Wedding Activity Books

One of the DIY projects that I worked on before the wedding was making wedding activity books for the kids. Drew has 14 nieces and nephews and I have 3. We also have several family friends with small children, so we knew we wanted to have something to entertain the 20+ kids that would be running around the wedding venue.

I had seen several ideas online for wedding coloring/activity books, but all of them seemed short, (just a couple pages), so I combined together ones that I liked and added our own stuff in as well.

Sorry that the pages of these are so wrinkly in these shots. I didn’t take any good pictures of them before the wedding, so these pictures are of two we had leftover after the wedding!

The back said “made with love.” I loved adding the little touches to coordinate with our wedding invitations!

I didn’t take pictures of all the inside pages, but here are a few:

The inside pages included a page with a pretty frame that asked the kiddos to draw a picture of what their wedding day would look like, a crossword puzzle with wedding words, a blank tiered cake for them to decorate, a couple games of tic-tac-toe, a blank page for them to color on or draw a picture of the bride and groom, a bouquet for them to color in, a maze for them to match the bride and groom up with a wedding ring, and the last page included a picture for them to color in of the bride and groom driving away to their honeymoon!

I think they turned out really cute! I just printed them all out on my home printer, used brown kraft paper for the covers (that I ordered from here), and then poked two holes through the spines and all the pages and tied them together in little bows with the same brown hemp jewelry twine (from Wal-Mart) that I used on our wedding invitations.

I wish I had gotten some pictures of the kids coloring in them! Maybe the photographer did though, we are still waiting on our pictures back from her, then I’ll share those with you.

We placed these on the same table as all the guest sign-in stuff and I had a couple of Drew’s nieces there to hand them out to the kids as they came in, that way the really little kids could color during the ceremony as well as during the reception. We also gave them little packets of crayons too. (I don’t think I got any pictures of those, but we just bought a couple huge boxes of crayons and little clear zip bags from Hobby Lobby and fit 8 crayons perfectly in each little bag.)

In addition to the coloring books, we also had a few tables at the reception set aside specifically for the kiddos. Instead of having flowers and candles on their tables for centerpieces, the centerpieces were jars of colored pencils and we had blank paper sitting around for them to color on. My original plan was to get large sheets of white paper and have paper tablecloths on their tables to color on, but I never got around to buying that!

These jars were perfect for holding the colored pencils! They are leftover glass frappuccino jars.

I’m sure there are lots of other ideas and activities for incorporating kids into your wedding plans, but that is what we did! My dad is an ordained minister, so I went to lots of weddings as a kid and I always had fun running around, meeting other kids, and dancing, but something like this would have been so much fun back then!

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Hello There :)

Hello! It has been a while! I’m still here, I’ve just been super busy the last few weeks!

I was in my hometown for several weeks attending my bridal shower and finishing up wedding projects! Then, June 2nd was our wedding day! It was an absolutely gorgeous day outside and everything turned out perfectly! It was one of the best days of my life thus far and I will remember it forever. I can’t wait to share pictures and projects from it with you! Then last week, we were on our honeymoon in Boston, New Hampshire and Maine. We had a great time! This week we are finally back in New Orleans, getting our house straightened up and trying to find places for all our wedding gifts!

Stay tuned! I have lots of wedding projects, pictures from our wedding and honeymoon, house projects and cool wedding gifts to share with you soon!

Here is a sneak peek of our wedding pictures from our photographer:

Can’t wait to get our pictures back!

Check out our awesome photographer’s other work, here.

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DIY Wedding Ribbon Wands

This past weekend was my 21st birthday! (May 13th) Last year on my birthday we were moving into our apartment, so this year it was definitely nice and relaxing weekend compared to that. Drew and I went to a local bakery for breakfast, went to the park and watercolor painted, went downtown for an early dinner and walked around the French Quarter, went to an organist concert in St. Louis Cathedral, visited with Drew’s cousin, Howell, at his house in the quarter, and made sure to stop and buy a drink in honor of my 21st! It really was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had. Totally fun, relaxing and I had a wonderful day spending it with my soon-to-be husband! (The wedding is 2 1/2 weeks away!!) If you want to see some pics from it all, check out my Instagram pics, here.

