Wedding Week Wednesday

We've gotten so much done this week!!!  My Mom, Aunt, Uncles and Grandma have been a huge help this week and it's making my week way less stressful than I thought it would be!  J has been great, too, but he's been really busy with his own stuff, obviously.

OK, here are some things that we've done this week.

Favors

Here's the finished product... and here's what they look like when they're all done.

They are going in the folded napkins tomorrow.












Out of Towner Packs

 J got these done really quickly and we took them to the hotel on Tuesday.

Flower Girl Basket

Side note... our TV looks really weird in this pic.
































Escort Boards

We ended up buying the cards at Joann Fabrics and printing them on the computer... the projects started getting a little overwhelming.















Surprise for the Guys


I don't think I told you about this awesome picture idea that found on Jasmine's blog and I LOVE...

So, of course I had to make it happen and had to make it cute!!!  The groomsmen are getting these at the rehearsal...

In case you can't tell, the box says "No Cold Feet"
















Marriage License


I was going to do a whole post about this, but some jerk face who was taking pictures of witnesses in court made it so I can't take pictures in Ft. Wayne's BEAUTIFUL court house... so, here's all I got  : (

... but we have the marriage license which is what matters!!!

One last thing...

J and I are not going to be together much for the next few days so before he left to go up to the lake (a.k.a. groomsmen central) we exchanged wedding gifts.  I bought his a LONG time ago and it took everything I had to not give it to him at Christmas because I was SO EXCITED!  So here's what I got him...

He went to Kansas for grad school and worked there, so I knew he would love a picture of Allen Fieldhouse on a canvas... and he did!

And I know that J and I are made for each other because here's what he got for me...

I'm a Texas grad and this is the tower at the center of campus... and he put it on a campus.  Great minds do think alike!

Coming soon... napkin folding and stuffing, centerpieces, bridesmaids gifts and getting organized!

Card Box

So, I kind of went around and around about what I wanted to do for our card box.  I was originally looking at something really cute and totally homemade like this...

The DIY Bride

or this

Megan and Michael

But when it really came down to it, I didn't trust myself to make it what I really wanted it to be.  I have a problem when it comes to expectations of myself.  My brain can come up with really great ideas, but when I create my own vision of something, if it doesn't work out just how I saw it in my brain, I'll be disappointed.

So, I decided that I'd go with something that was still cute and creative, but that was also simple enough that I wasn't going to drive myself crazy with it.  My mom used to semi-collect bird houses.  Well, maybe not collect... but she had a bunch of them in the kitchen of one of the houses we lived in.  Anyway, she had this pretty wire birdcage with her collection that I always liked and she said that I could have it and paint it whatever color I wanted.  SOOOOOOO...

Please pay no attention to the purple carpet... it's in my dad's office, where we normally close the door.

This is step one in the process.  It's hard to tell here, but the top of the cage (the two triangles and the space between) actually lifts up.  There's also a little hook that I figured out not only keeps it closed, but that I can use to keep it open just a couple of inches.

I also plan to get a piece of poster board that I can cut to fit in the bottom, so the cards don't fall out when one of my awesome bridesmaids makes sure it gets into my mom's car at the end of the night.

I haven't decided what else I'm going to do with it to decorate it and make it cute, but I was also thinking some ribbon around the two sides and the back so cards don't slip out there either.

So step one is done and I feel like the rest of it should be pretty easy to get done the week of the wedding... maybe an hour of time to allocate to this and it should be done.

Wedding Shower Recap!!

So, I don't have pictures yet, but I said I'd give a recap of the Texas shower and I have been receiving emails (mostly from my future sister-in-law, lol) about the fact that there's been no recap yet  :-D

OK, so we went to Su Vino winery in downtown Grapevine.  I absolutely love Grapevine... I grew up there and my first job was in a French bakery on Main Street.  J and I actually spend quite a bit of time up in Grapevine, too, so it felt like a perfect place to have a shower!  ALL of the people there were so great to work with and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who needs a place to host a small event.

We had about 20 people, and the size of the place was perfect for that number.  Melissa and I made tuna salad and chicken salad and we bought rolls for those to go on.  My mom got us a cheese tray and vegi tray from Central Market and those were FANTASTIC!  Melissa also got an olive mix from Central Market that was so good with the wine.  I ran down to the bakery that I used to work at and grabbed a couple of loaves of bread and we had oil and vinegar with that.  My roommate/bridesmaid made angel food cake, brownie bites and lemon bars for dessert and there was PLENTY of wine to go around.

We had two reds and two whites, all of which were on the sweeter side because we felt like 11 am needed sweeter wine.  We also had almond champagne and raspberry champagne with our desserts.  The best part, any bottle that we opened but didn't finish, they re-corked for us and we got to take them home!  Anyone who wanted could try all of the wines and then decide which they wanted a glass of.  The other great thing about Su Vino is that it's cute and it's got cute gifts and just the character of the store/winery makes the party more fun.

