What will she do after September...

Sometime back in April or May, my sister sent a picture of a fabric flower to my mom and me. This picture (which I can't find now) started the wheels turning in my mom's head and one night when my dad was out of town, she got out some silk and tulle and started playing. After a little tweaking, she came up with a design to make gorgeous silk & tulle flowers.

She starts with squares of Silk & Tulle. The silk here is left over from my bridesmaid dresses and we bought red tulle.


She cuts the shape of a flower with rounded petals out of the silk & tulle.

Then she wired each layer together to create a flower and fluffed it out.

To keep the metal wires from poking out, she wrapped the wires with floral tape.

And voila! A flower!

She made about 20 of these, which we'll be using as corsages for my house party. Yesterday, my dad had to go check on some things for work near Dallas, so mom rode back with me and worked on attaching Orangy-Pink ribbon to the flowers (I forgot to take picture).

Maybe my favorite application of the flower was on my shoes!! I was having trouble picking a color for my shoes and the bridal shop said they could match pretty much anything, so we gave them the swatch of my bridesmaid dresses...little did we know we'd be attaching a pink silk flower!

Talk about luck...the shoes were free with my dress, the silk was leftover and the tulle was super cheap, but I ended up with gorgeous custom wedding shoes.

Mom worked on the silk flowers at night when she was home alone...I'm starting to wonder what she's going to work on after the wedding? I keep telling her she needs to start an Etsy Shop, what do y'all think?

Just Say No to Flourescent Lights...

Our venue is lighted mainly by fluorescent tube lights on the ceiling with the exception of can lights in one area and 9 hanging lights over the dance floor. I am NOT a fan of fluorescent lighting if it can be avoided and the hall with only the can lights and dance floor lights is a little dark, so I requested additional lighting from my handy-dandy parents.

We originally wanted to criss-cross light strands with round lanterns across the entire hall, but that idea was quickly dissolved when we discovered we would not be able to hang anything from the ceiling at our venue. Our next idea was to create stands to hold a group of differently sized lanterns and place those around the hall.

My Engineer-In-Training brother and my parents started brainstorming designs for the structure to hold the lights and bought torch lamps from IKEA (Not Floor Lamp $6.99) to serve as the basis for the stands.



We had ALMOST nailed down a final design when I stumbled across this picture via Martha Stewart:
I immediately fell in love with the simple, yet elegant look of the towers of lanterns. I emailed the picture to my “wedding planners,” AKA my mom and sister and they too fell in love. My sister even did a web search and came across the Holy Grail—a How-To posted right there on Martha’s site!

My parents adapted their design and were still able to use the torch-style lamps they purchased at IKEA. To make the light stands, we wrapped each lamp base with several strands of Christmas Lights (bought 75% off in January from Wal-Mart) and purchased new light socket adapters which have 2 electric sockets along with the socket for the bulb. We will be leaving a 60 watt bulb in the top of the lamp to give a more intense light at the top of the tower.


The only thing left to do to the light stands is add the lanterns. We ordered 3 sizes of white paper lanterns online and will be randomly stacking the lanterns rather than using a single size like our inspiration photo. I believe the sizes we ordered were 12”, 14” and 16”, but I’m not 100% sure.


The plan is to have 6 of these light towers placed around the hall to create ambient lighting and draw the attention away from the drab interior of our venue. Following the wedding, my sister and I have already called dibs on one for each of us to put in our living rooms, and my mom plans on keeping the remaining 4 and renting them out for future weddings at our reception venue.

Reddish-Pinkish Dresses...

One of the first things we checked off our list for the wedding was bridesmaid dresses. I think we actually may have found our inspiration before I had the bling!

Just before CityBoy assumed the one-kneed position, my sister was in town and like the rest of the family, knew the ring was coming. A few days before she headed back to Wisconsin, she was moping around the house complaining about how she was going to miss dress shopping and planning for the wedding, so we decided to take a trip into Austin to look at dresses.

The wedding dress part was easy, I ultimately chose the first dress I tried on, but we had a rough time finding a bridesmaid dress we loved. Belle Saison, Alfred Angelo, David's Bridal--no luck. We weren't worried since I didn't have a diamond yet, but we knew it was going to be hard. Me, my mom and my sister/MOH have very different tastes, but somehow we all fell in love with one dress from one ad in one of the MANY bridal magazines we bought that day and flipped through together on my mom's bed.

The design has been through a couple brainstorming sessions and one test dress and has changed slightly, but we love the new design even better than our inspiration!

Mom started production on the dresses a few weeks ago and managed to get all 5 girls' dresses hanging together and the girls have started to filter in to her sewing room at our house to have their fittings.

The material for the dresses is a "strawberry" silk dupioni. Back in the fall, we hit every fabric store in Austin looking for the perfect silk for the dresses. Ultimately, all of the silks in store were either too pink or too red or just not right, so we ordered swatches from an online wholesaler, The Silk Baron. I think we ordered every pink, red & orange silk they had!

The test dress had two different bodices. The first was more like the inspiration photo, straight across with spaghetti straps, and the second was like bodice shown below. My cousin/bridesmaid W, served as the dress model for my mom and looked absolutely adorable in the scoop neck style, so our minds were made up.