This weekend was definitely the break I needed after all the wedding and school stresses lately. It was a refreshing and rejuvenating weekend that has helped me to tackle finishing several wedding projects and getting the house all cleaned before we have family in town tomorrow for Drew’s graduation this weekend!

This week we finally finished a project that we’ve literally been working on for months. Ribbon streamer wands for guests to shake as we walk back down the aisle as husband and wife!

My mom and I made these for my older sister’s wedding a few years ago as well. You can see some of them being shaken in the background of this picture.

Here are all 200 of ours now finally finished:

To make these, you need:

-wooden dowel rods (we used 1/4″ x 48″ Birch Dowels, cut into fourths to make 12in long dowels)
-lots and lots of ribbon (cut into 15-16in lengths)
-hot glue gun & hot glue sticks
-wood stain (if you want to stain yours)
-sandpaper (if you cut your dowels)

For our dowel rods, we ordered them online here. We ordered fifty 1/4″ x 48″ Birch Dowels, and then cut each of them into 12in lengths, to give us 200 wooden streamer sticks.

Since we cut these with a little hand saw, there were some little splintery edges on them, so we took some sandpaper and lightly sanded the ends. (This part takes a while, so enlist help from your fiance and bridesmaids!)

You can leave them like this if you want, or you can choose to paint or stain them. For ours, I wanted them to be stained a little darker to coordinate better with my tastes and other wedding stuff. I already had stain on hand from my office desk, so I used that. It really didn’t take that long to coat them all with a rag with some stain on it.

I don’t remember exactly how many spools of ribbon we bought for this, but it was a lot. We got most of ours from Walmart and a sale bin at Michaels, but you could also look online and see if you could find some bulk discounts on it. The ribbon part of this project can make it kind-of pricey.

Since our spools of ribbon were different lengths (3 yards, 6 yards, 10 yards, etc.) we calculated up what length would be best to cut each into, to make sure we weren’t left with any short end pieces. All of our lengths ended up being around 15 or 16 inches. Much shorter than that wouldn’t be as flowy and much longer than that might get all tangled up.

Here are piles of all our cut ribbons. We used a mixture of pinks, greens, oranges, whites, golds, and neutrals. I wanted more salmon/coral colors, but I couldn’t find any ribbons in those colors at Walmart or Michaels.

After the paint or stain on your wooden dowels has dried, it’s time to start gluing on ribbons! We decided to use 3 or 4 ribbons on each streamer.

For ours, we stuck the ribbons on with hot glue like this:

Then we wrapped a piece of wider pink ribbon around it to cover up those ends. In the end, they looked like this:

Here is one finished streamer:

Then repeat the process 200 times! It was definitely a time-consuming activity, but I’m really pleased with how they turned out. I think they will make for some fun pictures of us walking back down the aisle with them all flowing in the air.

I really like the various ribbons we chose:

I love the mixture of the burlap ribbons, the lace, the colors, and the patterns. So pretty.

I can’t wait for the wedding!! Only 2 1/2 weeks away! Getting exciting! 🙂

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Bad Days

Lately, I’ve had a lot of stress and pressure in my life. Mainly because I feel spread way too thin.

Trying to co-run a business, make time for design work or stuff for clients that Drew needs me to do, trying to finish up all my assignments, papers and projects to end this year of school, study for final exams, trying to wrap up all the ten million little things that still have to be done for our wedding and honeymoon in three weeks, planning to have family and company over for Drew’s graduation next week and not to mention all the bazillion household things like laundry, cleaning, dinner and loading the dishwasher that have to be done on a daily/weekly basis. I’m juggling too many balls in the air, and then that happens, one or all of them are bound to drop at some point.

The last few weeks have been a struggle to keep those balls all up in the air, and lately it feels as if one after another after another keep dropping.