So, we ate and drank and then about an hour in, it was time to open presents!  I have such great friends and I got some really great things.  I knew that one of the girls I used to work with would be getting me "all the things you never knew you needed" which is an awesome set of gifts that include things like woodpecker scissors, a shark bottle opener and a monkey vegi peeler.  With that set, I also got a swan teapot... to add to my collection  :-D

Everyone got me such great stuff and I think everyone really had a good time.  We only had about 2 hours before the store opened so we didn't play any games at this shower... we'll save games for the shower in Indiana, but with the amount of time we had, letting everyone eat, drink and visit was the best use of time.  There was a group of my mom's friends who came, so I know it was great for her to get to catch up with them, too.

The big surprise of the day was that we had a special visitor to the shower.  In my Weekend Recap I talked about Kelly from Su Vino.  She is the sweetest lady ever and she made our whole experience with Su Vino amazing.  SO, she stopped by on Sunday and said she was thinking of me and wanted to make sure that everything went well and she had a surprise for me... she made me a hand painted wine glass.

So the shower was a success and I think everyone had a great time.  I know that a lot of the guests decided to buy a bottle of wine (or 2 or 3) to take home with them, so I'm guessing they really liked it  :-D

Like I said, I don't have pictures yet (I'll share them when I do get them), but here are some pics I took after the shower...

My friend Mara from Houston get's the award for most creative DIY gift... she made this beautiful cake out of towels.  I wish I didn't have to take it apart!!

Also from Mara... she gave it to me the night before so I could use it on Sunday

A picnic basket full of goodies from my old neighbor

My mom and dad got us the one-cup coffee maker that we had on our registry, but it's up at their house, so she got me a box of coffee to give me at the shower.  I'm so excited for this gift!!

From my friend Leah... this is also as much as Jason gets to see for now  :)  I will say that it is very classy and cute!

And before the gifts went down to the garage, here are some pictures that show how wonderful my friends are...

I promise to put up some more pictures when I get them from Melissa and Mara!  It was such a great day!!!

Flower Girl Gifts

I don't know if I've ever told you, but I have got the CUTEST flower girl in the world.  She is four (which, when you ask her, comes out more like "foe") and when she was younger, she was always like a little person... not so much a baby or toddler.  She's tall and thin and LOVES to get dressed up and be pretty.

One of my favorite things has been finding and making little presents for her.  It's so fun to find things for little girls who will just fall in love with the stuff that you give them.  She already has a flower girl t-shirt that I made her (so she can be like the bridesmaids who all have shirts).  I also got her a gift that I got all of the bridesmaids because I knew it would make her feel special to be like the "big girls".

I saw a super cute little flower girl camera on the Wedding Channel Store and go that for her.  I wanted to get her one of those kids digital cameras, but they are just as expensive as the ones for adults!!!  So, she's getting this super cute camera that has 35mm film, which I didn't even really know they still made...

I have also included my Flower Girl gifts as part of my DIY adventure... here are the things that I've MADE for my precious little flower girl...

Wedding day is going to be LONG, so I made her a coloring book to keep her busy during the "wait" parts of the "hurry up and wait" day...

I put pictures in that will help her follow what goes on throughout the day.  Those are my shoes for her to color purple   :-D










Like I said... she really likes to be dressed up and pretty, so I also had to make something that was one of a kind for her hair.  I was thinking a flower headband or a cute little ribbon crown, but I found this video and fell in love with the end product, so I made here this...

ALSO, her dress is homemade (by J's mom) and it's coming back to Texas with Jason after his trip home this week, so there will be pictures SOON!!!!

Invitations - Step 1

I've talked in the past about wanting to get our invitations done sooner rather than later, and we are done with one whole step... the printing is done which I hope will be the part that I think will probably be the most difficult.  It took me FOREVER to get everything right with the printing and it was a PAIN!!!

But, this part is done... we printed a few over 190, which means we should have at least a few extras... not many, but a few.  Hopefully our guest list doesn't grow because we'll have to piece some parts together if it does.  So, here is step one... COMPLETE!!!

Invitations

Oh so many of them...

RSVP Cards

Hotel Info

So here is step one completed... I have also put return address labels on our outer envelopes, so that's one less thing that we have to do later.  Now all we have left to do is attach them to the back card stock, put the invitations and inserts in the petal fold envelopes, put those in the outer envelopes, print our address labels (yes... I'm printing them... I don't care that they are supposed to be hand written), stamp and send!

My mom and BFF will be here this week, so I may recruit them to help me out with putting these together for a little while.  We only have a little over a month until we send them out!!!!  HOORAY!

