Budget: Wearing a bridesmaid dress...

...is a great alternative when your budget is small or you simply do not see any sense in spending so much money for a gown that can only be worn once in your life.

Below are some of my favorites from The Dessy Group, one of the leading bridesmaid dress manufacturers who offers a huge variety of different styles and colors. Each dress can be ordered in at least one shade of white or ivory.

The complete collection can be found online, but almost every designer carries floor-length bridesmaid dresses in the style of a "real" wedding dress.

Have a look at the gorgeous dresses of Watters as well as Alexia Designs. Their websites have a tool that allows you to select by color which makes it easier and faster to find the perfect dress.

Budget: Cake Topper

A heart is the #1 icon used worldwide as the symbol of love. For that reason a heart themed wedding is a nice idea but displaying heart-shaped items everywhere can easily look overdone and kitschy.

This adorable and very affordable cake pick from the Oriental Trading Company is a subtle way to incorporate hearts into your wedding and fits perfectly on small cakes or cupcakes.
You can use it the way it comes but it is also a good basis for a quick and easy DIY project: simply glue on little flowers or rhinestones in a color that matches your theme to make it more personal and unique.

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DIY: I made a wreath

Not because i like them so much ( i don't) but it was a good opportunity to get rid of two things:

1. A styrofoam ring that i bought several years ago in order to make a christmas wreath, but never did.
2. Hawaiian Leis. I bought these right before our wedding and the plan was to use them as part of our ceremony decoration, but we changed our mind and they have been lying around in our living room since then.

The Leis are made of white fabric and i dyed half of them by mixing blue and green "Easter Egg Dye". The result was a nice pastel shade of turquoise:

I created a loooong Lei ( about 6 meters) by knotting the white and turquoise Leis together and winding them around each other like a drawstring, then i wrapped it around the styrofoam ring. So simple. The wreath still needs to be trimmed but here it is:

Looks so fluffy :)


PS: Easter Egg Dye is one of the most inexpensive ways to dye fabrics for crafting projects and it is also great for making your own colored paper!

Welcome to Ann-Kay's Home

No, not you!

But there are days where our doormat expresses our feelings perfectly. "Go away, we can't let you come inside, it's just too messy"

We aren't messies or hoarders however like every well equipped household we have a lot of things that we only need once or twice a year, but of course we must have them because they are oh-so-useful. Having them means storing them. Somewhere. And here begins our problem: we have an extreme lack of storage space.
Our appartment has one bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen and a hallway, 68 qm² and a huge balcony. Doesn't sound too bad, right? But there is no utility room, no closet and every wall has at least one large window or doors or a radiator which makes it hard to arrange our furniture and almost impossible to place larger cabinet or shelfs.
Hence every corner is filled with piles of books or office supplies or tools or just some random stuff. By the way, i love tools but i hate that we have to have them. Our dinner table currently serves as my crafting bench. It is overloaded with scrapbooking paper, pencils, embellishments and all different kinds of glue. I have tons of projects in mind and new ideas how to improve our living situation keep coming constantly.
Well then, time to get some work done...

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