our little birds have left the nest

Or rather, I booted them out and celebrated once they were gone.



Now you know where I've been for the past few weeks! I've been having anxiety over the fact that these should have gone out weeks ago, but April 1 is still pretty reasonable - especially since our save the dates went out so long ago. Oh, and good thing we took that photo before I went in to the post office! For some reason, I thought the PO didn't close until 3 on Saturdays, so imagine my surprise when I walked in at 2 to see everything all locked up. I was not happy. The future mister saved the day when he went back in to check their hours for Monday and discovered that there was another post office open until 3! We were greeted by a very unhappy postal worker who gave us a hard time (about wanting stamps that added up to $0.81 and the fact that we had something bulky-a wax seal-in our envelopes), but we were able get everything stamped and shoved on their merry way right as she was closing up. What a huge weight off my shoulders!

If I ever again plan a huge party and want to make 130 invitations by hand, by myself, someone please remind me what a stupid idea it is. (They do look pretty, though!)

Keep your eyes out for the big reveal sometime next week!

rsvp help

I need some help y'all. I've been neck deep in invitations for the past few weeks and am just about ready to start printing my RSVP cards. I thought I had it all figured out, but now I'm second guessing myself.

Here's the original wording:

We have reserved ___ seats in your honor

Name(s): ______________________

___ Wouldn't miss it for the world!

___ Will toast you from afar


My concern is that if we invite Mr. and Mrs. Joe Blow, indicating on their RSVP that we have reserved 2 seats for them, and only Mrs. Blow intends to come will they know that they are only supposed to write Mrs. Blow's name on the name line? Or what if Mrs. Blow thinks that since 2 seats are reserved for them and Mr. Blow can't come, that it's okay to bring Katie Blow who isn't invited to the wedding? Or am I just being crazy?

I did some research and discussed it with the future mister and here are the two other options that we are now considering.

Option 1:

We have reserved ___ seats in your honor

Name(s): ______________________

___ Wouldn't miss it for the world!
___ Number attending

___ Will toast you from afar


Option 2:

Name(s): ______________________

___ Wouldn't miss it for the world!
___ out of ___ attending

___ Will toast you from afar

Thoughts? Suggestions? Your help is much appreciated!

bride-to-be's little helper

It's just about time for the invitations to go out and I have more work than my two little hands can handle. At the same time, though, I'm too much of a perfectionist-control-freak to let anyone help me because the thought of relinquishing my control gives me more anxiety than actually doing it myself. Wow, I think I just made myself sound quite insane.

Anyway...

Yesterday I was convinced by a very willing future mister to let him help. And help he did. While I traced, he cut out about one hundred or so envelope liners.



Unfortunately, he's not all that comfortable helping me with the remaining invitation tasks (due to their skill level). But every little bit helps!

Did your fiance lend a hand with any wedding crafts?

omg

Seriously. I'm not sure I can even get out the words to describe how amazing this is.




This is our ring bearer pillow. Nancy (the hankie lady) made this. Out of antique linens. This was the example my mom showed her:

(source)

Sorry Martha, you lose this one. Honestly, I'm not sure I can even express how beautiful I think this is. All I keep imagining is my future daughter(s) and granddaughter(s) using this same pillow at their weddings, adding their names and wedding dates to the back. Passing down a piece of history - that started with me and the future mister. Such an amazing heirloom piece. Such a beautiful gift.

Do you plan on passing down any of the items you used at your wedding? Or do you have any heirloom pieces that were passed down to you?

guestbook prompts

As I mentioned, here is a possible contender for the prompt books that my mom and I found at Hobby Lobby:


It is obviously meant to be used as a photo album, but the pages are blank card stock inside (rather than plastic sleeves). And I LOVE that the future mister and I can incorporate some of our engagement photos if we end up using these.

Now, what are some good prompts?

Here are the questions that MSW provided with their template:

Some good...

1. What's the best marriage advice you've ever gotten?
2. What's your favorite memory of us? What's your funniest memory of us? (one or the other, not both)
3. What should we name our kids? (this one could get some funny responses)
4. What should we do on date nights?
5. What's the most romantic place we should visit? Where should we go for our 10-year anniversary? (these two questions are too similar, don't you think?)
6. What should we do during our first year of marriage?
7. Where do you see us in 25 years?
8. When did you know we were meant for each other?

Some not so good...