Adventures in Sewing

J's mom bought me a sewing machine as an un-Christmas present.  I say un-Christmas because she said it wasn't a Christmas present, but I got it in December.  THEN, J bought me a gift certificate for a class at JoAnn's for Valentine's Day.  So, today I went and took my very first sewing lesson!

I really thought it was going to be a lot harder than it was.  With that said, I've really only sewn things that are made of straight lines, BUT I did a pretty good job on straight lines!

After my lesson today, I was SO excited with my work that I bought supplies for a surprise I have plans for J, AND finished one project that I found for my MOH (she's getting it as a "thank you" for hosting my shower in a couple of weeks).  I'll put those pics up with my shower recap before then end of the month.

Fortunately, I do have some pictures to show from my day.  We made cute little purses today in Sewing 101... I'm probably going to give it to my flower girl when I see her in May.  Here it is!!!

Here's my sewing machine

Here's my cute little sewing box that I carry my stuff in

AND HERE'S MY PURSE!!!

Complete with a magnetic snap.













I can't wait to make curtains and pillows and great stuff like that!!!  Hope everyone has a great Monday!

Photo Share Cards - CHECK!

One more thing crossed off our list.  We were going to put our photo share cards inside our place cards, but when I tried to print them it was a lot harder than I thought it would be, I couldn't get it to line up right and I have a feeling it would have been the source of a lot of stress.

SOOOO, I went back to Vista Print and looked through their business card options.  I found some cute ones and when I went to order them, they gave me a GREAT deal... I got ended up getting 500 cards for less than $20 (including shipping).

I know 500 is a lot, but they came in sets of 250 and we are probably going to have 300+ at the wedding.  I figure that I'll have the chance to give them out at my bridal showers... and MAYBE at the bachelor and bachelorette parties... but only for the appropriate pictures  : )

So, here is what our photo share cards look like... COMPLETE!!!

Guest Post and Goals

Hope everyone's have a great week so far!  I am SUPER excited to be today's guest post-er on Wine and Cheese, Please while Laura is on her honeymoon.

I'm currently teaching an academic class to a group of freshmen who, after last semester, needed some guidance and needed to refocus so that they could make grades and come back to school next semester.  This week, I have spent a lot of my time meeting with them individually to decide on a specific goal for them to focus on this semester.  It's been really great getting to meet with them... some of them have really opened up and let me get to know them and I think that making that connection with me has made them more willing to talk in class and hopefully they are getting some good tips from the information we cover.

All of the talk about goals had given me some motivation to sit down with J and get make some deadlines for ourselves regarding the stuff we have left to do for the wedding.  The major thing that I'm focused on right now is the invitations... they are all printed, but we have to put a matting on them, get them in the inner envelope with a couple extra notes, get them in the outer envelope, get them addressed and stamped and sent!  Doesn't sound like a lot, but the matting is going to take a while.

So, we are giving ourselves a deadline of April 5 for invitations.  That also gives us a little bit of wiggle room, just in case something crazy happens or something goes wrong before our send out date of April 20.

I'm going to go home tonight and work on some more deadlines and goals to set for myself and I'll let you know how it goes soon!

Don't forget to go check out Wine and Cheese, Please and have a great Friday!!!

Exhausted

The first two weeks of school are always tough, but this semester has been exceptionally exhausting and I'm not sure why.  It may be that I'm teaching a class this semester that is taking up more of my time.  It may be the fact that I'm on a couple of committees that are currently WAY more time consuming than they normally are.  OR, it may be that I just have too much going on in my head and the combination of thinking and working is too much for my brain to handle.

I currently have 5 months and 3 days until the wedding.  It sounds like a long time, but I have so many things to do between now and then that the list is overwhelming.  We are making progress on some things, but it seems like a really long time since we've ACTUALLY crossed something off the list.

The invitations are the things that are staring me right in the face as a HUGE project that I really want to get done.  I'm sure that's probably because that's really the only thing that I have here in Texas that I can do, but I'd love to take a day and focus on getting these put together.  For these, we have to:

1. Print the actually wording on the invitation
2. Mount the printed pieced on the lime green backing
3. Put the hotel and RSVP information in
4. Fold the petals of the inner envelope and steal with our sticker
5. Stuff and label the outer envelope (no... we're not hand writing... I know... it's bad)

Because we have so many out of town guests, we plan to mail them by April 20.  We want to make sure that all of our guests have plenty of time to make travel plans and book hotels by the June 2 hotel booking date.  I know that April 20 is almost 3 months from now, but I think that looking at my upcoming calendar along with knowing that J is about to get into his super busy time makes me want to get these done ASAP before our spring semester gets away from us.

Oh geeeeeeeeez...

