Mint & Blush Geometric Styled Wedding Shoot

Hi everyone! Today I’m veering away from my usual posts to talk about something that I did for my calligraphy business. Back in December, I had the pleasure of collaborating in a styled shoot with the talented Alyssa from Alyssa Truong Photography, as well as my dear friend, Cakes by Shanajane. Shana has just put up her blog post of our collaboration here, but also be sure to visit her Instagram. It’s a catalogue of the stunning creations she’s done over the years!

It’s taken us a full 8 months to share this styled shoot with everyone – oops 😅 To be fair, the theme gives us spring wedding feels, so we wanted to wait until the weather was warmer to share our photos…we might have just waited a little too long. But just look at our spread and how whimsical it all looks together!

My Wedding Day Wasn’t The Best Day of My Life

I married my husband almost exactly one year ago, and I barely mentioned it on my blog or on Instagram after the wedding day. I know a lot of bloggers who get married do a recap right after the wedding, but I clearly missed that boat. Our anniversary was this past Sunday, which means that our wedding has been on my mind lately. I’ll go into a little detail about our wedding day, but considering it’s been a whole year, ain’t nobody interested in reading that anymore. This post is moreso about my thoughts on expectations surrounding weddings in general, now that I am married. Who knows, maybe this blog post might help future brides out there. I apologize for the click-baity title, but I swear it’s not actually click-bait! Also, it was super hard finding shots from our wedding photos that didn’t show people’s faces; weddings, after all, are about people!

We had a most wonderful wedding, and there were so many things I loved about it. Having all of the people we loved in one room was, of course, the best part. We were blessed with perfect weather. My makeup artist made me look the best I have EVER looked; so polished and yet still like myself. While I chose all of the decor and did all of the DIY, our day-of coordinator and put it all together so that everything looked even more beautiful than I ever could have imagined – I actually gasped when I saw our reception area! Our photographer, videographer, DJ, and photobooth exceeded our expectations by a long shot, and we absolutely loved working with them. The feedback we got from our guests was incredible – some people said it was the most fun wedding they had ever been to (although I’m sure that’s one of their duties as a wedding guest to say that). Even the employees at our venue said it was one of the best weddings they’ve ever hosted there (they probably get paid to say that, too 😝). One of our friends who attended STILL talks about how organized the wedding was (little do they know…) In general, it seemed like everyone had a lot of fun, which was important to us. Our wedding day couldn’t have been what it was without the love and support of our families, wedding party, guests, and all of the vendors.

Wedding DIY: Gold Leaf Guestbook Globe

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but today I wanted to share with you what is probably my last wedding DIY project that I did for my wedding last year. We’re talking about how to make a gold leaf globe, which we used as our wedding guestbook.

Although there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a traditional guestbook, I knew that we would probably look at it once after the wedding, and then stow it away in a closet, totally forgotten. Instead of that, I wanted something we could display as part of our home decor after the wedding was over. I found a few ideas on Pinterest, but ultimately decided on a gold leaf globe.

I was rather nervous to work with gold leaf, because it looked difficult and messy. It wasn’t the best DIY project that I completed for the wedding, but overall it turned out fine. There are already a lot of tutorials online showing you how to make these globes, but like with my previous DIY glitter table numbers post I shared last year, I also have some tips to offer.

Wedding DIY: Watercolour Place Cards

Although my wedding has long come and gone, there are still a handful of DIY projects I wanted to share but never got around to – nothing wrong with sharing them after the wedding, right? Today I wanted to talk about how I made my place cards. I loved how they turned out, and they surprisingly seemed to be quite popular at our wedding. A few of our guests even told me they took theirs home, which is hilarious because I’m not sure what you would do with a place card after the wedding 😝 This was quite a tedious process that took me months to finish bit by bit, but I enjoyed the process. I also went through several shows on Netflix while working on it, so it was a win-win. If you have any bridesmaids that are willing to give a hand (or be voluntold by the bride), that would probably be a great help!

Since my general wedding design was watercolour, the place cards featured a watercolour background with champagne-gold splatters and hand-lettering that I did myself. The gold splatters are optional – our wedding colours were blush and dusty blue, but we ended up with a lot of gold accents in our décor, so I thought the gold splatters would be a nice tie-in with the rest of the room.

Honeymoon Travels: Rome

Almost a full two months after we left home to go on our honeymoon, I am FINALLY posting about our experience at our fourth and final destination, Rome. Yay, we’re done! 😂

We were in Rome for four full days, and we chose to stay at Hotel Abruzzi, which was right across from the Pantheon. And I mean, literally right across – this was our amazing view from the hotel room:

We could see the Pantheon from our hotel window!

