Category — Wedding

And I will wear a flower in my hair! For my wedding that is. Even before I knew what dress I wanted to wear, I knew that I wanted to wear a birdcage veil with a big flower fascinator of some sort. I wasn’t exactly sure whether I wanted just a flower, just feathers, or a combination.

I spent hours scouring Etsy for just the right thing. They were reasonably priced and amazing, but eventually I thought I would give it a go at making my own fascinator. So I started hunting for DIY tutorials. I found this one on the WeddingBee forums, and it was perfect. I had something in mind for my own, that didn’t include feathers, but this was the perfect tutorial. It was so much easier than I thought it would be!

Here are pictures from my process.

And here is a photo of the final product.

This was so easy to make on my own and took about an hour total. I think it could have taken less time, but I had a difficult time deciding exactly how big I wanted it to be and which petal I would use as my base to achieve the look I wanted. I am thrilled that it is something else that I can add to my (already quite long) list of wedding DIY projects! I can’t wait to wear it on my wedding day, it’s going to go so perfectly with my dress and my veil. What projects are you super-excited about making for your wedding? Or have you already made for your wedding?

This wedding week post brings you my bridal party attire. Our colors are teal and orange, my fave color and Shawn’s, respectively. We are having an outdoor wedding in the mountains in August. I knew that I wanted my girls to have short dresses. I also knew that I wanted them to have them choose their own dress. So I set them free! Which, for me, was so completely liberating. For my first wedding I had the hardest time choosing dresses and I knew I didn’t want that headache this time around. I sent them to David’s Bridal and told them that our colors were Tangerine and Mermaid, the only requirement that I had was that their colors had to alternate according to the lineup and their dress needed to be short. This is what they came up with…

This image is from David’s Bridal’s Dress Your Wedding application on their website. It’s a great way to see what your potential wedding will look like.

I have six bridesmaids in my wedding. No maid of honor, just six of my favorite gals. Let me introduce them to you! (Appearing in no particular order, just by height!)

There’s my youngest sister, Courtney.

My sister, Jackie.

My dear friend and cousin-in-law, Leah.

My soon-to-be sister-in-law, Amber.

My other dear friend and cousin-in-law, Nikki.

And last, but definitely not least, my dear friend, Lauren.

These girls all mean the world to me and are my best and dearest friends. They have made planning and preparing for this wedding so wonderful and I just know that they will help to make our wedding so fun and memorable. Thank you to each and every one of these special gals!

This second post for Wedding Week is all about the Thank You notes I created for our wedding shower. Not wanting to get behind on Thank Yous, I got started on them right away. I decided I was going to make my thank you notes for the shower, since there were not that many that I needed to write. I knew that as long as I could come up with a cute, but simple design, I could get them all made in one afternoon. Then Shawn was awesome enough to help write them out. Perfect!

Once I had made the decision to make the cards myself, I had to come up with a design. Originally, I thought that I would use our wedding colors (teal and orange) as a starting point, but our shower theme was a luau and I wanted something more tropical feeling.

I went immediately to my paper stash and chose a pink (Stampin’ Up‘s Melon Mambo, to be exact) cardstock for the base of my card. Then, I needed to gather some stamps that were tropical. I knew I had a palm tree stamp from A Muse that I could use, and then remembered that I also have a flamingo stamp from A Muse that would be perfect together! So I gathered all of my materials.

All of the cardstock, ink, markers, and sentiment stamp you see above are Stampin Up. The stamps I used are from A Muse. The ink is Staz On and can be found in any craft store and I also used the Spellbinders dies: Small Classic Oval (for the white) and Large Classic Scalloped Oval (for the orange).

Next, I did all of my stamping and coloring, my favorite parts! And this is what the pile of pieces looked like before I assembled them all.

Finally, I assembled all of the pieces for each card. I made about 20 cards total. This is what the final product looked like, en masse.

After this, we addressed envelopes, wrote our messages, and sent these happy notes on their way!

My first post for Wedding Week is all about our first celebration of our impending nuptials, our wedding shower! Shawn and I are so lucky to be surrounded by the BEST family and friends a person could ask for. We come from very close families and treasure that immensely. The first week of June, these wonderful families and our best friends got together to throw us the most fun wedding shower we have ever been to.