Wedding planning has been really, really stressful lately. That is something I’ve been trying desperately to avoid. I want this planning time to be enjoyable. I want to soak it all in and remember these days as good ones preparing everything for our lives together. It is a day that I’ve been planning for my whole life, and more intensely for the past year and a half that we’ve been engaged. I’ve spent that time making lists to make sure that things got done ahead of time and spaced out so that there wouldn’t be any one time of planning that would get more intensely stressful. I’ve worked extremely hard planning out all the details, talking to vendors, designing the paper and stationary all myself, etc. etc. etc. I have put so much time, energy and hard work into this event and I want it to come across beautifully in the end.

Lately, I’ve had this overwhelming sense of worry about the wedding plans. What if things don’t come together like I’ve envisioned? What if all these ideas that look great in my head look horrible or unfinished together in the end? A million “What ifs.” I’m afraid other people will look at the stuff that I put together and not like it.

Which is a totally silly thing to think. Who cares if someone else doesn’t like it, right? It isn’t their wedding. All that matters is that I like it and at the end of the day we are husband and wife. The food, flowers, decorations, weather, all that doesn’t mean a thing. But it is still so hard to get those thoughts out of my head.

It has been especially hard these last few weeks because I’ve gotten a lot of negative comments about wedding stuff. Vendors, family, friends saying things like “So and so didn’t like the RSVPs,” “Those are too small, why would you pick those?,” “those are too big,” “you really want that color?,” “No one else likes that,” “When are you going to do this,” “Why don’t you do it this way,” “That is going to look horrible together,” “That is going to look like a 5th grader put it together,” etc, etc, etc… I don’t know why so many people feel it necessary to express their negative feelings to a bride three weeks before her wedding day, but it isn’t very nice and it puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on me. It makes me feel self-conscious about myself and my choices and when I let it get to me, it makes me a really sad and unhappy person.

I’ve been really sad the past few weeks. Upset about wedding stuff, pressured to get things done right this second when I don’t have any seconds right now to give to them, stressed about finals and school projects not going the way they should.

I’ve been trying to hold it together the past several weeks, but I’ve fallen apart more than once. Yesterday in particular was a really bad day. Yesterday was my last final. I’ve been done with classes for over a week and have been studying for finals and finishing projects. Surprisingly with everything else on my plate, I feel like I did really well at all my finals and got everything in on time and did my best. I thought I would be relieved once I turned in my printmaking final yesterday. However, I got the news yesterday that my French class that I’ve been working hard to try to take this summer at UNO isn’t going to transfer to Tulane for stupid reasons. I spent the last month, applying to UNO, paying money for application to them, talking to a million people, getting everything taken care of so I could register for classes, messing with residency information and immunization records to try to get this all worked out so that I could pay a bunch of money just to take one French class there. I need another French class to graduate and I need to take it during the summer so that it is all I have to worry about at one time because I really struggled with my previous French classes. I’m getting married and we are going on our honeymooon, so I had to take the class online because I won’t be in New Orleans to go to class everyday during that time. My academic advisor said before I even started the process that it should all be fine. But the French department refuses to offer credit for any online class, and they didn’t feel the need to inform me of that until after I put in all the work to try to make things work at UNO.

So now I have to try to fit that into my schedule next year along with all the other crazy hard classes I have to take to finish up a double major in both English and Studio Art. Talk about balls dropping, next year is going to be nearly impossible.

After dwelling on all that stuff yesterday along with all the other stresses in my life, I was starting to get really depressed. Saddened by the way things are going and how lately it seems like one thing after another keeps going wrong. When you start thinking about all those things, then you find a million other things in your life that you are unsatisfied with and it is a horrible downward cycle.

Last night, while wallowing in my sorrows, I saw this quote that a Facebook friend had shared on her wall. It was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment.

How perfectly true is that. It is so easy to have one bad day (or even a string of them) and then all of a sudden find it hard to remember all the million great things you have in your life. All your blessings, all your talents, all that you are capable of, forgotten in the midst of a few stressful circumstances.

But my words of encouragement didn’t stop there. Every night before I go to bed, I read the bible verse of the day on my Bible app on my phone and focus on that and how it relates to my life and then often go on and read the rest of the chapter it comes from. The past few days, every single scripture has been spot on to things that have been happening in my life lately. God always has the right words to say in every moment. Yesterday’s scripture was from Philippians 4 (one of my favorite chapters of the Bible).

