Save the Dates!

Now that our Save the Dates have been made and sent out, it is time for the big reveal!

There are so many beautiful ideas for Save the Dates out there, but we decided to pull from some of our favorites to make this postcard design...drumroll please...

Front

There is a washed out map of Wisconsin in the background, which I made sure had Lake Wissota visible, and then both of our names and the date.

Back

Simple, and to the point, you will notice from my previous post that we had to change up the design on the back by lightening the bracket color and removing extra text, as well as shrinking things up from the bottom to fit within the Postal Services guidelines for post cards. Make sure if you decide to do postcards you are within the parameters!

Here are some real life photos from stamping and addressing...it killed me to make them fuzzy, but someone is very particular about the revelation of full names online and all that, so this is the best I could do!

The cost breakdown is as follows:

250 Custom Design Uploaded Postcards from Vista Print,

Color Printed on both sides, with standard shipping:

$55.10 (about 22 cents per card)

125 Postcard Stamps:

$33.75 (27 cents each)

Total: $88.85

Total for each Save the Date sent: about 49 cents each

This is a pretty budget conscious way to send a ton of Save the Dates!

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Fab Friends: Jessica and Adam

You know these Fab Friend photos will be g-o-r-g-e-o-u-s, because this friend was, believe it or not, in the top ten of the Miss Virginia Pageant before getting married in the Summer of 2005!

Allow me to introduce you to Jessica and Adam:

Jessica and Adam had a beautiful wedding in Virginia Beach/Chesapeake Virginia. Look at these pictures of the bride getting ready

{if the young lady holding the mirror in the middle picture looks familiar, it is because she is actually the bride from this previous fab friends post! I told you we were close :) }

The wedding took place at Atlantic Shores Baptist Church in Virginia Beach, where the couple first met, and where after a stint in Charlottesville, Virginia and Peabody, Massachussets, Adam has now returned to be a Youth Minister! As soon as the doors swung open to reveal Jess, every woman in the church burst into tears...including me, which is saying something!

After the wedding, the bridal party and newlyweds snuck over to Regent University to snap some more beautiful photos...

{Part of the "Bridal Army"...Jess and Adam had 16 'adult attendants, and 9 children attendants! Here are some of the kids playing around, minus the flower girls from the getting ready photo above...}

{aren't they cute???}

While the bridal party was taking photographs, the rest of us guests headed to the Chesapeake Conference Center to enjoy a fabulous cocktail hour.

The bride and groom entered and had their first dance to "Making Memories of Us" by Keith Urban, which again had almost every woman in the room in tears...{it was a very emotional day}

and if THAT didn't have everyone in tears, when Jessica's little sister Anna, her MOH, made her toast, that certainly got the rest of us. She intertwined her speech with singing the Shania Twain song "Forever and For Always", which was not only original and brave for such a young MOH, but brought down the house.

One of my favorite parts of Jessica and Adam's wedding, however, was that they took the time to honor the Jewish part of Jessica's heritage. Who doesn't want a picture like this one?

They definitely threw an amazing celebration:

And as alway we made sure to get one awesome friend shot in before their exit:

{$10 to anyone that can help me discover a spray tan that can help me from glowing like I am in this photograph for my own wedding...I am almost translucent!}

And the evening ended with the bride and groom exiting to a secret location, secret to everyone besides the groom and his father that is, to keep well meaning and hilarious friends from sending them large orders of pizzas and other obnoxious distractions

They had such a beautiful celebration to start such a beautiful life together. They just celebrated their three year anniversary this summer and live thier lives in such a gracious model of love and support for one another...even across college rivalry lines (as Jess went to and is a fan of UVA and Adam is a die hard Hokie...they are even able to attend games together, a feat which not many such couples can claim).

Thanks for letting me share your pictures guys!

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Maids and Men Cards: How to

While the cards may have seemed almost self-explanatory for other crafters out there...I thought it would be fun to break down the steps, and cost, of the cards from asking our Maids and Men.

First up was the card itself:

After much deliberation on what colors and types of cards to do, {and Austin pleading desperately with me to go to any other store besides Hobby Lobby and Michaels -sidenote: have you ever noticed there is no apostrophe in Michaels? So is it plural Michaels? rando. sorry} I decided that crisp white cards would be the best to build on from there.

I bought one of those Value Packs of cards and envelopes from Michaels for a whopping $5.99 for 50. We would only need 16...by far the most cost effective way to do a card, in my opinion, since I did not have to buy envelopes separately and all of the card stock was pre-cut. I bought the navy cardstock and vellum on the other hand at "The Lobby" as it is affectionately called around our house, for about $5.

After coming home with cards in tow, I measured them and figured I would leave about a 1/4 inch border of white, then do a 1/4 inch border of the blue, and then 1/4 inch in from that would be the photo and vellum.

It is important to remember though, if you are doing something like this with the ribbon at the top, do every other step first, before adhering anything to the card, or you will have to punch through to the inside of the card...and unless you have a long handled puncher you are in for some creative solutions...

