I'm running out of hair...

Mostly because I've been pulling it out for the last umpteen days trying to figure out how to finish our invitations! 

And what you ask is the frustrating part of this whole process? The WORDING! Gone are the days of just simply filling in the blanks on an invitation...

Oh how simple it would be to just fill in the blanks and send them off into the universe. But, unfortunately that's just not possible for us-mostly because filling in the blanks on all those invites would probably give me carpal tunnel syndrome. So where does that leave me? We're not your traditional couple asking for the "honour of your presence" but we come from traditional families who want us to write that. Heck, they'd be much happier if we wrote "Mr. and Mrs. Smith invite you to join them in a celebration of love as their daughter, Bride, is united in marriage to Mr. Groom, son of Mr. and Mrs. Brown." a sentiment which makes me want to blech!  and there was no way in h-e-double hockey sticks I was going to write out two thousand and eleven. Umm...that confused me even as I was typing it-I'd hate to think what it would do to our guests. 
Not to mention the fact that finding a way to incorporate my dead mommy was proving very difficult. All the etiquette books I found said your not supposed to mention dead parents since it's considered bad taste. But she's still my mommy even if she's no longer living. And I decided I didn't care what Emily Post said about it-my mommy raised me for 18 years and deserved to be mentioned on my wedding invitation.

The whole ordeal made me start examining when exactly it was that FI Fishie and I suddenly became British Royalty or started talking like our wedding was as important as a state dinner. We would never request the "honour of your presence" anywhere no matter how badly we wanted you to come. 

Thus, our invitations went from this...

To this...

Obviously, I like option 2 better (especially the Font it's called Katy Berry on dafont.com) but what do you think? Should I go back to requesting the "honor of your presence" or leaving it how it is?

You Drove HOW Far?

I admit it; I drove almost 2 hours to buy...wait for it...PAPER! 

 Saturday morning, Fishboy was kind enough to indulge my desire for pretty paper. He woke up at the crack of dawn (otherwise known as 8:30am) and drove over 100 miles to Anchor Paper in Plymouth Minnesota (btw Minnesota/Wisconsin brides if you want pretty paper I highly recommend driving out Anchor Paper) first we stopped at Paper Depot, a scrapbooking store in Minneapolis, but since our invitations are going to be a little larger it wasn't going to work just using regular 12x12 paper which is what Paper Depot sold. 

  We ventured onto Anchor Paper where we wandered into their craft supply storefront first and then...we hit the motherlode! Otherwise known as Anchor Paper's warehouse! Fishboy and I wandered back into the warehouse looked at the paper and told the lady what we wanted and she cut the paper while we waited. We walked out $200 poorer with gorgeous paper and envelopes. 

Added bonus? Since we had the paper custom cut we were able to keep all of the scraps from the cutting so we have enough paper to last us throughout any paper projects we could possibly come up with.

Did we go to far? Yes, we could've ordered the paper online Anchor Paper does sell their paper online. However, A) we saved money going to the warehouse and picking it up and B) I thought I was going to get 80# paper and wound up with 105# paper and since they don't allow returns I would have been up chocolate creek without a popsicle stick.

Cakes Vs. Desserts

I have a confession to make...I don't like cake. There, I said it. I do not like cake, in fact I'm not a huge sweets fine at all. Fishboy on the other hand has a pretty decent sized sweet tooth. In comes the new trend hitting weddings, dessert bars!

I love me some cheescake, brownies are yummy, rice krispy bars don't stand a chance around me, and if you add scotcheroos mmm I'm hooked. Fishboy likes almost all the same things except for the cheesecake, plus he loves pie.

Now, here's the problem. I'm torn between the dessert bar and cake. Mostly because cake is traditional and our wedding could use a little bit more tradition, plus with my family there are certain things you don't mess with and their traditions are one of them. I love love love the idea of serving a bunch of our favorite desserts but at the same time I have a few reservations...

1. Time; will I have time to cook up enough desserts for 200 people before the wedding?
2. Money; can we afford to have a bunch of different desserts?
3. Legal; will the reception site let us bring in our own desserts?
4. Tradition; how can I still have the cake cutting without the cake?

What's your opinion? Should I go with my gut and serve desserts or stick with tradition and serve the cake?

STD's Follow-Up

Every responsible person knows that STDs require follow-up care-you can't let them just fester and not take care of them right? Well, my follow-up care is trying to get over the fact that no one has taken the time to acknowledge them. This makes for a very sad Fishie... 

