Oh My Goodness, 15 DAYS!

It's SO CLOSE now! Anthony and I were talking today about how in 16 days, we'll be on the beach in another country, he'll have graduated college and be an officer, and we'll be married! It's insane how close it is... that's all I can say when people ask me about it, haha; that it's insane and crazy! I'm oh so excited though. :)

Our guestbook came today! I'm THRILLED with it! I ordered it from MyPublisher and they did a great job. It's filled with pictures taken by our amazing photographer, the talented Amy Boeve. If you haven't seen it yet, you can here: Our Guestbook. SO happy! I was worried about there not being enough white space for signing, but I think it'll be just fine!

We also went to the reception venue today to pay and finalize details and all that. We're actually realllly close to the required 150 people - we thought it'd be hard to get not too far over that number, but in the end we invited almost everyone we ever wanted to and we're right on the edge! I'm glad though. It'll be perfect.

I don't think I've mentioned on here yet, but we FINALLY booked our plane tickets! We're leaving at 6 am, so from the reception we'll go to my parents briefly to open cards, then possibly to our apartment to get our bags and a few hours of sleep, or straight to the airport! I was initially really upset by leaving so early, since I know I'll be exhausted and I had my heart set on having a day-after brunch... but I think it's really for the best. Not only were those tickets cheaper, but we'll also have MUCH less travel time (8 hours with 1 stop instead of 25 hours with 3 stops!!) and get one full day more of honeymoon!! So I'm very happy about that.

We also got our marriage license recently! Anthony and I have been having "wedding errand days" where we run around and do all sorts of last minute things... on Monday we got our marriage license (oh so official now!), dropped off our cake topper at the bakery (I also dropped off some of my coffee-filter flowers, and our fantastic baker says she can incorporate them!!), tried to pick up the extra fabric from the bridesmaid dresses (but the shop was closed), and got all the papers for the centerpieces (this'll make more sense if I ever post centerpiece pictures)! (My parentheses overuse issue seems to be back :P)

So I've been thinking lately about things that make our wedding special to us and how most people will never know them! I may try to work them in somehow, but in the meantime, here are some interesting facts you may not know....

10 7 Things You (Possibly) Didn't Know About Haylie & Anthony's Wedding!

1. When we got engaged, I got Anthony a ring too! (From KathrynRiechert on Etsy) It's inscribed with Amor Vincit Omnia (latin for "love conquers all") on the outside and the date he proposed on the inside. He's worn it on his right hand every day since then!

2. The communion song at the wedding, You Are Mine, was one of the songs the first time Anthony & I went to church together.

3. I chose the song Butterfly Kisses for my dance with my Dad, even though it's cheesy and typical, because when my Dad and I went to a Daddy/Daughter dance when I was little, he danced to it and he told me we'd dance to it at my wedding. He doesn't remember this, naturally. :P I don't know how I do!

4. I wanted the wedding to be as close as possible to the 26th, because May 26th is our dating anniversary. So it's only one day after the 26th, just a few months later!

5. I asked one of my Maids of Honor, my cousin Brittany, to be my MOH two summers before Anthony and I actually got engaged! Last summer (we only see each other at summers and Christmas, since she lives in Kansas) I told her that I could be getting married this summer... at the time I thought that was INSANE and now here we are a year and a month later and I still think it's insane! :P

6. Neither Anthony nor I have been to many weddings... I was a flower girl in my aunt's wedding a LONG time ago and we both went to my second cousin's wedding 2 years ago. So neither of us really have much idea what we're doing, haha - we'll wing it!

7. The church where we're getting married is where I've gone as long as I remember! I went to elementary school at the school there and once a week we'd have all-school mass. However, I've only been to a handful of masses in the chapel, where we're getting married. I LOVE the chapel though. There are some GREAT pictures of it here. It's all stone and wood and gorgeous. We're hardly decorating it, because it doesn't need it! My grandma is making just a few pew bows.

....I guess I'll add 8, 9, and 10 when I think of more stuff haha. I know there's more! <3

Edited to Add: I remembered number 8!!

