Art for our little monsters

There are few blogs I follow every day but this one is a must. There isn’t a morning I don’t check what Meg Duerksen has to say over at her blog named Whatever... and today was awesome!!!
During this week and all of next week, she will be doing a craft project with her children every day when they get back from school (how amazing is she? Can someone say Mom Award of the year?!).

Here is the blog that helped her out:
The Crafty Crow

For all my future teachers, moms and aunties, let’s get creative with our little monsters!

Yay!

I love those mornings, when you dread getting up, its really cold (I mean cold, minus 29 degrees celcius cold) and taking the dogs out ... well sucks, the drive to work has you stuck in traffic and then, once you finally do get to the office you open your inbox and see, 'You've got mail' that says:

Your business cards are finally ready!!!!!!!!!!

Yay! I am in such a good mood now!

Picking them up from the printer tonight :)

Mika's Holiday Pooch Portrait

Just got back from the Underdog Club and I am super impressed!
Here are six photos of Mika taken by a wonderful photographer over at oh my dog! Photography. A wonderful fundraiser idea …and all of this was done in about 6 minutes!!!

Oh and if you guys are wondering what my creative projects are… here is a sneak peak. The collar Mika is wearing is one of my creations. It’s made out of the richest yellows, oranges and purples (which matched Ricardo’s tie and shirt and resembled my bouquet at our wedding!). And it was actually a great success at the Underdog Club … now if only I could get around to printing those business cards.

A Wedding in 4 Parts!

I am going to attempt to finish something I started a few blogs ago, talking about our wedding! Maybe I have procrastinated because there are just so many parts I can blog about, so I will start slow.

Hopefully my experiences will help a bride somewhere out there with the daunting task of planning her own wedding. For this to be accomplish Kirsten-style, she (or you) will have to be a creative, original, hands on, crafty and broke (my husband will kill me for saying that, so I will rephrase that to ‘on a tight budget’) bride to make sense of everything I have done in the last year and attempt to put it on repeat and make it her (or your) own.

Let me start by saying we did everything backwards. We first decided we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together and we wanted to shout it to the world SOON! So we got crackalacking! This meant we did not follow a logical order in planning our wedding. Proof? We first booked the venue (not engaged we would say “Ya we’re getting married the 3rd of October”). I then shopped with my MoH and chose my engagement ring. He proposed (As if he was nervous... he knew my answer!) ... and then I got rolling on THE projects!

So, unlike the planning of the wedding, lets blog logically, shall we?!
Part 1: Venue and ... priest?!
Part 2: Photographer, Deco, Food and Music
Part 3: the dreaded guest list
Part 4: Partying up the I Do!

Part 1: Venue and ... a priest?!
This was quite easy considering my man is pretty easy going. First you choose your ultimate favourite season. This was easy for us; fall, fall, fall!

Everything about fall is incredible. It’s just warm enough to wear big sweaters and cute hats, scarves and mittens with a sexy pair of boots but not cold enough to lose sight of fashion in a jacket suited for the North Pole. The colors and leaves are just so beautiful its mind blowing and breath taking, and the list goes on.

Fall is one of those seasons you take in ... in the middle of nowhere and if you ask my husband or any of our guests (after the drive there), they will tell you I sure found the “middle of nowhere” to get married!

In the last year we have been on a budget. We are also two very independent people that were determined to pay for their own wedding, no parental help. We, since living together in our own little home, have become more environmentally friendly. So our thought was local. Let’s try and spend the least amount of money so we can still have food on our plates and a roof over our heads once we are married and the money we do spend, let’s spend it locally. And this we accomplished very well.

We live in Canada, more specifically Quebec and now while that might not seem relevant to you, anyone who has ever eaten a pancake with REAL maple syrup will tell you ‘the land of Maple Syrup, Awesome & Yum!’. So we got married in a sugar shack, the home of maple syrup, a place called Sucrerie de la Montagne. There, in the middle of the woods, where buckets hang from every tree to collect the sap, they make their own maple syrup, bake everything homemade, have some of the biggest horses you have ever seen in your life and even have a friendly wolf whom just chills amongst its sugary friends.

Wanna know what it was like back in the day?!

Dirt path and foggy misty day, we walk to our loveshack in the middle of the woods! Romantic?!

A picture of moi infront of our 'maisonnette du sous-bois'

where we spent our first night as husband and wife!

Everyone whom works there are part of the same family and by the time we finished planning our wedding and becoming Mr. & Mrs. we had become part of the family too.

We are a young couple, and if any of you readers are young, you will know that often we are treated with the furthest thing from respect and priority. That’s why local businesses are often the best way to go. I can’t even express how impressed we were with our venue and they way we were treated.

