Eat them up, YUM!

For years I've avoided the eating of anything involving the head of any animal. Oh, many have tried. My dad, I swear for the simple gross out factor, has tried to get me to eat cow tongue and squirrel brains, but no! I drew my line in the sand and I wasn't crossing it. That was until we arrived in Singapore.

One of the two things everyone says you have to try when visiting this fair island is Fish Head Curry. (That's right. I said fish head. Apparently it's a Singaporean favorite.) There's a little banana leaf curry place down the street from our condo that we like to frequent. Most of the time we really don't have any idea what we're eating, since we just point to something in the buffet that looks tasty and, without fail, it's as yummy as it looks. It also has fish head curry. Now, it's taken us almost a year to screw up enough courage to try this delicacy, but the other night we took the plunge. With a little apprehension and a lot of sadness, we walked down to one of our favorite restaurants for the last time.

We figured we were in good hands, since this is also on the front...

That's right. Karu is the Fish Head King!

We walked into a busy night at Karu's, but we were immediately greeted and seated and in a matter of minutes, before we could change our minds, we'd ordered the fish head curry. While we waited we were served the yummy rice with two kinds of curry veggies and we don't know what the crunchy "bread" is called, but it's good too.

And then, it arrived. The piece de resistance. The Fish Head Curry.

If you look really closely, you can see that it's looking at me. Also, it had teeth.

The fish was swimming around in so much red that we thought it was bound to be really spicy. Surprisingly, though, the whole dish was very mild. The fish was not fishy at all and the seasoning was not overwhelmingly spicy. Karu's did not let us down. All hail The King! I am now a fish head convert, though I'm still holding on to my position on all other kinds of noggins.

All gone! See the teeth?

Bye Bye, Birdies!

Today I took my cranes to the post office and shipped them to Mama and Papa Belle.

All 685 of them piled on the bed for The Counting.

Snug in their box.

Ready to go. (Almost.)

Sayonara, my babies. I will see you in a few weeks.

Calligraphy Mission: Accomplished!

Thanks to all of you out there who offered so many great suggestions and helpful hints about how to do my calligraphy. I went out and bought all kinds of pens and markers and other tools of scribal warfare. I hunted them down, got them home, and set to work practicing to get a sense of what kind of writing I could do with them. The answer: too big. I was looking for an instrument that could do detailed, frilly work. I had a vision in mind, you see, something grand and girly and graceful. Something like this...

{from A Lucky Orchid Wedding}

Eventually I gave in and bought a calligraphy set complete with 6 nibs so that I could play around and see which size I liked best. I finally settled on the fine nib and I was super excited to get to work on addressing my invitations. I wanted to get some practice in first, though, just to be sure that I'd settled on a style I could actually accomplish before tearing into my limited supply of envelopes.

After about 10 pages worth of "practicing" this fancy writing, two things became very clear. One, I needed A LOT more practice and two, it was going to take FOREVER. A swirl would look pretty good, but then a loop would be all wrong. The grand and graceful part just wasn't happening. Girly, though, that seemed a possibility, and even cute looked like it was making an appearance, so I just went with it.

The next task was figuring out how to write in a straight line. The idea of drawing lines in pencil and then going back and erasing them was just too much for me. I liked the idea of the card stock printed with heavy lines and it turned out that I could just see the template through my envelopes. The issue to solve was the whole centering question, so I did a little searching and found a wonderful How To on this very subject from The Bride of Rochester. The answer was why center, when you can stagger! Problem solved!

{The top is for the outer envelope, the bottom
is for the inner envelope.}

Since we mailed them from Singapore, I had to forgo the pretty present box idea. I don't even want to think what the postage on that would've been. After perusing the stamp selection at our local SingPost, we decided to go with wildlife. At first I wasn't so crazy about the idea of birds and fishes being on the invites, but then it struck me "Hey, they're in pairs!" So then I made up this very Winnie the Pooh like song in my head, and every time I stamped an envelope I sang to myself "Deux birds of a feather, two fishes swim together." And much like Pooh, that's about as far as I got. Here's a little close up of my little happy pairs...

Because it was airmail, I had to stick that nasty little sticker on the front, too. I'm glad the lady at the post office was nice enough to let me do it myself, otherwise who knows where it might've ended up on my envelopes.

And here they are, the finished product...

Done! YEAH!

The Invitations Are Done!

YEAH! After two weeks of designs and countless mock ups, assembly, calligraphy and, finally, mailing, I am happy to report that my invitations are one by one finding their way to our guests from all the way here in Singapore. If you recall, this was the wedding invitation ensemble inspiration.

{Martha Stewart Crafts, Vera Wang Invitation,

program from TheSteph03, paper from Paper Studio}

And this is how they turned out:

The Invitation

These are "Jane" invitations from My Gatsby. The paper is ecru linen (a kind of ivory with texture that isn't showing up well here at all). I chose the Bickham Script font because it's classic and easy to read. The paper band is indeed from Paper Studio. I thought that the colors would be a little softer, like in the inspiration photo above, but I love the gold metallic paper that outlines the flowers. They were kind enough to cut the bands for me AND shipped them to the other side of the world, so that rocked my world. I tied a little pink sheer ribbon around the band a la an obi and voila!

The R.S.V.P

Pretty straightforward. I ordered Louis Comfort Tiffany "Magnolias and Irises" stamp off the USPS site and 6 days later it was in my mailbox to put on the return envelopes. I love that stamp for two reasons: 1) It's magnolias and Mississippi is the Magnolia State. A little lame and a lot cheesy, but then I'm kinda known for one or the other and sometimes both all at once. 2) The Boy's dad and stepmom work with stained glass. And it's very pretty. And it screams "Spring!" OK, that's 4 reasons.

The Info Insert Booklet

OK, this was definately the hardest part of the project. I am not good at math and because of that there was very little measuring involved here. For this I took the trial and error approach. I made about a million mock ups before finding one that I was reasonably happy with, and then guesstimated the measurements with what turned out to be pretty good success. Considering this is my very first project of this nature every, I like the way they turned out.

Next up: Calligraphy.