One Year to Go! A post about cupcakes, decor and the venue.

A year from today, if all goes well, I'll be married on on my honeymoon with my husband! Exciting isn't it?
I realize that I haven't posted in over two months. I hit a planning dry spell but since I recently started having an excess of free time (the nice way of saying being unemployed) I have restarted my planning efforts. An aide in rekindling my planning fire is Offbeat Bride and the Offbeat Tribe (their planning forum). I have gathered many a DIY tutorial, creative ideas and pieces of advice, as well as motivation to continue to plan this wedding of awesome.

Yesterday was the actual pre-wedding anniversary and I spent the whole day doing wedding related things.
To save space on the main blog I'm going to put a cut here. Behind it is a lot of really cool pictures so read on.

I made yet another batch of cupcakes. I know in the cake post I said we had decided to have orange vanilla and strawberry lemonade cupcakes. Things, the recipe for the orange vanilla cupcakes is from scratch, something I think may be too much work when it comes down to it. So I keep trying out cake mix recipes. Yesterday, I made up a recipe of my own. It involved white cake mix, a pack of vanilla pudding and a can of orange soda in place of the water in the recipe. I also bought a can of buttercream frosting and flavored it with half a pack of orange koolaide, it was tasty.

The cupcakes before baking. They were more orange in person

The baked cupcakes

Frosted with the koolaide frosting

With the fondant flowers.

Mom and I talked about it and made some decisions regarding the cupcakes. The orange vanilla cupcakes need more of an orange flavor so I'm going to try a different brand soda (cause the Shata orange soda doesn't taste as orangey as the name brands) or orange extract. Also for the regular frosting, I'll probably color it so it's brighter orange and pink and we'll make the fondant decorations (the flowers and the hearts) white and maybe flavored. Now I just need to figure out how many cupcakes I need to make.

I also got a start on a decor project yesterday. Wednesday, Mom and I went to Micheals where their scrapbooking supplies were on sale. We (and by we, I meant mom since I have no money) snagged a two inch heart punch. I had found this tutorial for paint chip heart bunting (click on the link, it'll make more sense). I've been collecting paint chips any time I've been somewhere that has a paint section. So yesterday I started punching hearts out of the paint chips.

The last thing I did yesterday was visit our venue.

A little backstory: when I was a teenager, I babysat for this family who had an awesome Victorian house and wonderful garden. I thought I was going to marry my high school boyfriend and one day while babysitting, told the mom that. She got so excited and wanted to have the wedding there. Fast forward five years, the high school boyfriend and I are long broken up and Mr. Right has come along. I call up this family and the mom, Karin, is thrilled to hear that I still want my wedding there. They've been waiting to host my wedding. That initial phone call was in February. I haven't been able to get over there until now. I'm so excited about it though.

I got a little geeky and found the house on Google maps.

The area in black is their property. It's the length of one block and half as wide.

The red dot is where we'd hold the ceremony. It's their back patio. I initially thought this would be where we'd have the reception but it's kind of small.

The blue dot is where there is a deck overlooking the Puget Sound. The view is amazing. We'll be having dancing in front or on the deck.

The yellow dot is where we'd set up tables for people to eat. It's nice and flat.

The pink dot is a small garden where we'd set up our DIY photobooth.

Like I said, mom and I visited yesterday and we took some pictures. (Any people in the pictures are me, my mom, the owner of the home or her kids).