8. Our wedding has an official font, that's used on practically everything. It's called Black Chancery and can be downloaded for free here. :)

Less than a Month Left!

I can't believe all this time has gone by so quickly! I wish I had blogged more. :P Both the wedding showers were fantastic!! It was so nice to see so much family and Anthony and I got so many wonderful things for the new apartment! We've been moving it all in... I can't wait til after the wedding when I get to live there too! We only have two drawers in the entire apartment though, so that makes organizing the kitchen interesting.... All my aunts did fantastic jobs putting the showers together. I have about a million "thank yous" still to write... I'm getting through them, but it's taking a while. A big "SORRY! :(" to everyone who hasn't gotten their thank you yet! Here's one of my favorite pictures from the shower - me & Anthony with my Co-MOHs and Bridesmaids!

I've been wanting to post pictures of completed invites, but they're trapped on my mom's camera and her sd card doesnt agree with my laptop for some reason. I'll get them up here eventually! I got the pictures! :) Here are my invites... I LOVE them so much!

You can't see it so well in the picture, but I'm especially proud of the RSVP - we typed up the names of the invited guests with check boxes next to them, so guests can just check off who's attending. We also had a box to check if no one could come. I love it because we haven't had anyone try to add someone who isn't invited and whoever knows what to do with the traditional M________ anyway? I <3 my invites. :)

Let's see, what else has gotten done this month.... well, Anthony & I met with Father Tony at the church to discuss our ceremony. We have all the readings picked out and we're very excited! He reassured us that he'd tell us exactly what to do on the day and that he "hasn't lost a bride and groom yet" :D He also really liked the readings we chose, so we felt good about that. He's going to call Anthony "Tony" and "Anthony" during the ceremony, so hopefully no one gets confused by all Anthony's names, lol.

I made the aisle runner this month too! For anyone who didn't see the picture on facebook, here's a cell phone picture of it:

I don't think I got a picture with a real camera before my mom & Tara rolled it back up for me. This was probably the easiest wedding project I did... took maybe a couple hours, at most. The hardest part was unrolling about 80 feet so I could get to the part I wanted to paint, and then rolling the whole thing back up! Hopefully it all lines up correctly on the day, but if it doesn't, I don't mind all that much.... more important things to think about at that point! :D

Now that I think about it, my garters probably took even less time than the aisle runner. I completed them a while ago, but I'm not sure I'm 100% happy with them... they're a lot wider than garters I see everywhere else... I like them though! One is ACU (army digital camo) and the other is made of the same fabric as the invites. I'll try to post pictures soon! (I say that all too often, and then the pictures never make it! We'll see. :P)

Oh, I also designed our menu cards!! We're going to have cootie catchers, like these, made by emma5w on weddingbee:

They have trivia questions about us and our menu in the middle! I've been working on the design and I'm pretty happy with it. Evidently it's a pretty popular thing lately... even Martha Stewart has a version! I think it'll be something that most of our guests won't have seen before though, so I'm excited. Plus Anthony always said that his parents taught him that girls have cooties. :P

I have more to write (especially about centerpieces!!), but I'm done for now. Hopefully I'll post again soon! We have a meeting with the reception venue tomorrow, so I'll take pictures. :) <3

Behind on Blogging... (Picture heavy post!)

Hello! It's time for my exceedingly late blog post with updates on everything we've worked on in the past month! It seems I just post once a month now, haha. There's just so much else to do! If I were really smart, I would've posted a few days ago, when (almost) everyone got their invites, which had a link to this blog! Instead, I didn't, so anyone who logged on would have seen that I hadn't posted in a month. Oops! Oh well. :)

So as I just said, most of the invites are out! We're still working on the last couple. I LOVE them SO incredibly much, and I hope everyone who got one does too! They were a lot of work, but so, so worth it. Here are some in-progress shots:

Stamping each paper:


Cutting all the fabric:


Cutting the pocket:


Co-MOH putting her calligraphy class to good use on the envelopes:


Starching the fabric:


Gluing the invites to the paper:


Fray-Checking all edges:


Beautiful glued invites:


I have more, but I'm sure that's enough. :P My pictures of the finished invites are having update issues, but I'll try to get them up soon.