None of the dresses are 100% done, but most are only lacking side seams. I actually brought back the dress for bridesmaid S, who lives in Dallas across the street from me, and I will be attempting to fit the dress on her and deliver it back to mom pinned in all the right places! I'll let ya know how that adventure goes...yikes!

I think they're turning out amazingly and I'm so glad I have such a talented mama!! Wait til you see the smoking number she made for herself!!

WHAT A TEASE....

I want to write about 50 posts right now, but I have some serious unpacking to do, so I'm posting a few teaser photos of the projects we have going on...

Stay tuned for more info on what the heck it is you're looking at up there ;-)

A Working Weekend...

I may have gotten off work Friday around 5:00 (okay, okay it was 3:45, but I left happy hour at 5:00), but the real work started as soon as soon as I pulled out of the parking garage headed down to my parents' house toting our newly printed invitations, a box of goody bags for the kiddos, and a party dress for the wedding we had Saturday night.

Saturday morning, our first project to tackle was the invitations.

My mom ordered Envelopes for the Invites and RSVPs online during Paper Source's fabulous 20% Off online sale and I picked up their Strawberry & Poppy colored oval labels in the store.

I printed our beautiful invites, RSVPs, and maps at FedExOffice on their heaviest cover (110 lb, I believe). We were very, very impressed with the quality of their printing after our STDs and ThankYous and we were able to print a full-color design for less than we could have printed a 2-color design with the printer my sister likes to use.

After a hearty breakfast, we set right to work.

I started with our OOTers. Each of our out of town guests received the Invitation, RSVP and Map. Because our wedding is so large and we believe most of our in town guests will be in attendance, we opted to only send RSVPs to the guests who would be traveling to the wedding.

Thanks to advice from the web, we numbered the RSVPs (35 in total) in case some come back without names.

All together, the invitations took about 2 hours to completely assemble. In addition to the actual stuffing of the envelopes, we had to cut our RSVPs to size, stamp my parents return address on all the envelopes and stick on labels and stamps. I figure 2 hours isn't bad for 158 invitations!

So, they're off!! I can't wait to start getting RSVPs back, I hope all of our guests can make it to the wedding.

Just when we thought we had "The One"...

So, I lied in the last post. The final design I posted wasn't "The Winner" afterall.

My sister wanted to do one final edit on the design to change the colors slightly and pulled a switcheroo on me!

She came across a great font she thought would like great in my invitation suite:

What do you think?

Invite:


RSVP:


Map Front:


Map Back:


**Sorry for the nasty white-outs, I don't want any creepers showing up at my wedding!!

All In The Family, Part I: Graphic Design...

One of the most unique things about my impending nuptial celebration is that we're keeping it "All in the Family"--my Mom is my Wedding Planner, two of my favorite aunts will play DOC, another aunt is making my cake, yet another aunt is a florist and will be doing my flowers, and my sister is my graphic designer. Each one of these people is playing a very important part of my special day and I'm so lucky to have each of them!

My sister's graphic design hobby began in high school when she worked on the yearbook crew and only grew during her 4 years in the Journalism department at Baylor University. Upon graduation, she went to work as Editor-In-Chief of a small magazine and as part of her day-to-day job, she designed Ads to be featured in the magazine. Now she's living across the country doing nothing journalism related professionally, but there was absolutely no questioning her role as the graphic designer for the wedding.

We sat down and fought through everything from the wording to the size of the paper and managed to nail down a basic idea. Since I'm a super visual person, I told her the best way for me to express exactly what I wanted was for her to make up some drafts:




As soon as I opened the file, I knew the background design was a little too busy. I loved the circular design, so we nixed the lines.




A little less busy, but the ampersand was really really driving me and CityBoy nuts, so we requested a slight wording change nixed the "&" altogether.



FINALLY, a version we loved!!

Well, we loved it until we got it test printed and realized the design was a little small and the bleed wasn't going to work the way we wanted with the circles going off the page, so I called up my sister for a rework.



WE HAVE A WINNER!!

The DIY Professionals...

My parents amaze me.

When I was a kid, my dad designed and built a 2 story playhouse for my sister and I, complete with a fireman's pole and monkey bars.

When I needed tables for my apartment, my mom and dad made tiled tops and welded iron bases to make the most gorgeous tables.

Now that I am getting married, my parents have gone DIY crazy!

Here is there "Wedding Construction List"
Bar Height Tables (x4)
Light Stands (x6)
Light Tree
Cake/Photo Backdrop
String Light Stands (x4)

They started with the Bar Tables. At our venue, there is a "bar area" where the Beer is served and at every wedding, it ends up being a place where people stand and mingle, so Mom decided to make several tables to put in the area for people to gather around, set their drinks down, and have snacks.

I don't have photos of this because I wasn't around for the construction, but they started with unstained wood tops, found at any big-chain hardware store (Home Depot, Lowe's, etc). They tossed around ideas of staining the wood Red to match my theme or painting the tops, but ultimately, they just stained them a lightly and coated them with polywhatever to make them look like actual bar tables. For the bases, they found 4 used bases from actual bar tables from the bar my grandparents used to run (the tops were rotting from sitting in storage in the barn at the farm too long).

The tables turned out perfectly and have already been put to use at the outdoor hometown reception for my cousin and his new wife!

More on the other projects to come!