The Crest

My graphic designer friend, Emily, and her husband both have last names that are common nouns, like A and I do. She thought it would be so funny if A and I came up with a family 'crest' that incorporated both of our last names (Hammer and Spears). At first, we all kind of laughed and dismissed it, but then I really thought about it some more--why not incorporate this somehow in our wedding stationery? We could do it in a way that would be fun, but not too too cutesy. Just a small monogram-type image on the invitations or programs (or both).

Will need to discuss with Emily again, to see if she might be able to help us. My design skills are very poor although A professes an expert status in using Paint :)

Crests kind of have that royal, British thing going on. Thoughts? Is this idea over the top?

Planned and tanned

Wedding summit = huge success! Not only did we get to eat guacamole 18 times (how could we ever say no,when it was there at every meal, tempting us in its avocado yumminess?) but we successfully and thoroughly organized lots of wedding planning details.

In case you were wondering what the Spears ladies actually do, during our yearly mom/daughter vacations, it is always pretty much like this, with little variation:

7:00 wake up

7:00-8:00 - walk on the beach (this is 'strenuous exercise' so we are justified/encouraged to eat mexican food steadily for the remainder of the day)

8:00-9:00 - 1st round of mexican food, including guac, of course (duh--guacamole and chips are breakfast food)

9:00 - 5:00ish - remain fixed on beach chair unless to apply sunscreen, read fashion magazines and/or entertaining books or cool off in the pool when demanded due to the ridiculous amount of HOT sun that shines on mexico (also, eat more guacamole as needed)

6:30 - 10:00 - dinner (no description is needed, i assume you have caught on) and relaxing, perhaps walking around. maybe we have some champagne.

10:00 - lights out/heat exhaustion

This is our kind of vacation. It's not for everyone, but absolutely for us. Being the good worriers/planners that we are, of course my mom and I were considerably more productive during our vacation this year, and were prepared with notebooks and pens at all times, for jotting down ideas for table assignment cards, floral arrangements and invitation styles. Don't worry though that we spent our entire vacation 'working'--we had so much fun doing it.

Today, we had some time in Houston before my mom's flight, and conducted an impromptu cake tasting at Barnaby's. Dark chocolate, carrot, toffee and french vanilla. Barnaby's has great cakes--the sight of four BIG pices wrapped up in to-go boxes made my heart beat a little bit faster. Hands down winner was dark chocolate with brownie layer, so I am going to talk to 'the cake lady' sometime early next week to see if she can perhaps allow us to sample some of her chocolate cakes. (Our caterer has a cake lady, who will apparently bake us any type of cake we want and decorate it however we choose--this seems almost too good to be true, and I am anxious to hear what she thinks about some of my ideas). Dark chocolate cake, ivory buttercream frosting, layers of chocolate ganache...i am in love already.

The wedding summit

Every year my mom and I take a relaxing vacation to somewhere tropical where we can indulge in our favorite activities, like laying in the sun all day, walking on the beach, reading magazines and eating guacamole. Lots and lots of guacamole.
We've had this year's trip planned for months, and we leave tomorrow for Cancun! I'm beyond excited because I've been really stressed lately and I can't wait to sip margaritas and not think about work for a full week. I'm calling the trip THE WEDDING SUMMIT becuase we are likely to talk about wedding planning 24/7 all week because we love weddings (in general, and planning mine, specifically) and still have about a bazillion things to decide and plan. So, I am hoping we have internet access at the hotel so that I can update with fun ideas from the summit :)
Am also planning to reread Eat Pray Love becuause it is such a thrilling book and a great beach read! So excited about that too!
Turning on my out of office now and preparing my stomach for mass guacamole consumption...

Cornflower Blue

The TX Art Supply store has a surprising amount of fun materials that may soon assemble themselves together for pretty pretty wedding invitations. Assuming I will develop enough confidence to tackle a project this intense.

Images here are a close up of the amazing 'cornflower blue' hand-made paper. And the zoomed out shot of it, along with a pretty textured blue card stock that is also hand-made. I loved these enough to bring home a sheet to look at some more, to hopefully inspire some invitation-making creativity.

Mom and I have been doing some research on Weddingbee to learn how to make pocketfolds and belly bands. So fun!