Multiple parts of this scripture were exactly the positive words I needed to hear.

Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!”

I was so not rejoicing to God for all the wonderful things he has given me in life by focusing on all the bad things.

Philippians 4:6, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” 

By spending all day worrying about what I was going to do about my wedding plans, what I was going to do about my French class, how I would handle all those classes next year, talking myself through all the bad things happening, I wasn’t spending enough time praying about those situations and giving them over to God. I was worrying myself to death and for what? Over a French class? It might be a hard class, but it is such a minor detail in the scheme of life.

Philippians 4:8, “Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

Such an excellent reminder any day, but specifically yesterday, where were my positive and lovely thoughts instead of those negative ones?

Philippians 4:13, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”

French class next year, finishing up two majors, hours and hours of art studios each semester. Bring it on. It might not be the most fun year of my life, but I can do it.

One of the things I really like about my Bible, is the study notes that it has for every verse. Those often bring more understanding about the scriptures and give it a better relevance to everyday situations. I found this one particularly pertinent:

“It’s easy to get discouraged about unpleasant circumstances or to take unimportant events too seriously. If you haven’t been joyful lately, you may not be looking at life from the right perspective.”

Umm hello, I think that was written specifically for me to get through yesterday. Really wise words.

So I’m trying, trying to take all that to heart and forget about the unimportant stuff. I should be excited and happy and joyful! My 21st birthday is in 2 days! The love of my life graduates from college in a week! My bridal shower is in two weeks and our wedding is in three weeks! I have a wonderful person to share my life with, we have a cute little house, we have food to eat, we have a nice event planned to share the start of our married lives with the rest of those people closest to us. We have a lot of great things going on! We have a lot of people that care about us and want to be a part of that day.

We have a lot to rejoice in the Lord for!

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Wedding Invitations

As of today, the wedding is exactly one month away!!

I have so many wedding projects to blog about but with wedding plans, end of school and finals going on, I haven’t had any spare time. The next month is going to be a pretty crazy one! I have two finals left, tons of wedding stuff left to do, my 21st birthday is in 11 days, Drew is graduating in 16 days, my bridal shower is in 24 days and the wedding is in 31 days! It should be a fun month!

The last few weeks we’ve been scrambling to get our wedding invitations designed, ordered/printed, packaged and sent out. It was so hard to actually decide on a design! When you are a designer and can design anything, it makes it so hard to choose! We ended up going with something really sweet and simple that fit well with our wedding theme and our already designed save-the-dates and thank you cards and I’m really happy with how they turned out. We finally got them in the mail last weekend and I’m so relieved to have that done and off my to-do list!

Here is the invitation suite:

We included the actual invitation (5×7) with a directions card to the venue and a rsvp postcard (both 4×6). We are both from Southern Illinois and any family/friends we have coming from out of town know the area already and have places to stay or have hotel information. So, we didn’t include hotel accommodation information in our invitations.

I tied all three cards together with polished hemp twine (found in the jewelry making aisle in Wal-Mart or other stores). I love the sweet little charm it adds. Although my fingers definitely hurt after tying 150 tiny bows! The back of both the invitation and the directions card had a burlap fabric printed pattern on them.

For our rsvp cards, we went with a mad-libs style fill-in-the-blank card. I thought it was more fun and would be funny to read the responses. We also made sure to ask our guests to list their favorite song so we could play some of those at our reception. The back of the cards are already filled out with our address and a little space (like on a normal postcard) for guests to add an additional message if they wish.

We contemplated doing kraft paper/grocery bag brown envelopes, but thought that they might not look as well with our invitations since they were already so simple. We ended up going with a metallic quartz colored envelope that was really pretty. It was a white/cream color with subtle hint of a metallic champagne color. We ordered them here. (I’ve made several envelope orders from envelopes.com and always really liked their products. You can also pay $1 each for samples to be mailed to you, and then you get a coupon to get the money you spent on samples off your final purchase.)

For labels, instead of having to print out both delivery and return address stickers, we went with a long 7×2 in label and printed both on one and folded it over to the back, with the return address on the back of the envelope. If I had more time, I would have fancied the design of it up a little more, but I like the way it turned out. It was definitely quicker and easier than doing it twice! You can buy these blank labels, here.

