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!

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  :)

Indiana To Do List

I am so excited to go to Indiana tomorrow.  I have been looking forward to Christmas since Thanksgiving, for MULTIPLE reasons...

1. It's Christmas... nuf said
2. Snow
3. Some time away from work
4. HOPEFULLY a finish to the wedding "planning" and maybe even some DIY projects done

So we leave on Friday evening, and we were lucky enough to get two of our three flights as direct.  We will start by going Texas to Indiana on Friday and then on the 29th, we'll go to South Dakota to J's sister's house, where i get to meet my almost-niece.  Then it's back to Texas on the 1st, but it will be 2 weeks of no work and all family!

SO, let's talk about number 4 on my list of reasons for excitement.  I have booked us pretty solid on Dec 21 with "wedding" meetings.  My mom and I are starting with a trip to the tailor to get my dress altered, and by altered, I need to have a hook and eye put on the bottom of the back opening so that it doesn't gap.  That's all I am willing to do to my dress, and no one will talk me in to more.  OH, and she's hopefully going to bustle it, too (rats... I just figured out that means I have to have my shoes with me... so much for only having to pack 1 pair).

After that, J and I have a meeting with a lady who may be the person who is going to officiate the ceremony.  Yes, we still don't technically have someone to marry us.  If we don't like this lady, we are going with my mom's friend's daughter, and that's that... no more searching.

Last meeting on that day will be at our venue.  We have a few things to do there... 1. meet with a party rental company to talk about reception lighting.  2. pick a purple table cloth.  3. Take some more pictures of the venue so I can a. post them, and b. have fun playing with them while I try and figure out exactly where everything should go.

ALSO, we have to go to the place where I've already put down a deposit for the guys' suits so J can see what they look like and approve them and I'm hoping they have SOMETHING that is not a computer screen to show us so I can see what the color of the green for the groomsmen really looks like.

ALSO ALSO, my flower girl will be making an appearance at the holiday festivities and I'm sooooo excited to get to spend some time with her, looking at flower girl dresses.  I can't wait to hear what her favorite styles are!!!

No, it's not nearly as much as we've fit into wedding planning days in the past, but it will still be a very full day.  The other wedding related tasks have to do with our DIY projects.  We have a birdcage/card box to spray paint, we have a flower girl basket to spray paint and accessorize, we have some teapots to spray paint (the shapes work, but the colors just don't), we have some flowers to put together so that we can just toss them in the teapots, we have favors to put together (this one is not essential), and we have 40 pomanders to make (this one is essential).  I'll feel SOOOO much better about my DIY projects and my long distance planning if I can get a good amount of this stuff done in the 10 days we are in Indiana.  I think right now, we technically have 3 days with NOTHING scheduled, so hopefully we can put some of those to good use!

I CAN'T WAIT TO GO!!!!

Welcome Knotties... Part 3!!!

Do It Yourself!!!


Part of our major focus has been our budget.  We are trying to save as much money as we can by doing things ourselves, which also lets us personalize things more than the standard decorations that our banquette hall offers. You'll see a LONG list on the left sidebar of stuff that we are doing ourselves.  Here's a quick summary of our long list...

Bouquetes - this is something that I'm not really doing by myself.  I'm kind of a freak about flowers... I love them, but I don't love how they wilt and how you just can't be sure that you're going to get the exact color that you're looking for.  Since I'm so far away, I've decided that I'm going to use silk flowers instead of real because 1. I can't afford a florist on my budget... there are too many other things that I want to spend our money on, and 2. The silk flowers don't cause NEARLY as much stress.  So, I found a great lady who creates beautiful silk bouquetes at an antique shop nearby.  I bought the flowers for my bouquete and she's getting the ones for the bridesmaids.  I'm sure they will be beautiful.

Boutineers - our boutineers are going to be herbs.  We are going to make these the day or two before the wedding.  They should be pretty easy... just some herbs and some ribbon and a pin and they'll be done!

Invitations - We have a few different invitations to create... rehearsal dinner, bridal brunch, and obviously the wedding invitation.  We started out with a Target invitation kit, and although they were really cool, they were brown and I could not find out a way to incorporate our colors into it the way I wanted to.  So we switched to an invitation that's ALL do it yourself.  We bought the purple petal fold envelopes, we bought and cut lime green and the ivory cardstock and eventually we will be printing the invites and put them together.  They are going to be AMAZING when they're done!!!

Card Box - the card box is a bird cage that my mom's had for years.  We are going to spray paint it, put some ribbon on it and TAH DAH, it will be a card box!

Centerpieces - our centerpieces are teapots because that's how J proposed.  They are all different and we bought each of them for less than $5 and we are putting hydrangeas in them.  We only have a few more teapots until we get to the 40 we need and then we just have to put them all together.

Escort Card Display - We have 2 easels, 4 foam boards, 2 rolls of wrapping paper and lots of rolls of ribbon to make this... hopefully we will have this done in December!

Favors - we are making our own teabags... which are really teabags inside a big teabag.  We have to print the little tags for the ends of the string, buy and cut the string and put them together, but they should be very easy to make!