As I said before, we finished the bouquets! I don't have any really good pictures of the finished bouquets yet, but naturally I have some in-progress pix!

All the roses (finally!):


Wrapping the ribbon:


Pretty! It's not pictured here, but each bridesmaid has a charm with her first initial at the top of the handle.


Me with a completed bridesmaid bouquet!


All the bridesmaid bouquets together:

Also, we put down our security deposit on our apartment yesterday! I love it so much. It's a little one-bedroom, but it's adorable. Windows in the bedroom and big one in the living room. Huge bathroom. I'm thrilled. :) We looked at a LOT of apartments in the area, but not one could compare. Here's the floorplan (no balcony):

Happy, happy, happy. And our first of two wedding showers is this weekend, so we'll get lots of new things to put in the new apartment! <3

Catch-Up Post!

Hello blog readers! (All 5 or so of you :P) I have so so much I need to post on here, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Since I posted last, we FINISHED the bouquets (!!), began the invites, tried a centerpiece idea, tried on the dresses that finally came in (mine, my mom's, Tara's), and visited a bakery!

And now it's less than 3 months until the big day! I've been wanting to post pictures, but all my spare time has gone to wedding crafts. :)

I'll have to add pictures to this post later, but for now, I'll just fill you in on all that happened!

The bouquets are BEAUTIFUL (in my own, not so humble opinion :P). The flowers are perfect and the crystal spikes look great. We wrapped the handles in two colors of ribbon and added a letter charm to each so the bridesmaids and CoMOHs know which is theirs. I've been dying to show them off.

The invites are really starting to come together. We got ivory granite resume paper (it's watermarked, but you can't tell) and matching envelopes. Tara, my CoMOH and sister, is taking a calligraphy class at school, so she's hand-addressing all the envelopes. We printed all the inserts and I stamped each one with a swirly border (That's over 400 pieces of paper stamped so far!). We're (and by "we", I mostly mean my mom and Tara... I got kicked off this job pretty early on!) currently working on starching and ironing rectangles of the aqua crepe-back satin and using spray adhesive to attach them to the invite paper. Then my mom is using my rotary cutter to slice off the excess fabric. It's quite a process! I'll be posting in-progess pix soon.

For centerpieces, I was thinking I wanted a potted plant. So we went to English Gardens and picked out a "spike" plant. It looks roughly like this:

We were then planning on adding some tall ivory spikes (it's hard to explain) on some tables, and pearls on wire spikes on others. However, the spike plant we bought didn't get watered for a few days while we were in Kansas, and now it's very sad and brown. :( So we're still trying to figure out options... do we keep the plants inside? Do we buy them right before the wedding? Do we come up with an entirely new idea? So it's been interesting. I definitely want something very different though.

It was so exciting to try on MY wedding dress! I took pictures, so perhaps later I'll post some links so you can see. :) It fit perfectly, it just needs a tiny bit of hemming in the front. And a bustle, of course. My mom's dress fits her perfectly too! Hers needs quite a lot of hemming and some straps added. We went to go see Tara's dress today and it ALSO fits perfectly and needs just a little hemming! It looks so fantastic and she looks so skinny in it! It was hard to tell how it would look when the girls tried on the samples, since the sample sizes were far too big, but I love it so much in the correct size!

Anthony and I visited a couple bakeries today. We finally nixed the decorating-it-ourselves idea... it was just a bit too crazy and there's so much else to do. I think we're going to order from Party Cakes in Berkley. I'm going over there tomorrow to pick up a "drive-by tasting" order, which apparently allows me to sample 6 different kinds of cake and two types of frosting! After going to the bakery, Anthony and I looked at over 2,000 wedding cake pictures on the knot.com and picked our favorites. It turns out that he really doesn't like some of my favorite elements! Oh well, haha. I combined some of our favorite ideas into a VERY rough mock-up... which I will now post, even though it's not very pretty haha.