You can’t read it in these pictures, but the front of the label says,  “please deliver to:” and then the name & address of the guest. On the back we wrote, “with love,” and then our names and address.

This wasn’t part of the invitation, but while we were ordering things to be printed, we also ordered these little cards. They are for guests to write well wishes, messages of love, or wedding advice on in place of a guest book at the wedding. They have the burlap fabric pattern on the back of them as well.

We also ordered these as well. They are bookmark favors to give to the guests at the wedding. They say: “thank you for joining us on the next chapter of our lives,” and yes, we are that cheesy. Plus Drew did work in our hometown library when we were first dating and he used a book to hold the ring during the proposal.

In additional wedding news, we also FINALLY finished our wedding website! You can check it out, here.

The wedding is so close!! It’s getting exciting!

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Our Wedding Rings

Wedding rings are literally one of the smallest aspects of a wedding, but really in many ways are one of the largest. After the ceremony is over, the guests have left, the pictures have been taken, the flowers have died and the dress has been hung back in the closet, the rings are the one small daily reminder that you wear with you for the rest of your life as a symbol of your love and the reasons why you tied the knot in the first place.

We have a lot of other things to buy for the wedding, so we are definitely on a budget, but I wanted to make sure whatever rings we picked out were what we liked and were high quality, since they are going to get a lot of daily use. I also wanted them to be special and sentimental as well. I would have loved to have a wedding band with little diamonds all the way around it, but that simply wasn’t in our budget right now. I wanted to try to get both of our wedding bands for under $800.

Since I had already given up on the idea of diamonds around my wedding band, I decided I just wanted a plain, simple, thin white gold band that would match the band on my engagement ring. I originally talked to the lady that made my engagement ring to talk to her about making me a thin, simple band. Then I realized that I already had a ring that looked like a wedding band– my promise ring. Drew gave me my promise ring on my 17th birthday, now nearly 4 years ago. It is engraved on the inside with the words, “Andrew and Caitlin Forever.” I wore it everyday from then on, until the day we got engaged when I replaced it with my engagement ring. It really meant a lot to me, and I was sad for it to just be sitting unused. It didn’t however, look very good with my engagement ring. It was too thick for my tastes and was rounded on the outside, which I didn’t like either.

See what I mean? The thin, delicate look of my engagement ring just didn’t look good with my promise ring. So, I took it to a local jeweler here in New Orleans and had them make it skinnier and more flat on the outside, while still keeping the inscription inside. It turned out a little thicker than my engagement ring band, but still much thinner than before. I think it was as thin as they could go without having to re-engrave the words inside and make them smaller. I love it so much more now that it looks like this:

It is hard to believe that it is the same ring! It looks so much better with my engagement ring and I’m happy that I got to re-use it since it has a lot of sentimental value. I’m so happy that they were able to keep the original inscription without having to re-engrave it as well. Plus, guess how much it cost? $70. Much cheaper than it would have been to buy a new wedding ring!

I was so excited about getting it back and seeing how it turned out. We also ordered Drew’s wedding ring at about the same time. We ended up having it made by the same lady that made my engagement ring, so that they would be more cohesive and because we really liked that lady’s work. We also couldn’t find anything like what we wanted in the jewelry stores we looked in and their prices were much more expensive than what the custom-made lady was going to charge us. Additionally, I wanted to add a little something more sentimental to Drew’s ring as well. Since mine was engraved, I thought about having his ring engraved, but in the end decided that I would prefer to have a little tiny heart etched in the inside of his ring instead, to literally mean that he holds my heart. The lady that made it was happy to add that tiny detail. His ring is 6mm wide, smooth with a satin finish in white gold. Here is how his turned out:

I love how mine turned out to be a mini-version of his:

I love them! Drew’s ring was $725, which was quite a bit cheaper than the $1500-$2500 that we saw for similar rings in the jewelry store that re-did my ring. Plus I love that we both have rings made my the same lady and that she was able to add that tiny heart to it as well. So, our total for both of our wedding rings was $795!! $5 below our original $800 budget! How awesome!