Step by step

So, I think a lot of major wedding websites might want to steer you away from do-it-yourself invitations because they are supported by advertisers who want you to spend big bucks on fancy letterpress custom invitation packages. Maybe that is just my cynical outlook from being in the ad industry myself. Regardless, it was pretty hard for me to find much of anything on the web for DIY invitations. Yes, I mean doing it YOURSELF. The horror.
I've thought it over a lot and I think I will try to do the invitations myself now that I've had a trial run with the save the dates. It was amazingly inexpensive (which I love) and turned out super cute. For those who are interested, here is how you can do a save the date card (or invitation) all by yourself. Minimal craftiness needed (trust me--this is time consuming but you don't need to be martha).
1. Locate graphic designer friend with access to Illustrator or similar software. I realize not everyone has this at their disposal, but even if you pay a friend of a friend to do the design for you, it is probably worth seeking out someone who knows what they're doing and knows how to prep files for printing.
2. Let your designer know what you're generally thinking about style-wise and provide wording. Give samples of the colors you want.
3. Review 5+ options from your designer
4. Revise and pick a winner
5. Go to an art supply store and pick out really cool paper. I got some that was textured and cream colored. Comes in big sheets (22"x30"). They can probably help you at the store. Paper is cheap. Make sure to get enough (5 sheets made just enough for 90 4.25x5 cards).
6. Cut the paper down into sheets that will fit in your printer (note on printer quality: we used my friend's Epson printer. It worked just fine but we did have a few issues with 'streakiness', but it was no big deal. any good color printer should work fine.)
7. Have your designer prep the files with bleeds so that you can print 3-4 cards on each printer sized sheet that you've cut down. This means that you can have some extra color 'bleeding' off the edge so that when you cut it down to size, you don't have to be exact.
8. We had to feed the paper into the printer one sheet at a time. My paper was kind of thick.
9. Use an exacto knife and a ruler (to give a straight line) to cut to the size you want for the cards. I also used a scrapbooking exacto slide cutting tool, which was way easier if you aren't too steady with the exacto, like me.
10. Stuff into envelopes (ordered from Paper Source, online) and you're done! Total project cost very minimal.

If you're still reading this, sorry. That was long. The project was not too too hard and it was fun to work on the designs. I may choose to get a 'professional' printer to do the printing/trim for me for the invitations. Depending on the cost :)

Save the Dates!

I am beyond thrilled with the awesome designs my lovely graphic designer friend Emily sent through last night. She sent seven options and these three are my very favorites. So pretty.

Hopeful that I will be able to get these in the mail this week. (note: the website is not correct on these. the website is under major construction this week, hopefully to be somewhat presentable by Friday.)

Just ordered some light blue A2 envelopes from Paper Source. I have my fingers crossed that A will be finished compiling the addresses by the time the envelopes arrive so that we can start addressing right away.

Friday night frights

OK, hopefully I'm not the only soon-to-be-bride in history to have extremely disturbing, awful, worst-case-scenario dreams about her wedding. This happens to me several times a week, and I feel like I just got started with this wedding-planning thing. Last night, I had a dream that I was marrying a prince (but he looked just like A, with a little crown) and of course I didn't know all of the royal wedding etiquette--do I bow, curtsey, lead/follow in the processional? Plus, my dress was delivered just a few minutes before the ceremony and it was ALL WRONG. It has these just awful sleeves, plus the sweetheart neckline was covered up in dreadful black/red silk to the neck. For some reason I was wearing awful pantyhose (which I despise) with black peep toe shoes (uggg!) and absolutely no sign of a veil. Papparazzi were attacking me, asking "who are you wearing?"
Of course, I use my very limited knowledge of psychology to explain to myself that this is just my stress manifesting itself in my subconscience (does that even make sense???). Thankfully, it was just a dream.
Yesterday was A's and my 4 year dating anniversary. He was very sweet to get me surprise beautiful lilies and a cute card. Plus, he has offered to schedule me a spa visit to de-stress from the wedding planning. Yay!
Today, I am considering fun table decoration ideas. Since the colors will be iguana green (thanks Sooze!) and ocean blue, we might bring in some elements to tie in A's and my love of all things ocean, water, beach, and fishing (well, I enjoy fishing mainly when it involves boats and/or laying out in warm weather). Mom came up with an idea for having a colorful fish in a small, stable bowl as a part of the centerpieces on some tables. I think this is brilliant. Do you think it would be weird to eat on a table with a fish in a bowl??

License to Wed

Thankfully it was a relatively slow-ish day at work, and I was able to do quite a bit of research on the process for obtaining that little slip of paper that allows you to make the marriage official. apparently, just saying 'I do' in front of a church full of people doesn't do it for the states of Tennessee or Texas. Let me break it down. First of all, county clerks are not too skilled at website design or clarity of message. After much back and forth and emailing to the county clerks, it seems like I will have to get a license in TN since the TX license is only good for getting married in the state of TX. But, the TN license must be purchased 30 days or less from the date of the wedding ($100, ugg. i am cheap and hate that it is $30 more than the TX license). This means A and I will be booking it to the adorable Jonesborough city hall (see pic) for our license just a couple of days before the wedding--since we'll be in TX until just before the wedding. I can picture a cute photo op on the steps of the city hall.

Stress meter somewhat high, but I think it will work out fine :)

Success!

Sooooooo I was waiting until everything was official to announce it--the wedding will be on October 24th in Tennessee! So excited to finally have a date/location so that I can really start planning! And I have ordered the dress. So funny, I never spend more than $100 on my credit card at a time, so Citi called me within 30 minutes of the purchase to ask about 'suspicious activity'. haha. good work Citi.
Next project is Save the Dates! My lovely and talented friend, Emily, will be lending her graphic design expertise for my save the dates. I am so lucky to have such creative and awesome friends.
Am currently loving the font Papyrus. What do you think?