Groom's Cake - J and I both LOVE Rice Krispies and when I saw a picture of a grooms' cake made of them on The Knot, I knew that I wanted to do it!  We have our pans and we may test (at least the first couple of layers) the cake at Christmas time.  This is going to be a really cool!!!

Guest Book - This is probably one of the crazier things that we are doing.  Both J and I have quilts that we just love.  His mom is a big quilter and so is my Grandma.  I have always loved quilts and once I saw a quilt that a friend from high school did for her baby shower, I was hooked.  So, instead of the traditional guestbook, we will have a queen sized quilt for all of our guests to sign!!!

Monogram - this is the first project that we completed!  We did this ourselves and printed it and put it inside the front of our wedding binder.  Then, I found a place where you could make your own stickers and NOW, we have 1,000 stickers with our monogram on them!  I don't know if we'll use it anywhere else, but I think we will have plenty of chances to use our 1,000 stickers.

Out of Towner Packets - I contact the Ft Wayne Visitors Bureau and they were really nice and told me that they would be happy to give me any information and brochures about the city that I'd like, as well as a list of restaurants in the area of our hotel and a bunch of coupons to give to our guests.  These should be a really easy project that will hopefully make our guests feel welcome in Ft Wayne!

Photo Share Cards - J and I both have families full of shutterbugs, so we are hoping that we can get people to share their pictures with us and with the other guests.  We have created a Snapfish group page and we are going to try to either put the info inside the escort cards, or make business cards with the information.

Pomanders - these are going to be a HUGE HUGE HUGE project.  We are planning to make 40 pomanders, 20 green and 20 purple, that we are going to hang on the aisle chairs at the ceremony to add some color to the space.  We are currently cutting a BILLION circles out of fabric and eventually we will get around to putting them on the styrofoam balls.  Part of me is COMPLETELY overwhelmed by this and the other part of me is SO excited because they are going to be amazing!!!

Programs - these are going to be simple.  We are printing them on pretty, light purple paper and folding them in half and handing them out!  They are already designed and once we finalize all of our details, they will be ready to print.

Ring Bearer Pillow - This project was my first adventure in sewing machines.  J's mom taught me how to use a sewing machine last summer (and now I really want one) and I made the inside of our ring bearer pillow.  J's mom covered it with satin and is putting some purple and green ribbon on it, and it's going to look great!

Save the Dates - we didn't do these completely by ourselves.  A friend of mine from work who's also getting married found a website for these and I loved them!  SO we picked our layout and our colors and had them printed.  They are awesome and they gave us extras and envelopes and we just labeled, stamped and sent them out!

Table Numbers - we have not decided how these are going to be done, but they are going to be incorporated into the centerpieces.  More to come later...

Veil - again, I didn't really do this myself, but it is homemade.  One of the student workers in my department is a fantastic seamstress and she made it for me.  It's exactly what I wanted and the less than $30 I spent on the whole thing sure beats what I would have paid at a bridal store!!!

So, that's my complete list... it's a long one and I have a long way to go in less than 8 months, so I guess it's about time I get to work... wish me luck and you can keep up with my progress on the left sidebar where I'll post the finished products!

A DIY Update

I was contacted by Gottlieb and Sons about writing a post that could be featured on their new Facebook page.  They are a jewelry company who prides themselves on customized pieces for brides.  They were interested in my blog because of the DIY projects and the element of personalization they add to a wedding.

So, I decided this would be the perfect opportunity for me to highlight some of the DIY projects that I have planned, completed and in the works!  There's a full list of projects to the left where finished projects will be linked as they are completed, and if it looks overwhelming... it kind of is.

Semi-DIY
There are some things on my DIY list that would probably be better described as "homemade" because I'm not making them myself.  These include:
The Guest Book
The Veil
and The Ring Bearer Pillow (Pictures to come Later)

My Favorite DIYs

The Centerpieces

We've been to every thrift store and Goodwill in town and we have 35 of the 40 teapots that we need for our centerpieces.  We chose this for centerpieces because this is how J proposed to me.  I have collected teapots for the past 3 years, since I finished grad school and got my first real job.  So, on December 29, 2009 I received a cute little tea set with a ring tied in the lid and the words "Will You Marry Me" around the rim.

So, now we have searched high and low for teapots under $5, which we have been very successful finding!  I think we are averaging about $3 a teapot right now and we are using different shapes, sizes and colors!  Here are a couple of examples that my mom made up

The Favors

We chose a favor to follow three themes... DIY, tea and budget friendly!  I found this idea in my Martha Stewart Wedding magazine and LOVED it.  It's creative and they will cost less than $1 each to make!

Martha's are a little cuter than my first attempt, but I think once I get the hang of it, they will be fine.  I am really excited that we get to include our monogram stickers on the back of the teabag tag!

The Invitations

I knew that we wanted our invitations to be DIY because there are SO many options on invitation kits at Target and Michael's and stores like that.  We started with Target invitations that looked like this

We got them really early because we were afraid they would go away, and then decided that we did not need the RSVP card (we are requesting it by email/phone) so it made the pocket that we liked so much, obsolete.  I was also having a hard time incorporating our colors in to the invitation design and overall, I was settling for them.  SO, we took all of them back and started over.