Honeymoon Travels – Venice

I just realized yesterday that we’ve been back from our honeymoon for more than a month and I’m STILL going through my honeymoon blog posts. Since I only post once a week and have been trying to alternate my travel posts with beauty posts, it means I haven’t finished with anything honeymoon-related yet. Hopefully I can get the last one up next week, but in the meantime, today’s blog is our penultimate stop on our honeymoon: Venice.

Venice has always been on my bucket list, but at the same time, I went in with low expectations. A few of our friends who have travelled to Venice said they didn’t really enjoy it, so we weren’t sure what to expect. Based on advice we received, we only stayed in Venice for a day. We left Sorrento in the morning to return to Naples, and from there we flew in to Venice’s Marco Polo Airport, arriving at 5pm.

The view of Venice from the airplane. It’s connected to Mestre by a large highway!

Honeymoon Travels: Amalfi Coast

Today’s post is the second installment of our honeymoon – this time takes us to the Amalfi Coast, Italy. While my heart always belongs to Paris, I was the most excited for the Amalfi Coast because I was pumped to see the famous views I’ve only ever seen on Instagram and never dreamt I would see in real life. My husband had never heard of the Amalfi Coast before I brought it up as a potential honeymoon locale. I was incredulous – had he never seen photos of the hill with all of the houses on it?! As soon as I showed him photos, he said, “Oh, I’ve seen those before. I didn’t know that was the Amalfi Coast!”

In my head, I thought that the Amalfi Coast would be the most relaxing part of our trip, but in reality it was probably the most chaotic of the four places we visited due to the massive crowds. A coworker had told me that a lot of Italians go down to the coast during the summer, which made perfect sense when we got there because it seemed like the majority of the tourists were either Italian or British.

Honeymoon Diaries: Paris

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you’ll know that I was in Europe for two weeks for our honeymoon. There were so many cities within Europe we wanted to visit, but with only two weeks available, we settled on Paris, the Amalfi Coast, Venice, and Rome. Today’s post is on our stay in Paris! This was the only city on our itinerary that I’ve already been to. I visited Paris on a school trip when I was 18 and fell in love with the city; even as a kid, I’ve always loved anything Paris-themed. Not entirely sure why, but I think it’s due to my obsession of the show Madeline as a kid. Either way, I’ve always wanted to go back with my husband (who has never been), and what better time to go to the City of Love with him than during our honeymoon? It wasn’t hard to convince him, since Paris was on his bucket list.

Paris is separated into Arrondissements, or districts. For example, the Arc de Triomphe is located in the 8th arrondissement, the Eiffel Tower is located in the 7th, and the Louvre is located in the 1st . We stayed at the Grand Hotel Saint-Michel, which is located in the 5th Arrondissement. The location of the hotel was so convenient – we were a 5 minute walk to the Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Garden) and the Pantheon, a 10 minute walk to the closest Metro station, and a 15 minute walk to the Notre Dame Cathedral. The hotel itself was quite good, too. It was on a quiet street far away from any noise, and although it was a bit small and we didn’t have much of a view, it was clean and modern. Being the beauty lover that I am, I found it interesting that the hair and body products they provided for guests were from Hermès! How fancy.

We stayed in Paris for four full days. There’s a lot to see in the city, so we knew we’d be on a bit of a time crunch! After landing at 9:00 am, we took the Metro to our hotel, where we checked in and dropped off our luggage. 

Wedding Update #3

Today is an update on our wedding planning. According to the count on our wedding website, we are 87 days out! Today’s post covers what we’ve done for invitations, bridesmaids and groomsmen outfits, my shoes, hair, and favours. This might be the second last, if not last, wedding update, because other than a DIY post or two, we’ve covered all of the big items!

Bridesmaid dresses:

I asked the girls to pay for their own dresses, so I wanted to keep costs as low as possible. My vision was for them to wear dusty blue dresses, but I couldn’t find any styles in this shade unless they were $300+. I ended up ordering online from a website called Light in the Box for only $87 each. Ordering dresses online can be a little more than sketchy, especially when you’re ordering from a Chinese website like this one, but my MOH ordered her bridesmaid dresses from the same website when she got married, and the quality was great, so I felt pretty confident that these would turn out well. They arrived in three weeks, and look exactly like they do in the pictures!

Wedding Planning Series: DIY Glitter Table Numbers

Today’s post is on a wedding DIY project that I’ve been working on for the past few months – DIY glitter table numbers. They actually don’t take very much time; I made 15 of them and would say they can be finished in 3-4 days. I just kept abandoning the project and going back to it!

We thought about doing watercolour table numbers, but ultimately decided to do these glitter table numbers instead. These sell for around $15-$20 each on Etsy – which means I would’ve had to spend around $300 on table numbers. I’m not a particularly crafty person, but knew I could spend only a fraction of that if I made them myself.

This is a fairly self-explanatory DIY. You can pretty much tell how it’s made just by looking at it! Spread glue, glitter, repeat. However, in this post, I hope to offer a few tips and tricks I picked up while making these.