Big changes, and a new direction in life

Well, since I last posted on here I got engaged and married!  Yes, it's been a while.  But my wife is a creative spirit like myself and she encourages me and since we have a blog of our adventures together here I was inspired to try and get this off the ground again, so here goes. . .

As a re-re-reboot post I decided to show a little of the fun stuff we created together for our wedding and talk about how we made them.

 Here is the save-the-date we put together, it's based on something Rachel saw somewhere that we made our own.  She found a big pack of these library slips and we borrowed a typewriter (two, because one messed up) and typed out the text at the top.  Then, using different pens, filled in the dates and "borrowers name" sections with different hand writing.  Finally a Save the Date stamp and envelope finished it off and out they went.

 For our actual invitations and several other elements of the wedding itself Rachel wanted a watercolor monogram, but the internet proved to be too pricey, so we endeavored to make our own.  Rachel was already a talented watercolorist but she didn't want to try and do the whole thing in one piece.  The solution was she painted each element on it's own and I scanned the pieces into my computer.  Then, using Photoshop, I merged them all into one image.  For final touches Rachel looked over my shoulder and told me where everything needed to be and we tweaked everything together.  The benefit to working digitally is if she wanted something she hadn't painted I could use elements of things she had done and construct more pieces.  The finished result is below and I am staggered by what we made, it's just gorgeous and was exactly what Rachel wanted.

I wanted a cheese table for my grooms cake and my idea was to stack cheese rounds to look like a tiered cake.  But once again, buying it proved to be very pricey, so we made our own.  To do this I started with a foundation shape made of foam core board over which I layered plaster cloth to get the final shape. We then melted several blocks of candle wax in a big boiler and I alternated dunking the forms in the wax then in cold water then wax again until we got a decent looking coat of wax.  Here is the final product sitting on a wooden cheese case with a cheese ball on top.  I'm so ecstatic with how it ended up looking even though it was one long trial-and-error episode and we had to re-do a couple of steps in trying to figure it all out.

Now, about those labels.  Since I was making my own cheese I didn't want just any old label on there, so I made my own on Photoshop.  They are pretty basic but I put several Easter eggs in them.  The first one reads "Shamba Moshi" which is my name in kiswahili (sort of) and was established the year I was born.  The second has several.  Beside the fence you see a meeple (a common component in hobby board games), there are five dots in the shape of the pips of a die, the strange lines on the bottom are in a Star Wars script, the label is a hexagon (my favorite shape), and of course it's "Smoaked" gouda.