Changing of the Guard

Despite the fact that our porch recently looked like this:

I've decided that it's time for Spring to come to the Goodlaff household, which means a changing of the guard on our front door.  Yesterday, guests would have been greeted with a gigantic pile of ice and snow and this lovely, wintry wreath:

Today, visitors to the Goodlaff residence will instead be greeted with this:

A cheerful, Springy wreath!

I'm gonna chalk it up to research.  See, I was walking around our local craft store (hereinafter known as the "bad place") a few weeks ago, and I saw a really awesome archway decoration using a white, loose-weave netting that Mr. Goodlaff and I are going to try to replicate (as I'm sitting here typing this, it's occuring to me that I probably should have taken a picture of it to share.). Strangely enough, the packaging for the netting has no information on length, so even though the roll looked sizable, I had no way of knowing how long it would be and how many I would need. 

Saturday, Mama Goodlaff and I went back to the "bad place", looking for fabric and trouble.  We found both. As I was browsing the Easter displays, I spotted a wreath made by using the same netting as the archway, but in a bright pink.  Inspiration!  I needed a new wreath for the front door, and here was a chance to try using the netting before committing to buying rolls and rolls of it for our archway.  I'd also be able to figure out how much netting we'd have to work with in each roll. Crafting disguised as wedding research--love it!

With a wire wreath form, craft wire, and the netting (25 feet in a roll, BTW), plus ribbon, a few flowers ripped from their wire stems (to be used in another project), and the cutest ladybug trimmings ever, I had the makings of a wreath.  The verdict on ease of use of the netting?  Maybe a 6 out of 10, but most of that is due to the craft wire I had to use to secure it to the wreath from.  Our front door is Spring-ified, and the netting gets a stamp of approval for use in our ceremony decorations. Done and done.

The second project I tackled this weekend comes courtesy of Joy at HowJoyful.  Her Tutorial Love Fridays continue to get me into trouble.  This time, it was the Monogrammed mugs (tutorial #3) that got me.  I picked up two plain mugs a few weeks ago at Goodwill, and instead of doing block monograms like the original tutorial suggests, I went a little bit fancier and did scripted initials.  I love how they came out, and Mr. Goodlaff and I broke them in properly this morning with a morning cup of tea and Maple Nut Scones with Pear Butter.

Both tasty and classy.

The productivity didn't stop there.  I finished a third project this weekend, but you'll just have to wait and see what it was and how it came out!

Have you had any non-wedding related projects that ended up helping you in the planning process?