1. What's the most romantic movie you've ever seen?
2. What were you really thinking during our vows?

And here are a few others that I found online:

1. Share your favorite moment of the wedding so far....then update later if you have a new favorite moment.
2. What are your predictions for our future? (very similar to "Where do you see us in 25 years?" - I think I like this wording better)
3. Why is Heather perfect for Sam? Why is Sam perfect for Heather?
4. What's the best thing about being married?
5. What are your tips on how to be a great husband/wife?

What are your favorite questions of the ones listed above? Do you have any others to share?

Also, we will have about 20 tables (6 - 30" hi boys, 8 - 36" rounds and 6 - 48" rounds) in total at the reception. Should we have a book for each table or just 10 to 12 scattered throughout?

inspiration strikes again

First off - I hope you all had a nice weekend! Wedding wise, mine was pretty successful - I've got tons to share this week.

I'm sure you've all probably experienced finding inspiration when you least expect it. Something really great popped out at me in the entrance to Hobby Lobby this weekend. I was there with my mom and she stopped to peruse the craft, hobby and DIY books at the entrance to the store. Books that I would just pass on by. But we were already standing there, so I started browsing and I found the PERFECT option for our flower girl basket. On Friday, I told our florist that we could use whatever he had available. It certainly wasn't something in the forefront of the crafting/DIY section of my mind. Seriously, though. This was too good, and too easy, to pass up.

(source)

A flower girl basket made out of a crocheted lace doily! All you do is take a doily, drench it in fabric stiffener and shape it over the bottom of a bowl. Add a ribbon handle and fill with flower petals and Voila! I bought a cheap-o test doily and some fabric stiffener at Jo-Ann's. If my test is successful then I'll move on to use one of the nice doilies I have. So excited.

Where are some of the places you found inspiration when you weren't expecting it?

how I spent my christmas vacation

Instead of cleaning up the craft room/guest bedroom like I SHOULD be doing (it's still a disaster area from our STDs which went out over a month ago - eek!), I decided to crack open some of my Christmas gifts and practice calligraphy. It's not really procrastination if I'm doing something wedding related, right??

(Handmade Weddings)

(Calligraphy Kit from Emilie Friday)

One serious hand cramp later and not much to show for it:


I had fun though! I'm still undecided about whether I want to tackle hand calligraphing our invitation envelopes. I would need to put in a lot of practice time, not to mention all the time it will take to hand address each envelope. Although....printing our envelopes for our save the dates didn't exactly save me much time.

Would you or have you considered DIY calligraphy?

a-tisket, a-tasket...

a green and yellow basket (please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers this nursery rhyme)

After some thought, I decided to go with a basket and flower petals for our flower girl instead of the bouquet I made a few weeks ago. After scouring the aisles at Michael's, I purchased this gold basket at 50% off - score! I already had a few cans of white spray paint lying around, so it was a pretty quick fix.



And with the addition of some pretty ribbon and flower petals, my project was complete.



I hope she likes it and has fun "practicing" with her little brother for the big day! When I was little I always wanted to be a flower girl and would have loved receiving something like this. What about you?

felt flower tutorial

I forgot to include the tutorial I used in my post on Tuesday, so here it is if anyone is interested in making something similar.

I followed this tutorial that I saw on The Bride's Cafe. It was very clear, except I wish there was more photo documentation of the different steps. The included template wasn't to size when I printed it out, either, but that was easily fixable with a ruler.

A finished bouquet - I might add leaves to mine eventually, like this one, to fill it out more

All of my materials, minus my sewing kit

All of the "petals" cut out for the gardenia

Cutting fringe for the mums

Attaching the floral wire stems

Reinforcing the stems to make them sturdier

Everything wrapped with floral tape

If anyone decides to tackle this particular project, I would suggest carving out a good chunk of time to do so. If I had known how long it would take (the directions made it sound so quick and easy!), I would have found a different tutorial that used the glue gun instead of a needle and thread. But overall, I'm still extremely happy with how it turned out.

Did any of your "quick and easy" projects turn into something more involved and time consuming?

and some flowers for our flower girl

Meet M, my soon-to-be niece and big sister to E:


Like I did for E, I purchased M a book - The Little Flower Girl:

(source)

And made her something she can practice with, too:


As much as I LOVE this bouquet, I have a few issues.

1. I'm a bit nervous about it's kid friendly-ness. The flowers are attached to floral wire, which could come loose and poke out if the bouquet takes a beating. Also, the floral tape I wrapped the wires with is extremely sticky. Unless you only touch the bouquet where the hankie is, it will get allll over your hands.

2. Sorry, this reason is purely selfish. This bouquet took so much more time and energy (and needle pokes in my fingers) than I anticipated, whereas the ring bearer pillow was a 10 minute job. Is it wrong that I would rather keep this one for myself (perhaps to use as a rehearsal bouquet) and make something else for M?

