Picture Pairs

About a month ago I showed you guys all of Chart's adorable baby pictures here. I now finally got my own baby pictures so I thought that it would be fun to decide on baby picture pairs to put around the wedding.

What do you think?

The Guest Book

When we started planning this wedding one of the last things I thought about was the guest book. It seems like such a weird thing to me... I just don't really understand the point of a guest book. Do you ever look at it again after the wedding? All guest books I have ever seen are just made up of signatures and some times well wishes to the bride and groom. I'm sure its nice to read those kind words after the wedding, but years later it feels like it would be something that you get rid of. When I started looking for some alternatives to the traditional guest book I found some interesting and creative options. Such as the "leaf your name" pictures where you stamp your finger print onto a tree and sign your name next to it... After all of the guests have stamped their finger prints it looks like a tree full of leaves, hence the name.

While its a very cute/unique idea, I am just so particular about the decor in my house and I don't think this would really be my taste... So I decided to go in another direction.

I also thought about the fun idea of having anniversary wine bottles for people to sign, that way we get to read the well wishes of our guests, but we can throw the bottle away... after Chart and I drink it of course :) 

See how neat they look, but they do seem hard for guests to sign.

Now my wonderful cousin Meg informed me that apparently wedding photographers now a days are not including your image files in their pricing when you hire them. So to make sure I didn't have to purchase my pictures on top of paying our photographer I brought this up to her. She reassured me that I would get my image files of both the wedding and the engagement shoot, but not until after the wedding. Since Chart and I really Love the engagement pictures Allyson Magda (our AMAZING photographer) took we wanted to find a way for our guests to see those pictures. Allyson suggested that she do a guest book for us with our engagement pictures, that way our guests see the pictures and our "guest book" turns into a keepsake/photo album. Allyson explained to us that she was going to make sure that the pages were matte finish, very thick and lie flat when open so that it is easy to sign. We decided this would be the perfect solution for us, we ordered the book and it arrived yesterday!!! It is so Beautiful!!! I can't believe how good Allyson is, she continues to astonish and amaze me!!! :)

Here is how our book arrived.

The outer cover of the book is a Beautiful black leather.

Here is the first wonderful page... :)

Chart and I are both in love with our book, we can't wait for everyone to see it and send us their well wishes!!! It seems as though its shaping up to be a very magical day... Im so Excited!!! 

Christmas at the Exeter Gallery

We went to my hometown this weekend to help out my grandparents with their silent auction to raise money for the gallery. My sister and I served wine while Chart helped my cousin Jeff serve appetizers. My parents along with all of my aunts and uncles attended the event. We had a lot of fun hanging out all together and having free wine ;) plus I think we raised a lot of money for the gallery, which was our ultimate goal. I always have so much fun when I get to go home, I don't know how I was blessed with such a wonderful family, both immediate and extended! I just love spending as much time as I can with my parents and my aunties :) We got pretty silly near the end of the night.... Hehehe :)

Its the Most WONDERFUL time of the year!!!

Finally its starting to feel like Christmas which is my Absolute favorite time of the year!!! Chart and I went to go get our Christmas tree yesterday evening. We went to one of the Christmas tree lots because it always feels so festive to get your tree from an actual lot rather than a store. We started walking through the lot and selecting trees, that is until we looked at their price tags. I don't think $69 for a 5' tree is worth experience of shopping at a lot. Plus we are saving for a wedding (only 4 1/2 months away ;) so we cant be throwing that kind of money around on a tree, no matter how much I love Christmas!! Then not only did we not shop at a Christmas tree lot but we ended up purchasing our tree from... I feel like I shouldn't even say it... Home Depot... I know, I know that is Lowe's rival and la la la... but lets face it, Home Depot is just so much closer to us. Plus I really just wanted to get a tree so we could start decorating it!!! :) Even though we got our tree at the arch nemesis of Lowe's, I am very happy did. Our tree is AMAZING!!! I personally have never seen a tree this Beautiful, Lush and Full!! I know, I know everyone thinks they got the best Christmas tree, but just look at this.

This is the tree all wrapped up still... It doesn't look that spectacular yet.

But look at once we released the net!!!! Boom!!!

Wow! Right?!?!

Here it is all decorated... Although since our tree last year wasnt nearly this big we are a bit short on ornaments :(

The Wedding Website!!!