We see our wedding as a sort of investment. We have reinvested our money in our home. We have supported a local business, where family work together. In return we had a wonderful wedding that was personal and cozy.

This is our best friend, Véronique! A tear in her eye while marrying us, we couldn`t have dreamt of a better way to get married. We are lucky to have such a wonderful friend!

To complete the personal factor of the wedding, we had to decide how we wanted to get married. While we don’t attend church we thought of us hypocrites to get married religiously. We know no priests personally and didn’t want a stranger marry us. So my wonderful friend Marissa suggested “why don’t you have a friend ordained?!”. While we first laughed at this thought, it soon became a serious consideration. We looked into it and here in Quebec it is possible. So we chose someone extremely dear to both of us and asked her if she would do us the honour of marrying us. With tears in her eyes she accepted. So on our wedding, in a cozy wooden shack, in the middle of the woods, in front of a warm fire place, our best friend made us husband and wife. Original, personal, cheap, cozy and full of love our venue and ‘priest’ were amazing!

Holiday Pooch Portrait

Ok so as you guys have probably seen I am a little nutso for the animal kingdom, more specifically pooches! While my intention is not to create a blog about dogs, I will slip a few posts here and there when something cool comes up… like what I am about to tell you.

A little over a year ago, my husband and I decided to become proactive in the saving of those poor poor puppies that are abandoned, mistreated and uncared for and so on. We have worked with many rescues until we have found our own; Sophie’s Dog Adoption. This rescue is run by ONE woman. She is incredibly sweet and kind hearted. How did we meet Sophie?

A few months ago I heard on the radio, the story of a woman who’s been writing articles in the gazette and has created a unique project called the Underdog Club!
The goal of the Underdog Club is to counter the pet stores and puppy mills while supporting rescues but more specifically the underdogs of each rescue. The dogs that are old, ugly and unpopular. And well since I am a fan of the underdog, discovering this project made me so happy! We decided to check this out. Amongst the many rescue there, we met Sophie and ever since we have been trying to support the Underdog Club as well as giving Sophie a hand by volunteering for her.

Meant to run for a month, it was so successful that they have decided to stay open until funds run out. They are set up in a gallery on Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. In this gallery are amazing photographs of underdogs up for sale for this charitable cause. But what makes this gallery unique is that while you are looking at some of the most amazing photography, the underdog in the photo is walking amongst you. Why go the pet store when you can stop by the underdog club and greet, meet, play and love a pooch right in front of your eyes? A rescue dog that is looking for someone to give him a second chance and in exchange will gladly love you unconditionally.

While we all wished money grew off trees, it doesn’t, and rent is being paid by generous supporters, fundraisers and volunteers. So what do you do to raise money? You come up with genius ideas…. And here is this month’s!

“Bring your dog to the Underdog Club to get his vintage-style Holiday picture taken by a professional photographer.”

Now if you ask me, this is a wonderfully fabulous idea. Our dog Mika has her appointment tomorrow at 3:15 and our other dog Clara has her appointment the following week. Frame them, scrapbook them or put them on a Christmas card, these photos will be beautiful and unique I have no doubt.

I hope, if I have any readers in Montreal (or any readers at all for that fact! :P) and are animal lover like us, will consider supporting an amazing cause by bringing their pooch down to the gallery for their holiday portrait. And if you don’t have a pooch, pop on in, meet exceptionally amazing dogs, check out the prints and maybe find something to hang on your living room wall!

That time of the year ... again!

It’s that time of year again, when the sun goes down early and the weather isn’t quite sure if its settled on being warm, cold, windy, rainy or snowy so, it gives you a combo and this results in… one of those famous colds!
The sniffles, sneezes, watery eyes, head congestion, deep voice, sore throat, tired-bags under your eyes that for some odd reason come and go. They come and go for two weeks making you actually envious of the people that experience the ‘real’ thing. A two day, 48 hours, worst cold ever… but the glorious thing is, it’s gone as fast as it came.
This year I was the lucky one chosen to get the ‘teasing-cold’, the poser of colds, the weakling cold that wishes he was ‘The’ cold but isn’t! Now I just sound crazy… anyone know how I feel?

So for the past week or so, I have eaten soup, worn horribly comfortable clothes, ski socks and cuddled with my dogs while watching one too many episodes of “Say Yes to the Dress”. I have attempted to be productive, but have failed a tad bit.

Here is what my past week has looked like:

Cuddling with Mika and Tchix (foster pup) wearing my dorky new glasses

Attempting to be productive and work threw the fogginess going on in my head
=
One too many projects … brooches, iPod cases, Christmas ornaments and more

A few posts ago I showed you dog chaos in my office
Well this is to prove that cats are always up in your shizzz
Just chillin’ in the middle of my materials