Right now, I'm leaning towards making a new bouquet (using my glue gun instead of a needle and thread) with the easier to make mums (the pink pom pom flowers) attached to either wooden dowels/skewers or green pipe cleaners. Or I could just make, or buy, some fake flower petals and put them into a little basket. My mom made a good point that petals might be more fun for M anyway because she could practice scattering them "down the aisle".

What are your thoughts? Should I just give her the bouquet I already made or make something more kid-friendly?

a pillow for our ring bearer

I don't think I have introduced you all to our ring bearer yet.

Meet E, the future mister's nephew:




Adorable. Don't you just want to pinch those cheeks?

Anyway, since we've had a super long engagement, we haven't yet officially asked E or his sister, M, to be in our wedding party. But we're now past the six month mark (!) and will be seeing them for Christmas. The future mister and I have set quite the precedent with asking the rest of our wedding party, so I thought it only appropriate to put on my creative thinking cap and come up with something cute for the little ones, too.

For E, I purchased The Best Ever Ring Bearer book:


And this weekend, I made him something he can practice with:


For the pillow, I used my hot glue gun to adhere two pieces of felt, left a little opening so I could stuff some polyfill inside, and glued on some felt leaves, a flower, and a piece of twine. I think I might check at Michael's or the Dollar Store to see if they have some plastic rings to complete the look.

Did you do anything special for the little ones in your wedding party?

for your tears of joy: stds part 4 (one more detail)

One last detail that was a pain in my butt were these home reception tags that I put only on the stds being sent to my side of the family and those local to the Pennsylvania/New Jersey area.


It was one problem after another with these things. I decided to get a circle cutter rather than a circle punch so that I would be able to cut different sized circles with just one tool. Well, if you're thinking about buying the Fiskars circle cutter (because it is the best rated) - don't do it. It has issues (or maybe I'm the one with issues) cutting circles under 2 inches in diameter. No matter how hard I tried, it gave my circles rat tails.



I ended up returning it for the Martha Stewart circle cutter and the Fiskars 2 inch squeeze punch, which is what I ended up using. Even though I told myself that I would return the Martha Stewart cutter if I didn't use it, I kept it anyway. It's a Michael's/craft store curse, I tell you. Anything I ever buy with the intent to return it if it's not used never happens because I tell myself that there will always be another craft project. Luckily, I already have some ideas.


So after purchasing my circle cutters, I made a quick stop at the office supply store to see if they had any circle labels. My original plan was to use the circle cutter to cut a 2 inch circle out of craft paper and then a 1.5 inch circle out of the full page label paper I already have. Circle labels sounded much easier, though. And what do you know? The only size they had was the exact size I needed. I went home, downloaded the template, made my design and pressed print. And this happened.


After fussing with it for an hour or so and wasting a few pages of (expensive) label paper, I decided to just delete the black outline from my design. Not ideal, but doable. Again, no one would notice or care but me.


It all turned out okay in the end. And even though I have more supplies than I know what to do with, I'm sure Michael's hasn't seen the last of me.

Did you accumulate a lot of extra craft supplies during wedding planning?

Read all about our save the dates here:

Part 1 (envelopes)
Part 2 (envelope liners)
Part 3 (handkerchiefs)

for your tears of joy: stds part 3 (the full reveal)

I am so very excited to finally show you our save the dates in all their glory!





These were just a few of my favorites. And, yes, I took a photograph of every single hankie. It eased my separation anxiety. Whatever works, right?

My mom found this one in the parking lot of her doctor's office

I told you all about how I almost freaked out when my dad told me he was going to use a letter opener. Well my possessiveness didn't stop there. I was thisclose to including some sort of instructions with our stds. It would have told guests how to open the envelope, some of the things they could do with the hankie (bring to the wedding for their tears of joy, wear as a pocket square, etc.) and, most importantly, that if they didn't want to keep the hankie to give it back to me instead of throwing it away. AHH, can you even imagine?! The thought of one of these at the bottom of a landfill makes me want to cry. But, I'm a reasonable (and somewhat sane) person and I know that including something like that would have been inexcusably rude. So I didn't. But I thought about it. And now they're out there and I have no more control. The good thing, though, is that we've received some great feedback from a few of our guests!

Did you become possessive of (or obsessed with) any of your wedding projects?

Read all about our save the dates here:

Part 1 (envelopes)
Part 2 (envelope liners)
Part 4 (reception tags)