We found some AWESOME petal fold envelopes and some really pretty ivory card stock that has a pearl sheen to it.  We are going to print on the ivory, mount it on lime green, and we will have all of our colors incorporated in a simple but pretty invitation!

The Pomanders

I have been tossing this idea around for a while.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to make pomanders because I didn't know where I'd use them or what I wanted to make them out of.  When I went back to Indiana a couple of weeks ago, I looked at the ceremony courtyard again and was reminded about how much white there is there.  I need a pop of color in the form of something that was easy to put in the space.  So I decided that pomanders were the way to go.  

I decided that tissue paper, while fairly easy, would probably not store or travel well and I was concerned about how they would stand up to the humid Indiana summer.  I also considered silk flowers, but let's be serious... that's expensive... I would need a lot of silk flowers to cover the styrofoam ball and we're trying to keep our decorating budget low.

So I found a "how to" for fabric pomanders here and thought that they could be a great, inexpensive option.  So, we went and got half a yard of fabric, which was just the right amount to make one pomander, and we tried it out.  The first attempt was not so good, but I quickly learned how to make the "flower" look out of the fabric and I think these are going to AMAZING!

I haven't added the string yet, but you get the idea.  I'm really excited about these and I'll have more updates once I finish it completed.  All I have to say about these pomanders is THANK GOODNESS I have 8 months to finish them... it takes a good amount of time to cut out all those circles!!!

I hope you've enjoyed by DIY update, and that 

you'll keep up with my DIY list on the left sidebar as the next 8 months goes by... eventually there will be completed pictures of everything!

I would love to know what DIY projects you are doing or you did for your wedding... you can never have too many ideas!

Favors - First Attempt

I found these DIY favors in my Martha Stewart Weddings spring magazine and just fell in love with them!  They actually were the inspiration to change our centerpieces from Ball jars to teapots, too.

My biggest issue with wedding favors is that if it's an object that you take with you (that you cannot eat) what are you going to do with it?  I don't expect anyone to want to keep something for any length of time that has our names and wedding date on it... I wouldn't if I was them.

Edible favors are great because it's not like you have to find something to do with it after, but I really wanted something that followed our tea/teapot "theme" (and I use the word theme lightly, because it's really just the centerpieces).

These will cost us less than $1 a person... a lot less.  They are cute, they are personalized and they will fit perfectly with our teapot centerpieces!

It's a glasine bag (think fancy wax paper), a couple of peppermint tea bags, some string (no idea what kind... just white string) and one of our stickers on the back of a piece of white card stock.

So, here is my first attempt at creating our wedding favors.

So far, they are pretty easy to make, but there are a few things that I'll do different next time:

1. I'm going to add a little note to make sure people know it's caffeine free peppermint tea
2. I'm going to use our awesome paper cutter at work to make sure the edges of the bags are straight, and to trim them down just a little
3. I'm not going to sew the string in (let's get serious... I'm going to have 300+ of these to make)... I'm going to staple it.  Most teabags have staples in them if they have a string.
4. I need to make the string a little longer, which I'm sure will be remedied once I'm stapling them in and not sewing them, but the string being just a little too short makes it look all wrong.

Our Monogram

I can not believe that I have not talked about this yet!!!  We created this a long time ago (our first DIY and the first thing off our DIY To Do List)... I love it and I don't know how much we will use it, but it's bold and it's going to stand out wherever we do use it!

The first thing we did with this was make stickers.  We are going to use these stickers to seal our invitations instead of the plain little round stickers that came with them.  We are also going to use them on our favors, on one side of the teabag tag.  We will probably also use them on our thank you notes (we ordered 1,000 stickers so we will have PLENTY for anything we can think of!

We haven't decided if we want to use it anywhere else, but we have it as an option!

Wedding Favors

More often than not, I would say that wedding favors are a waste of money. One of my friends got married last summer and they gave away bottles of wine with their picture on the label, which was awesome, but when you are on a budget and you are going to have 200+ people at your wedding, that’s probably just not possible.

We knew that we didn’t want to give food… no candy or cookies or anything like that. So when you look at your options for non-edible wedding favors under $2 each, you find a lot of crap. The things that end up in the trash can about 2 minutes after someone gets back to their house or hotel.

We found some really cute paper hearts that grow into flowers when you plant them. Luckily we were told that they don’t actually work! So then we talked about doing seed packets and putting a label with our picture/wedding date/love quote/etc. I still love those ideas, but really, they didn’t have anything to do with our wedding and didn’t really have anything to do with “us”.

I found a really cute wedding favor in Martha Stewart Wedding, and it actually inspired me to change the centerpieces to teapots.

So we will add to our list of DIYs and create wedding favors that are functional and inexpensive. I’m really excited about them!  I'm not going to give a description of how they are made, yet... that may change once we start making them, but for now, I'll just let you admire them and wonder how they will be created  :-D