Give and Take

Planning a wedding should not be the most stressful thing you've ever done. It really shouldn't. Though that becomes increasing difficult when it is easily the most money I've ever spent on anything (and I'm not spending that much, comparatively). And it's also the largest event I've ever planned. So I've finally decided that some give and take on my projects and wedding goals needed to be allowed for.

Things I've given up on altogether:
- There will be no cute, handmade felt acorns at every table. Making felt acorns hurts my hands and is boring. Though they do look cute when done, it is not a priority and nobody will miss them.
- I am not making my own cake. I keep wanting to and then trying to picture myself having time to do it in the days before my wedding, and it just isn't happening.
- I am not going to worry that directions to the wedding didn't get in the wedding invite. People can get them on the website. Or they can call one of us. It wasn't worth another wasted gocco screen to try and figure out why that image wasn't working (for the third time).
- I'm not going to make an acorn shaped pinata or spend hours online trying to find a squirrel pinata either. In fact, I'm not going to worry about trying to find one at all. (As an aside, we were going to do a pinata beating instead of a garter toss/bouquet throw).


Things I am still doing but need to find the motivation to work on:
- Making ribbon mobiles to hang from trees.
- Making wire contraptions to hang jars filled with candles from.
- Figuring out who will make my wedding cake/cakes/pie? instead of me.
- Making some sort of leaf shaped place card/seating chart thing.
- Making blackboard signs to put around wedding site.

(Image source acorns. Image source ribbons.)

i'm a post office junkie

I am crazy. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been to the post office 4 times today. Three times to try and get enough stamps to do my budget version of the vintage stamp thing, because I didn't like the 42c options.

And then once to get them dropped off. Although that almost turned into another visit when a super pushy older (homeless?) woman wouldn't let me get out of my car because she wanted me to walk down the street with her to see her kids so i would give her money. I ended up leaving, deciding I really didn't want to visit a 5th post office today, and circling back around to the other side of the post office to drop them off.

Gocco Take 2

We finally finished our wedding invitations last weekend. It was a long process involving running out of supplies multiple times, frantically ordering new ones, mistakenly having them sent to my parent's house due to paypal address confusion, and then giving up on certain parts of the invitations that just weren't working.

Making your own invites can be a hassle, but it definitely saved us money (in comparison to letterpress at least). And they look homemade--but I think in a sweet, fun way.

Plus, I'm pretty impressed that with my total lack of design skills, I was able to pull this off.

This picture has the best representation of the colors (if you click on it you can see a larger view).










The actual invitation part--the image is in a gold, shimmery ink that we also used in a few other parts of the invitation (the ink color doesn't show up very well in pictures).

I'm knitting the artists son red mittens in exchange for using the image.







The front & back of the reply postcard. Our initials carved in the tree have to be one of my favorite elements of the design, and totally last minute.










If I can get myself to the post office today to find stamps, they should be in the mail by this afternoon. It makes the whole wedding thing seem more real, to know that people will actually be able to RSVP soon.

Back from my bachelorette...

I've come back from a weekend of wine tasting with my best friends really inspired to keep going with this whole wedding planning bit, despite my last grinchy post.

I've been thinking a lot about photography lately. Our photographer is a friend of a family member and is giving us an amazing package for a great price. His work is really lovely--bright, photo-journalistic, sweet. The more I look at his work (and I'll bet they think they have a stalker if they look at their web hits, because I'm on their site a lot), the more I like it.

But, since their site doesn't let me grab images, I present a few of my photo inspiration pictures.

Ranting

In a moment of self-loathing about all the things that need to get done for the wedding, I made the very bad mistake of opening my to-do list on theknot yesterday. Not only does it include about 100 things that I am behind on (groom's attire, floral arrangements, officiant, etc) but this month they would like me to "Start taking better care of yourself (eat right, exercise) so you look and feel great on your wedding day." I mean, yes, it's a good idea to eat right and exercise. But I kind of resent them telling me to do that for my wedding day. Like I have the rest of my life to turn in to a pig, but for my wedding, I should look skinny and pretty. So that's rant number one.

Rant number two is that I'm really sick of people acting like I'm being a control freak about the wedding. Yes, I am normally a planner. I like to plan things. And I'm not that good a group projects. But in this case, a wedding is a huge event. And I'm doing everything 100% by myself. Not because I want to, but because every time I try to delegate something to someone else (primarily my parents who actually live where the wedding is being held), they ignore my question for months until they finally get sick of me asking. But then their response is surrounded by this whole "She's always been like this...so controlling. I think this might be her inner bridezilla coming out." I think they think it's funny. But I'm a little bit over my parents calling me the b-word that might as well be the other b-word.

There is something so wrong with women getting forced into this role. Everyone expects the wedding to be big and fun, nobody wants to help with the planning stages. So essentially they expect you to show up after months of planning in secret so as not to disturb anyone or look like a bridezilla, and look like the skinny, hot, princess bride for a day. It's not right.