

Handmade confetti that were never tossed (mainly because we forgot about them - lol!).

I hand-punched each flower, butterfly, dragonfly, and circle in those bags, then made the vellum tags with glued paper butterflies that say "Confetti" in Macedonian in glitter gel-pen.

The other side features our initials "M & V" in white gel pen.





The idea to make the confetti myself came to me as I was making the favor boxes from regular card-stock I got from Michaels. There was so much scrap paper left that I kept it in jars planning to use it for handmade paper (something I would still like to do at some point in the future).

Instead, I punched a whole bunch of little things to toss - in the colors of our wedding: red, white and aqua. Also, I never liked the idea of throwing plastic confetti near a lake, so these were the bio-degradable option.

Too bad we forgot to take them with us to the ceremony, or to the reception... We had other things on our minds, so these little handmade dears were left behind.

That's ok. We plan to have a fabulous 1st anniversary, so instead of eating any left-over cake, we'll play like children and toss our confetti then :)

Cheers!

Blue Paper Flowers

This is the blue version of my wall art paper flowers.




I made close to a hundred of these (with some help from my mom, my cousin Gonce, and my maid-of-honor Dani).

Almost all of the flowers stayed in Macedonia. We used them to decorate my parents' house for the pre-wedding party, and the hotel for the wedding reception.

Wedding Tree

I'm a big fan of handmade trees, and this one is pretty special to me since it came from my parents' backyard. The branches were cut from my father's favorite tree: a dark cherry that delights him with fabulous bloom and fruit every summer. He was good enough to let me and my brother cut a few branches.

First, we cleaned them from leaves, and let them dry in the sun for a day. Then, my father painted the branches white. I made the paper butterflies and flowers, and together with my best friend, Cece, we wired the crystals and hung them from the tree.

The tree was the main centerpiece at the pre-wedding party at my parents' house two days before the wedding. Everybody liked it, so after the party, we took it with us to Ohrid, and used it for the wedding reception.