For starters, we had the most AMAZING cake EVER!!! One of my bridesmaids’ mother made it for us and it was so incredibly perfect for us! Being the big Apple fans that we are and iPhone owners and developer, an iPhone cake with custom icons to represent things about us as individuals and things we have in common (the middle and bottom icons), was totally fitting. A huge thanks to Lauren and her mom!

This is us! I love this photo of us, we look so happy! Our shower had a luau theme, which I wish I had known about because I would have chosen to wear something more themed! Oh well!

This was a game my youngest sister came up with for our shower. She asked us questions about ourselves separately beforehand and then we had to answer the questions about each other. Each time one of us answered a question incorrectly, we had to put on a costume item. It was a lot of fun and the pictures of us could not be any funnier. (And I swear we know each other better than it appears!)

These next photos are photos of our bridal party. The first is my bridesmaids (minus 1) and myself. The second is our entire bridal party (minus 3). We love these guys and gals so much and we are so blessed to have wonderful friends and family to be with us every step of the way on our way to wedded bliss.

Thanks to all of our friends and family (again) for such a wonderful day! We had so much fun and agreed it was one of the most awesome wedding showers we had ever been to.

image from weheartit

I have a whole bunch of goodies concerning our fast-approaching wedding to share with you all. I have been saving them up to share after the re-design, and the time has come. So to celebrate, I am announcing that this week will be wedding week on the blog here. Each day will present a new post that is wedding related. You will be able to see all of the DIY projects I have been consumed with in the planning of our upcoming wedding and other wedding related topics. Check back daily starting tomorrow for all the behind-the-scenes wedding goodness!

Well since they have all been mailed, I can now safely share our invitations here on the blog. These were so much fun to make. I love the way they turned out and there was a small part of me that didn’t want to send them! They were all so pretty I wanted to keep them for myself!

Because we are going with a carnival inspired theme for the wedding, it was important to me that the invitation carry that feeling. Months and months ago, my friend Liz sent me a ton of inspiring ideas for my carnival theme, including a bunch of great carnival/circus fonts. It was so hard to choose the best ones for our invites, but I am so pleased with the choices we made.

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The invites were completely DIY. I typed everything up in the fonts I downloaded from DaFont.com, hand trimmed all of the pieces, used a Sizzix die to cut the front of the invitation, and assembled all of the pieces. Of course, I digress, I did not do this alone. Without the help of my bridesmaids, my mom, and my aunt, this would have taken me ages to complete. With their help, it only took a few hours. A BIG thanks to my best gals for their help with these! I love when we can work on projects together!

This is the front of the invitations…

This is the inside of the invitations…

And, a closer look…

All of the products are Stampin’ Up – the paper, the ink, the stamps the ribbon in the colors Pumpkin Pie and Bermuda Bay. These are the colors for our entire wedding. Shawn’s fave is orange, mine is teal/blue, and I am lucky that those two colors go quite well together. The die that was used to cut the front is also from Stampin’ Up – the Top Note die.

The next step was envelopes. I have a friend who has impeccable handwriting and offered to do the calligraphy for my addresses on the envelopes, but that just didn’t seem like my style. I loved how Elise did her wrap-around labels on her response cards, and thought that I would like to have something similar for my own invitations. It would be so easy to do and something different. I did some reading up on whether or not my invitations would actually get where they needed to go with a wrap-around label and asked my future father-in-law who works for the USPS and it was decidedly worth the risk. So I started hunting for tutorials on how to create said labels and found the BEST thing! Leave it to Ms. Martha Stewart to come up with exactly what I need, exactly when I need it! I must admit, I have gotten a lot of my ideas for this wedding from Martha so I wasn’t too surprised when she had this great template for wrap-around labels on her site. It was so easy! I just saved the template to my desktop and typed in all of the info I needed, and it was automatically formatted. Then I printed them on sheets of label paper and trimmed them. Then I used my pinking shears to add a little detail to the edge of the label and viola! They were all ready to go!