I sent my cute little cards out into the world and granted I didn't expect flourishes of phone calls, texts, emails, or what have you but it would be nice to hear from someone that all my hard work was totally worth it.

In case you've forgotten, here's our lovely cards...
 

How could no one tell me how awesome they are? Not just that but how can I know if the ones we mailed made it to their intended targets? Grr...it's frustrating and kills my DIY buzz all in one shot!
Have you ever not gotten a response when you wanted one? Should I let this kill my buzz or just move on and keep on with all the projects I have planned?

Ode to the USPS

Blogger Note: I meant to write this post back when I mailed out our STDs but my bridal ADD kicked in and I got distracted.

Oh, United States Postal Service, you have become the bane of my existence. Why must you keep increasing rates and coming out with butt ugly stamps for me to put on my pretty Save The Date cards? Why must you have completely unreasonable office hours and no available parking spots that make it impossible for me to get there in time to buy the butt ugly stamps? 

Now, I'll admit it-I don't necessarily blame to post office for having to raise their rates. With email, facebook, texting, and what not the art of actually sending mail has gone by the wayside. But, that doesn't mean that I have to be saddled with butt ugly stamps.

I walked into the Post Office wanting this stamp. Pretty wedding cake stamp, perfect amount of postage for what I needed.  

Instead the post office wanted me to walk out with this stamp...

 Now, I'm not racist and it wasn't the fact that it was a black man on the stamp that made me not want it-it was the fact that it WASN'T the pretty wedding cake stamp that I wanted. I almost had a bridezilla moment and tried fighting with the poor postal worker over the stamp but instead I bit my tongue and tried to find a compromise...

The compromise was the pretty "Love" purple flowers that don't go with our theme but it's an envelope and most people are just going to throw it away anyway. We just have to add the ugly blue big horn sheep stamp and then it's enough postage to get our magnets out the door and on their way to the right people.

As for the crappy hours and parking spots? Yeah, ummm who the heck closes the post office at 4:30 in the afternoon? Not only that but if you walk through that door at 4:29 they're already closing up shop and won't even sell you stamps. Their parking lot was a one way and I couldn't figure out which was the "right" one way. 

Did you have problems with the USPS? What do you think of the compromise stamps? Should I have just sucked it up and put the ugly black man stamp on the envelope? Which reminds me, anyone know who that guy is? I know I could google it but I figure if someone else knows that'll save me some time.

Rethinking Our Colors...

Remember back when I told you about our "theme" for this wedding? It boiled down to the fact that we have no theme just a mish mash of colors...these colors to be exact;  Neon Purple, Hot Fusha Pink, Glodenrod Yellow, Lime Green, and Electric Blue.  

Well, we've decided to change it up a little bit...

 

The biggest change is the removal of the yellow color and changing the green from a lime green to more of a hunter green and the blue went from a teal to a cobalt/navy blue. 

But, being the indecisive bride that I am I can't give up on my initial vision of bright colors in favor of the more muted jewel tones. So I'm asking my loyal readers for their help once again; what do you think? Should we stick with the original colors or should we embrace our newest idea for jewel tones?

Please Take This Magnet and Stick It....

To your fridge that is. 

I've completed my second attempt at wedding related DIY projects and I have to say they turned out fabulously! Not to toot my own horn but BEEP-BA-BEEP-BA-BEEP! They were fantastically easy in addition to being fantastically inexpensive.

Aren't they adorable? We couldn't decide on just one picture for our cards so we decided to have three different ones! As we told our guests, if they don't like the one they get then they can just trade with someone else-like Pokemon cards.

I know you're all DYING to know how I made these things, and although it felt like it sucked the life out of me making them it really only took about 8 or 9 hours total to make 40ish cards. It just felt like longer because it was a little boring watching the Cricut cut, over and over again.

Watching Jeff Dunham's Christmas special made the Cricut cutting a little more bearable.

 Fishie Kitty supervised from his perch over by the Christmas tree that we'd just put up, which also makes the BEST kitty toy EVER!...
















 
and FI Fishie vacuumed the apartment, or at least he pretended to.

Meanwhile I ran 45 photos through the Xyron machine to make them into magnets. Which, by the way, is easier said then done-you have to give enough space in between the photos otherwise you wind up with one photo on top of another and then you have to throw both photos out...not that it happened to me or anything, I've just heard it happens to other people-sometimes.
 