Favors - Step 1

I had so much help with the pomanders on our last night in Indiana that I got to do some work on our favors.  I put my dad to work that day, cutting 12 inch strings.  Then, my little cousins can over and they counted the string to make sure I had enough.

Once the pomanders were moving, my Grandma and I started assembling the string and tag that we'll attach to our large tea bags that will have two normal sized tea bags inside.  Eventually, our favors will look something like this...

which I found in the Martha Stewart Weddings magazine.

















J was out running some errands and picked up some skinny yarn.  He picked some out that had a little bit of silver in it and I think it's going to look really pretty!

We made tags out of white card stock and my dad cut these up for me when there were in Texas at Thanksgiving.

We used our monogram stickers on the back of the tags to a. make the tag 2 sided and b. attach the string.

Eventually we'll put two peppermint tea bags in each of our glassine bags, fold the top and staple it closed while also attaching the string.









I plan to make these closer to the wedding... I can't imagine that it's going to take me very long, especially if I can recruit my family to help again  :)

Escort Cards and Photo Share Cards

So I was pretty confident that I wanted to combine my escort and photo share cards into one, just for ease and so there weren't a million little pieces of paper all over the place.

The current plan is for the escort card to be a small, tent folded card, that has the family on the front and the photo share info on the inside.  I was planning on doing one escort card per family/invitation instead of one per person.  SO, if Mr. and Mrs Smith and their two kids their escort card would say something like:

SMITH
John, Jane, Jimmy & Sally
Table 27

They are going to hang on our DIY Display Boards for people to grab on their way in to the reception.  On the inside of these escort cards, I was planning to print info about our photo share site that would look something like this:

HERE'S THE ISSUE... we decided to put our escort cards on a pretty pearl card stock (it's the same one we are using in our invitations) and it came in huge sheets so I had to go ahead and cut them down to the correct size.  So when I put them in the printer, they don't come out exactly right... the text is kind of hard to see... and above all, I don't know if people will notice the printing on the inside.

So now I'm second guessing myself.  I want to make sure people see the info and I want my escort cards to be pretty and simple.

For those of you who don't know about Vistaprint.com, I suggest you check it out.  They have a lot of free and nearly free products that are decent quality and can be made into plenty of DIY wedding stuff.  SO, I got back on the website and found out that for about $30, I can make 500 photo share cards that look like this

I could put one of these at each place setting, in the napkin pocket along with their favor and a note about our guestbook quilt.  With this, I would make sure that everyone got the information and it would be pretty.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO!!!!!  This may seem trivial and stupid, but I don't plan to put all of my wedding pictures on Facebook... this would be a way that I could show pictures to my guests without it having to be there for everyone to see.  Jason says that we can't make everyone see the website info and that the inside of the escort cards don't have to be exactly perfect, but "not perfect" sounds like settling and if I don't have to settle, I don't really want to.  Would notice something like the first example inside an escort card or do you think it would be better for us to get something like the second example?  Ahhhhhh!

Pomanders - DONE!!!

I've talked a lot about pomanders, and one of our goals for our time up in Indiana at Christmas was to get some of these DIY projects done.  This was one of the big ones and I'm proud to say that my cousins and mom are amazing and we were successful in finishing our BIG pomander project!!!

J, my cousin Carli and I started with green ones.  J was making the petals and Carli and I were getting them done.  We spent about 6 hours on them one day and got about 14 or 15 green ones done.  It really wasn't too difficult and although we spent a long time on them, it wasn't a horribly painful process, other than the burned finger tips from the hot glue.

We waited until our last night to do the purple ones.  We have less of those than we do green ones, but at this point, I just don't care...  we'll take what we have and make it work!  On our second night, we have 4 glue guns going and we flew through them!  We also got the hooks in and the ribbons on and all of our pomanders are currently hanging in my dad's closet  :)

The most important thing is that we are done!  Carli gets the pomander award... she's quite the trooper!!!

Here are the pictures and some notes from the process...

This time, we started with spray painted balls... It worked so much better because we didn't have to worry about covering every little bit with fabric

Here's one of the work stations... pink glue guns, pomander and milk duds that we used as incentives... 2 milk duds for each pomander completed  :)

J was in charge of petals.  Here are the two colors next to each other.

Covered, but not quite done...

I used floral ribbon and made little hanging rings.  I left a post at the bottom.  We filled the hole in the styrofoam ball with hot glue, set the post in the hot glue and waited for it to dry.

We cut half inch white ribbon into 18 inch pieces.  Shout out to Grandma for doing the cutting.

We double knotted the ribbon and they were ready to hang.  J disassembled a wire hanger, slid them on, and then twisted the hanger up again.

AND THE FINAL PRODUCT...

I think we have about 30 of them.  We'll figure out how to make that many work!!!
BIG check mark on our "to do" list... I'm so excited!!!!!