The front with the mailing address…

And the back with the return address…

I knew I definitely wanted colored envelopes and since our invitations were teal, I figured orange would be a good color for the invitations. They were 6″x6″, so postage was a little more than normal mailings, but I love the square, gate-fold design of our invitations so it didn’t matter. The envelopes are not quite the same shade of orange as the paper on the invitations, but I really don’t think anyone is going to mind. I got the envelopes from Paper Presentation. They were very reasonably priced and delivery was quite speedy. I would definitely order from this company again.

So there they are, our wedding invitations! And with exactly two months from today to go, I have a ton of projects on the horizon! Thank goodness today is the last day of school! So stay tuned and check back frequently for more updates on wedding projects.

When I started planning our wedding I knew that it had to be color saturated, especially if we were going along the lines of a carnival theme. The only question was…what colors??? There are so many choices that would all work perfectly! Well, it really didn’t take long for me to decide on our color palette. We not knew that we wanted our wedding to be a total representation of us, din to the smallest details. So it seemed only natural that our wedding colors would be our signature colors, respectively (every time I say “signature colors” I can’t help but think of Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias!).

So I happily present our wedding colors to you…

TEAL and ORANGE!!

Teal is definitely my favorite color, and Shawn is sort of known for his obsession with orange, so it seemed perfectly fitting that these two colors make-up our color palette for the wedding. So here is a little bit of teal and orange eye candy and inspiration.

(from The Perfect Palette)

(from Tiny Talk)

(from Groom Sold Separately)

(from The Swish List)

I can’t wait to be able to share more about how we are using these colors for our own wedding…but not quite yet!

Now that we are in the double digit countdown to our wedding, I wanted to reflect a little on all the wedding-ness that has been going on. This is a list of all of the wedding goodness that has happened around here lately…

* centerpieces have been decided on
* bouquets have been decided on…
* …they will be tissue paper flowers
* tissue paper has been ordered and has arrived
* all of the bridesmaids, and my super officiant sister in law, have decided on their dresses
* our engagement photos have been taken (and the sneak peek is AMAZING!!!)
* invitations have all been (hand)made
* cupcake toppers have been (mostly) assembled
* decorations for the bags for the candy buffet have been made
* invitation envelopes have been ordered and arrived
* envelope design is being decided on
* a wedding website has been created
* we have registered for some pretty awesome things

This has been a busy 2-3 weeks! Very, very busy, indeed! I can’t believe this list! I am in full steam ahead mode right now. I just need my day job to end so that I can spend as much time as I want thinking about our wedding. Well, I guess I can’t ask for anything more than having only 25 days left of school!

I intend to be back again with more detailed posts about most of the things on this list. Can’t wait to share some of these things with you all!

-image source weheartit

I have so many good things to post, most of which need to be photographed before being posted about, but there has been so much wedding goodness going on around here! As of today there are officially 100 days until our wedding! I am so incredibly stoked!

I spent some time last week setting up our wedding website. We have all of our registry info on there, details about the wedding, and our guests will RSVP to the website, which is a little more eco-friendly than the traditional mail-in RSVP.

I intend to get back here in the next few days with a more detailed, chock-full-of-wedding deliciousness post, or a few posts, but in the meantime, please take a few minutes, if you haven’t already, and check out our wedding website.

You can find it here: www.SandSwedding.com

Some of you may know already, especially if you read my sister’s blog Knittin’ in the Kitchen, or have a conversation with me on any given day, that we have decided on a carnival-inspired theme for our wedding. I knew for our wedding that I wanted it to have some sort of cohesive, overriding theme or idea that would dictate decorations and details for our big day.

Long ago, before I even knew I was going to be planning a wedding, I came across this wedding and completely fell in love with the carnival as wedding idea!

I couldn’t believe that they had a ferris wheel, that would be so awesome! Despite the fact that I knew I would not have a ferris wheel at my wedding, I knew that a carnival theme would be fun and that is exactly what we want our wedding to be.

I have since found TONS more inspiration for carnival-inspired weddings and parties and just wanted to share with you all some of the ideas that are out there for bringing a little bit of the circus/carnival/Coney Island to your event.

from Grey Likes Weddings

from flickr

from Green Wedding Shoes

I am not quite ready to share what our take will be on the Carnival-Inspired wedding but you can bet it will be a good time and some of these ideas may definitely show their faces again!