If you are interested in looking at work by the lady that made our rings, you can see her work in her Etsy store, here, or on her website, here. She is really nice, does amazing work, and her prices are pretty reasonable for custom handmade jewelry compared to a chain jewelry store. (My engagement ring was actually appraised at several hundred dollars more than what we paid for it!) If you like my engagement ring, there is one that she has for sale that is almost identical, here.

*******

I haven’t shared much else about wedding planning lately, but since some people are really interested in my planning process, here is what else we’ve gotten done in the last couple months:

-We completed our wedding registries at Target, Macy’s, Dillard’s and our hometown Durham’s Hardware Store
-We sent out our Save-the-Dates
-We booked our honeymoon!! We did this in mid-December. We are flying into Boston, Massachusetts and spending a few days there, heading on up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire for a few days, and then heading on up to Portland, Maine for a few days! We can’t wait to see this area of the country (I’ve been when I was a baby and my parents have been several times and always talk about how beautiful it is!), and we have cute little Bed and Breakfasts reserved to stay in and can’t wait for sailboat rides, seeing lighthouses, art museums, Drew’s brewery tours, and relaxing and enjoying our first week of marriage!
-I picked up my wedding dress
-I bought my wedding shoes
-I ordered and picked up my veil
-We booked the DJ for the wedding ceremony and reception
-We picked out the men’s tuxes.
-We met with the caterer to discuss the reception menu.
-We talked to the florist.
-We booked our cake baker.
-We reserved a bed and breakfast for our wedding night.
-We, of course, ordered our wedding rings!

We still have lots to do, but it is nice that most of the big things are out of the way. We just have to get the bridesmaids dresses done (my mom is making them), design/print/mail the invitations, get all the small little decor/favors/table decorations, etc… bought/made/completed and about a million more things, but at least we are down to the fun decorative to-do items! I can’t believe the wedding is just over 2 months away!!

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Happy 2012!! :)

I love the refreshed feeling every new year brings. It is always the perfect time for reflection on the past year and hopes and dreams for all to come in the new year.

The past year has been great for me! I’ve expanded this blog, gotten my first real apartment, spent time decorating, crafting and DIYing things for my home, continued to be better about being healthy (making sure to take my vitamins every day, going to Pilates classes every week, eating fresher and more organic, spending more time outside in the fresh air, getting in a better sleep schedule, spending time daily in prayer and bible study, trying to manage stress better, etc…), been planning my wedding, and lots of other great things. Last January, I started my 20 Before Twenty list and it is nice to look back and see that I addressed everything on my list, completing almost all of the things, and modifying others.

I don’t have a specific list of things that I want to accomplish in 2012, mostly because big things are already going to happen in 2012. Drew and I are getting married this year! The wedding is now only a few months away! It is so exciting and kind-of still unbelievable at the same time! I’m sure I’ll be crazy busy the next few months with school and wedding planning! Drew also graduates this year as well! (just a couple weeks before the wedding!) This semester he only has two remaining classes to take and he will be working full time as well. With my credits at school, I’m already listed as a senior as well, so that means graduation for me is not too far off either! I’m excited for his graduation, our wedding, honeymoon and getting to grow in our relationship through marriage. I’m so happy to be building a life and home together with my soon-to-be husband!

My goals for 2012 are simple really. I have to get all my wedding planning done, and I hope to do so as stress-free as possible. I really want to enjoy every step of this process! I want to enjoy picking out things and enjoy this as part of life and not just as a to-do step for the wedding. It is a lot more stressful to plan a wedding while I’m still in school, so I hope to continue to develop a good balance between school and life. I want to work on building up a successful and happy marriage and hope to work out all the extra things in life that a marriage brings in a stress-free way. (being financially independent, paying extra bills like home, car and health insurance, etc…) Mostly I just want to work on remembering to enjoy life. It is easy to get wrapped up in school and see this time as just a stepping stone to get to a career or another part of life. I want to really remember to live each day and try not to worry and stress out so much about what the future might bring. I want to simply live life and enjoy every moment of it. 🙂

These are the first pictures of me taken in 2012, spending a lovely evening on a double date with my soon-to-be husband and my best friend and her soon-to-be husband, enjoying life:

Happy 2012! 🙂

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One Year Ago

One year ago today, I was on the beach in California, when the cutest, curly-headed boy got down on one knee in front of me and asked me to spend the rest of my life with him. I can’t believe that it has been an entire year since we got engaged!