As some of you may know, I started the wedding website on... well lets just say the week after the proposal ;) I am so excited about it, but since we have been working on the wedding I have just been developing the website more and more. I think its just about done :)

Here is the link to it if you would like to check it out, let me know what you think of it!

www.weddingwire.com/christopherandsarawedding

To blog or not to blog..

I always thought about doing a blog, only thing is I have a sister who is an Amazing writer. By comparison I should probably never write again, so I just thought starting my own blog would be pointless. However, I was recently inspired by my sister's friend's blog:

http://sparklesandcheaterpants.blogspot.com/

She did such an beautiful job creating her blog and as I was reading through it, I realized you dont have to be a great writer, you just have to have something to share. She is getting married the same time as I am and at the same place, I noticed that her blog was made up of all of her DIY projects. I Love doing DIY projects, if I see something someone made I always want to figure out how I can make it myself. Plus with the upcoming wedding, there have been a lot of DIY projects because of budgetary issues. It has allowed me to find interesting ways to still get the look I want, but without the price tag. Since I have my new blog, my hope is to share my findings with who ever would like to learn them. Hopefully I can be of help to someone else, no matter if its through wedding vendor reviews, wedding DIY projects or even.... Baby projects like my last post :)

Baby Time!

Hahaha no, not baby time for Chart and I.... yet :) Last year was a busy bridal year for my family. I have about 10 girl cousins on both sides of my family. We are all very close in age and up until last year there was only about two weddings that had occurred on either side of my families. However, last year I attended about 7 weddings all within about a three month period. While I Love each of my cousins and was so excited for them and their special days, it was a bit of an over whelming year. Now that they have all been married for about a year, what comes next.... Babies. Next weekend we are throwing a shower for my cousin Kaela, she has waited a long time to have a baby. She was actually one of the first two to get married and she is finally having a little bundle of joy and... its a Boy! She is also the matron of honor in my wedding so I am so excited to be a part of throwing her shower to celebrate her and this amazing next step in her life. I personally feel that no baby shower is complete without a diaper cake ;) I have seen many of these cakes before and also saw some for sale online, although none really fit with the colors for the shower. Therefore I decided that I was going to make my own diaper cake.... I know, scary!
I found this video online which was kind of helpful to get the basics down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwiwZxHNPGU&noredirect=1
I found my self to be a little overwhelmed while at the store shopping for the cake supplies. Not being a mother myself I didn't really know where to start.. My first step was to review her registries online so that I could pick up enough small necessities to adorn the cake with. Selecting bottles however, was a different story. I forgot to pay close attention to the bottle brand on her registry, I thought bottles were all the same.... Apparently that's not the case. I had to consult with my own mother for advice... with only two trips to Target, I finally had all the "correct" supplies to begin making my own diaper cake.

Here are all of my supplies that I started out with :)

I also got a LARGE box of infant diapers because I wanted to make a large three tier cake. Plus I got a cardboard cake base to use as the foundation. (I ended up only using a little more than 1/2 of the diapers in this box for all 3 tiers of the cake.)

Next I began assembling the cake, first you have to role each diaper and secure it with a rubber band. This was by far the most time consuming part of the cake. Then you place a bottle (make sure its the right one, the one shown was not ;) in the middle to serve as the support for your cake, you build the cake around the bottle. I put a large rubber band around the bottle and just started placing the diapers around the bottle inside the rubber band. I repeated this 4 times for the bottom layer.

Then you start the process over, building the second layer. I did about 3 rows for the middle tier, then for the top tier I rolled up some receiving blankets I got and secured them with a rubber band and put rolled diapers around the blankets. (so the blankets took the spot of the bottle on the top tier) Then I tied little bows around the rubber band of each diaper on the top tier. 

Finally all assembled... Time to start decorating, the theme of Kaela's bedding is elephants so we are trying to incorporate that into the shower, hence I wanted to make that the theme of my diaper cake since it will be decoration for the shower :)

Here is the Finished cake :) I really like how it turned out!! What do you think?

Baby Pictures for the Big Day

I had an idea to put up some of Chris's and my baby pictures around at the wedding, like at the guest book table and the seating chart table. Of course we will have our traditional engagement pictures also framed but seeing as our two extended families dont know us that well I thought that might be a fun detail. Plus I would love to get those kind of things framed to put up in our new house (when we finally purchase one that is :) As it turns out, me being the first child in my family there are a ton of baby pictures of me, so I am having a bit of trouble narrowing them down. Chris however was the middle child in his family and as his momma explained, there arent many pictures of Chris without his older brother. So I thought the best thing to do would be to have his mom send me the pictures she had of him and that would help me narrow down my choices. Little did I know that Chris was the cutest little boy ever!!! I just had to share some of his pictures so you could see how adorable he was!!! Makes me very excited to start our own little family ;)

My baby pictures will be following shortly... :)

Just the two of us

Driving home together this weekend, Chris and I saw this beautiful sunset. We felt like it was a perfect ending to a perfect weekend, I just had to share.