After I'd run about a million of them through the xyron machine and wound up with a nice little pile of magnets on the floor...









 It was time to cut them out...I tried using my straight paper cutter first but soon found that the rotary cutter I use for quilting worked MUCH better...

Even FI Fishie decided to help out, after his "vacuuming" of course.

Next it was time to babysit the Cricut and let it do it's thing...although it was boring sitting there watching it cut, I've gotten enough compliments on the cards that it was completely worth it.

 Being the indecisive bride that I am I couldn't decide on one photo or one color so we wound up using 3 different pictures with 4 different colors on the front...making for 12 different combinations.







 Another overlooked detail was the cute little polka dot edge that I meticulously hand punched out with a cute little punch I found at Michael's for 40% off.









We'd budgeted $200 for these cards and by mostly using supplies I already had on hand (xyron machine, hole punch, etc.) I was able to complete the project for a little over $100. The most expensive thing I bought was the refills for my Xyron Machine which were normally priced for $34.99 and I bought all of them on sale for 40% off.

Xyron Magnet Refills	$89.65
Cardstock	$3.98
White Cards	$5.99
Photos	$8.55
Total:	$108.16

Did I make this project harder then it needed to be? Should I have just stuck with 1 photo and 1 color? 

DIY Project Number Two...

Now that I've got one project under my belt I'm ready to begin tackling the million other ones I have left. First up...our Save The Date magnets.

We're going to keep this project super simple, have the picture printed at Wal-Mart's photo center run them through the Xyron machine to get the front side laminated and the back side gets the magnet. Easy peezy lemon squeezy.

Take a look at what I've managed to come up with using this wonderful free software called Photoscape and the way I look at it, it's like Photoshop for poor people.

What do you think? Are any of these good enough to be printed or should I just go back to the drawing board and come up with something else?

One Down...Only About A Thousand More To Go

 Remember when I showed off all the cool toys in my toybox? Well a few weeks ago I finally got a chance to play with them! I whipped out my little Cricut and created some "Will You Be My Bridesmaid?" cards. I wanted to wait until all of my bridesmaids had received their cards and given me their answer before I showed the project off. 

It's a pretty easy DIY project, mostly because I tried making it more complicated and just wound up getting frustrated and gave up after countless numbers of tries and failures. Finally I realized this was a simple project and I shouldn't dwell on it too much. Although it was difficult for me to give up and keep it simple I realized my sanity was more important then the fancy project I'd envisioned.

So how did I get from this...







 
 








 To this? 







Well it's elementary, my dear Watson...first I opened up my fabulous Cricut Design Studio

 I laid out the 3 dresses and one tuxedo I needed for my 3 bridesmaids and 1 bridesman on the screen and after several attempts and even more explicatives screamed at the Cricut I figured out the way the mat is laid out on the screen is not identical to the way it goes into the Cricut. And when I was using 8 1/2" x 11" paper on a 12" x 12" mat it was verrrry frustrating when the paper and the designs weren't perfectly matching up. 

When I finally got it to work...

the dresses came out beautifully...this just reinforced my love of the cricut (oh by the way, please ignore the date stamp on the photo-I forgot to reset the date on the camera I didn't make these cards last year before I was even engaged I promise) after I cut the dresses it was a matter of figuring out how to get them off the mat, which incurred more cursing and I almost needed a little liquid calm. But I did manage to get them off the mat and ready to be put on the cards...

 
 But I couldn't decide how to mount the dress onto the card...

So I looked through my stash of craft supplies and found my foam pop dots...score!!! 

Now the dress would be slightly above the card giving it the cool shadowy effect underneath.


But now I was confused as to how to incorporate "Will You Be My Bridesmaid?" onto the card since as you can see, the dress took up majority of the front of the card. Then I remembered I had this cute little font I'd downloaded from dafont.com called Jellyka-Love and Passion
















A quick little type into the wonderful little Microsoft Word and I wound up with 4 neatly written "Will You Be My..." plaques for my cards... 2 bridesmaids, 1 maid of honor, and 1 bridesman. 


 

I added a couple more pop dots to the
back of the plaque and stuck it on the inside of the card.












After countless tries and fails, and finally four victories I wound up with some wonderful cards that I like to believe my bridesmaids will treasure for ever and for always.

The best part of the whole experience? I got a card from one of my bridesmaids with a simple word on the front...

I'm glad to finally have one DIY project checked off my list, the journey of a thousand projects begins with single one.