For ring pictures, the engagement story, and to see what I wrote on that day, visit last year’s post, here.

This year has seriously gone by fast! I’m sure the next 6 months will go by even faster and before I know it we will be married! It was nice today to look back on the pictures from our trip and re-live those memories. Our trip to California last December was really our first vacation together (just the two of us) and it was such a wonderful trip! We had such a great time and it was of course made all the more exciting by the ring on my finger that we couldn’t stop staring at the whole time. I never posted any pictures from our trip, so here are some never-before-seen pictures from last year’s trip to San Diego:

Such great memories! I’m so blessed!

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Postcard Save-the-Dates & Thank Yous

It took Drew and I nearly an entire year to decide on our wedding stationary. (We will have been engaged a year this Thursday!) We seriously designed tons and tons of options and liked them all, but couldn’t pin down a single one to actually use for our save-the-dates and thank you cards. We knew that we had to get them in the mail soon so that out-of-town guests could start thinking about their travel plans and everyone could go ahead and get our date written down on their calendars. So this is what we ended up with:

Super simple really. We had more intricate and detailed designs made that used our engagement pictures, but when it came down to it, we really liked the simplicity of this design. We liked the subtle background texture (it is the same as the background of my blog) paired with the simple font, typographically lined up.

We designed them ourselves and had them printed through a company that we have a trade account with and use to print all of our P.S. Designs print products. They actually ended up being free, because we had a credit on our account from a previous business order that had been misprinted.

If you are interested in designing something yourself and having them printed like we did, but don’t have a business trade account, you can try a company like GotPrint. An estimate from them for what we had printed for our save-the-dates (250 4×6 postcards, 16 pt dull cover with matte finish, color both sides) is about $30 plus shipping. That does mean though that you have to have some kind of design software to make your card design in the right format with the correct bleeds and everything.  If you are looking for something similar and can’t do it yourself, send me an e-mail through my contact page, I do graphic design and offer printing services.

We printed ours out as 4×6 postcards. On the back of our save-the-dates we simply had our return address printed in the upper left corner and then left the rest of the card blank so that we could add labels with the guest’s addresses on them. On the thank-you cards, we  just printed a little line to separate where we could write a personal thank-you message and then write the guest’s address down on the other side.

If you are planning your wedding, you might consider going the postcard route as well. Both save-the-dates and thank-you cards are supposed to be sweet, personal, and informal, and I think that postcards really convey that well. In addition, we saved money by not having to buy envelopes for them and also saved 20 cents a card on postage since we could use 29 cent postcard stamps instead of 49 cent regular letter stamps. When you are talking about mailing so many of them, those few cents really add up!

So happy to have them all addressed and mailed now! The challenge now is going to be trying to decide on a design for the actual invitations… Maybe we need another year? 🙂

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Wedding Registries

I had already started our wedding registries online a while ago, but today Drew and I went into the stores to look around and see what else we wanted to add to our lists and to check things out in person. I’m excited about all the things on our list that could one day potentially be ours, but most of all, I’m super in love with the dishes that I picked out:

 

From the first time I saw those floral plates in the store months ago, I fell in love. I picked out the other white dishes online, so I wanted to go into the store, put them together and see how they looked together. I LOVE the way they look paired together! The colored plates give just enough color and interest and the white plates keep them simple and sophisticated. The coupe style and the shape and size of the plates are perfect together as well!

I wanted to go with white dishes and colored accent plates, that way over time I can collect different styles/colors of accent plates that I can change out for the occasion or holiday season, while still keeping the neutral white main dishes. I love the wide, deep bowls in this collection as well and the classy silverware collection. The name of the silverware is “Louisiana.” How perfect!

You can find more of the floral dishes collection, here, more of the white dishes collection, here, and more of the silverware collection, here.

More of our wedding registry items can be found at Dillard’s, Macy’s, and Target.

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