Ok so it's more of an ominous storm cloud that we are driving towards... but we still thought it was cool looking :)

Lets eat CAKE :)

This weekend was our cake tasting! This is one of the aspects of the wedding process that I have been most excited about. We hired Haute Dolls Bakery to make our dream wedding cake and it looks like we are off to a Fabulous start. I asked our baker to make sure she had some Caramel, Toffee and Vanilla flavors to accommodate my hubby to be! But of course I had to have some chocolate in there, so she made me a chocolate cake with chocolate hazelnut ganache filling. To top it all off she will be covering the entire cake in italian butter cream frosting!!! It is absolutely the BEST frosting I have ever tasted. Also look at how cute the tasting was set up for us.

Sadly Christopher decided to spend the day with my dad and miss the cake tasting (Not his best decision, but more cake for me ;)

However, our wonderful baker made him a to go box with all of the cake tasting fixings...

Drum Roll Please.... Here is our cake!!!

Bridesmaid time

I was lucky enough to have all of my bridesmaids come visit me in the beginning of October to go shopping for Bridesmaid dresses. My only guideline was that they need to be black! I said I prefer that they have a sweetheart neckline and be cocktail length but all of my girls have such different body types so I didn't want to put on too many limitations and have them be uncomfortable. We got lucky though!!! We went into White House Black Market just for fun and ended up finding the most beautiful dress and get this, it ended up only being about $90!!! 

and we found some adorable 

Betsy Johnson Shoes!

And they even have a bow on the back!!! I am so excited for the day of to have a picture of all of the girls shoes lined up with all of the bows! :)

My BEAUTIFUL sister modeling the dress and shoes together, what a fun weekend!!! So touching that I have so many wonderful women in my life.

Wedding Details and invitations!!

I selected black and white as the colors for our wedding because they are simple yet classic colors that will hopefully always be seen as elegant.

The idea is to also incorporate touches of silver to add to that elegant look I am going for.

Also just last week I received our invitations which we are so excited about!!! We saw the letterpress invitations and just fell in love with them. A lot of them were out of our budget, but we found this great company that does letter press for a lot less than other companies. We were skeptical but now seeing the actual invitation we are so happy we took the risk.  The name of the company is The Aerialist Press, here is the link to their website http://theaerialistpress.com/.

These are our invitations, response card and map to the venue, we are so excited with how Beautiful the invitations came out!! Now the next step is to get the envelopes figured out... We are going to try the cheaper route with those and hopefully do them our selves, which will be very interesting. Although we were able to make our Save the Dates ourselves and they came out really good actually! Although I might be a little bit partial ;)

 

Wonderful hubby working away on our Save the Dates, he got a whole assembly line set up. It was very effective though and we got them done in no time!

 

Here was the inspiration for our Save the Date, I found it on the Wedding Chicks Website, https://www.weddingchicks.com/2011/09/23/photo-save-the-date-card/.

Here is how our Save the Dates turned out, we were Very happy with them!

The Beginning...

A little about me, I am a small town girl who moved to the big city a couple of years ago to persue my dreams of becoming an interior designer. Low and behold, not only am I now an interior designer at a small design firm in Santa Cruz, Ca but I also met my prince chartming :) We met a couple of years ago through one of our mutual friends, the more time we spent together the more we realized how much we had in common. About a year and a half from when we met each other my Chart took me to my favorite cupcake shop one night and surprised me with not only my favorite cupcakes but a marriage proposal as well!

Its about 6 months until the wedding now and we just cant wait, I of course have everything planned and organized! We are getting married at Wolf Lakes Park in Sanger Ca in the garden venue. It is one of the most beautiful locations I have ever seen! It reminded me of when I was a little girl and would read The Secret Garden. The ceremony location is surrounded by beautiful tall trees and the entrance is an iron gate, just what I would have immagined the garden would have looked like in my book.

We also recently got some of our AMAZING engagement pictures back!!! Our photographer Allyson Magda with Allyson Magda Photography simply blew us away!!!

Here is a sneak peak, more to come!