So, we took the photo ourselves {camera with a self timer is imperative} and then I imported it to my computer where I used Picasa 3 to edit it.

If you have not heard of it, Picasa is powered by Google and is a free downloadable photo editing program. It is pretty basic, but I love it for quick fixes and it helps keep things really organized on your hard drive. It also interfaces really easily with Blogspot and Their Online Web Albums.

So, I cropped and sepia toned the photo to look copper-ish and then imported it into one of my favorite programs, Microsoft Publisher.

I know, I know, it is not fancy. But, I am of the personal opinion that with a few other small tools Microsoft Publisher and PowerPoint are some of the most easily usable design programs out there, and let's face it...most of us already have it. So I use them a lot.

I created a few pages in Publisher {it helps with my organization to be able to have multiple pages and save all aspects of a program in one file}. The first was the photo, and the next was a box with the wording for the vellum overlay.

I printed and trimmed both to the same size and then used an adhesive roller to attach the photo to the navy card stock. I used some removable glue dots that I had lying around to position the vellum on top of the photo, and then used your everyday hole punch to punch the ribbon holes.

I used white grosgrain ribbon that I found at The Lobby for 99 cents for a roll. I then tied a simple square knot and cut the edges and adhered the whole shebang to the front of the white card.

Card Cost Breakdown:

Cards and Envelopes...........................................$1.92 (for 16)
Cardstock and Vellum (8 Sheets of each)....................$5.00
Ribbon...................................................................$0.99
Total.....................................................................$7.91
Total per card........................................................$0.49

Not too shabby for 16 cute cards and the envelopes! Of course I did not factor in ink, adhesives, or regular computer paper, as I had them all already, but still pretty durn cost effective.

::whew:: That was a long explanation, but it is a relatively simple project, I swear. Next up, easy breezy envelope liners!

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Thank you Macy's

for finally making our wedding registry visible online.


As some of you noticed it was not visible when we first registered...so we sent an email.

and then another.

and then went to talk to someone at Macy's.

and then called the person we were supposed to call from that interaction.

and then followed up with an email that that person recommended we email.


and now? our registry is visible. Yay!


The whole time we were dealing with this, the Macy's reps kept reiterating, "This is so weird, we can totally see that you are in the system and the visibility is on!" yet...we were invisible.

I guess that it is just one of those things that you don't anticipate taking much more energy to take care of than you had planned. Like most things in life, right? :)

Nonetheless...the switch has been flipped and I heart Macy's again...just in time for friends and family discounts.

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Maids and Men

Though I haven't heard from a couple of them yet, I am going to go ahead and reveal how we asked our bridal party to join us! {I will wait for introductions to the party as a whole until we hear from everyone, but a tutorial will be coming soon too! :) }

We deliberated for a long time on how to do this...and then we decided, hey, why not DIY it?

Remember that Sneak Peek I gave you a couple weeks ago??? Well that was a peek at our "Will you be our..." cards!

Here are some better photos:

The "suite" as a whole

We used the same card for bridesmaids, groomsmen, MOH and Best Man.
The ladies got the bottle of champagne {plus some poppers!} and the men got the cigars*

Here is a closeup of the front of the card, and the self-made envelope liners

The inside said:

"but there is nothing that we would love more

than to have you celebrating with us at the finish line.

Will you be our {blank}?"

{Yes, those are really our feet, and please, please, ignore the grammar mistake on the front if you noticed it...the comma just did not look right with the change in font.}

The card in the envelope, as shown before

and a quick seal I whipped up...thanks Xyron!

A closeup of the champagne bottle label...thanks again trusty Xyron

The label is the same image of our feet, washed out, and a definition of the word "celebrate"...we had originally intended on making cigar labels that looked similar for the men, but ultimately decided not to...as the boys would probably not care :)

*I had a couple of ladies out of town, and found out that you cannot mail alcohol, whoops. So then I thought, "Hey! I will just send the poppers, good idea!" Just Kidding. Those are also illegal to mail. In the end I sent them a champagne glass, with a picture of their champagne bottle that is awaiting them the next time we see each other.

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Dear Kate,

I love you.

 

  

  

  

{from here} 

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and 7 days later...

Wow! It has been a whole week since my last post. I apologize profusely to my devoted readers :)

I will blame this lack of posting on a vacation where cable internet was unreachable and also on my general frustration with DSL...but do not fret, for there are plenty of things to talk about and reveal this week!

First and foremost I would just like to say that the wedding is officially real. Now that we have seen so many friends and family and been able to talk about and reflect on what this means for us, it is so much more, well, real - for lack of a better word.

We were so blessed to have spent time with people that we love over the last week and are amazed at how willing, and excited even, they all are at coming to be with us in Wisconsin, of all places. As we sat in traffic for hours and hours and hours yesterday {more on that later} we were able to really wonder at how we have been so fortunate to have such amazing people come into our lives.

So, thanks. To all of you.

Get excited for much information to come!

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