Here's a (tiny) picture of the elements that I tried to combine....

That's all for now - I'll try to add another post with pictures later! <3

Cake Insanity

Some of you may be aware that I've been toying with the idea of making and decorating my own wedding cake. I know, it sounds *insane,* but hey, so does making 120 coffee filter roses, right? But don't worry, I've never planned on actually baking the cake... just making a fake one and decorating it!

So I was at Michaels recently (oh how I love that store!) and I came across something fantastic: the Cricut Cake. Naturally it costs more than a wedding cake, BUT I believe I can buy the thin fondant sheets that work with it and use a exacto to cut my own designs. I don't see why not!

Here's something Minette Rushing - Sugar Seminars made with the Cricut Cake:

I'm reasonably sure that I can cut shapes out myself... it won't be as quick, or as possibly intricate, as using the cricut, but it won't be as expensive either! I would at least like to cut out our monogram that I've been using on everything and put that on there.

There's still a lot of experimentation to be done! :) <3

Invites & Roses!

In the last few days, there has been a LOT of wedding progress! We bought (almost) all the needed supplies for the invitations - including postage and not including envelopes (strange, I know, but we didn't buy envelopes yet haha) they come out to $1.88 each. Not bad for a pocketfold with 3-4 inserts and a crepe-back satin outside with sheer ribbon closure! :D I've found out through this process that I'm extremely picky when it comes to invites and there aren't too many I like. But I think I'll love mine! We ordered the aqua satin last night, so hopefully by next week I'll be making invites! I'm definitely planning on having an invite-constructing party once I figure out what steps need to be done... anyone want to come and help? :P It's based on the tutorial in this book.

I've also officially finished painting all the big white/pink roses, which means that all flowers for the bouquets are DONE! I also made the wire bead spikes (easily the most expensive - but easiest/quickest thus far- part of the project. I made all of them while watching a single movie) and got the ribbon. So now all that remains is actually putting them together! The one thing I still need to figure out is how to cover up all the stems/wires. I keep looking at this picture (Bouquet made by alinaswedding on craftster) with extreme jealousy:

Isn't it beautiful! Her coffee filter roses are gorgeous and the pine covers up all the ugly wires.... I just can't figure out how I can do the same thing, but in a summer-wedding way. *sigh* I'll figure it out eventually, I suppose. Hopefully in the next week or so - I'm anxious to finally be done with them!

I still have to paint the yellow roses for the AST table and make mini and super mini roses for corsages. I may also do roses for the bouts... I'm not sure though. My current boutonnière inspiration is this (made by the ever-amazing sweets4ever on craftster):

I'm planning on doing mine slightly differently, with more of a loop at the bottom and no ribbon bow, but the same concept with the wires and beads. And blue instead of red, of course. I'm going to use many of the same beads I used on the bead wires for the bouquets:

(The ones on the left, not the right... the ones on the right are for my bouquet :) ) So we'll see how it goes. My mom already showed my brother (a groomsman) the prototype I threw together and so far he's not a fan. But we'll see once I actually put a real one together. I just need to get another 24 gauge spool of wire (I'm on my third spool now!)

My mom, Co-MOH, and I also went to our reception venue to ask more questions and finalize a few things... one of the BEST things we learned is a way to finally solve our seating issues! We had been struggling with a head table since Anthony's Dad is his best man, but we didn't want him sitting separately from Anthony's Mom and brother (who is also more or less a groomsman... it's a little complicated). There was also the matter of the groomswoman and more bridesmaids than grooms...people.... in any case, it's been a struggle. But no more! Evidently we can have a sweetheart table on a stage for me & Anthony (which I've been wanting - yay!!) and what's called a "captain's table," which is a long rectangular table for the bridal party and parents and grandparents. The captain's table won't be raised like the sweetheart table; it'll be on the floor in front of our table. So I'm very excited. We're still figuring out *exactly* who will sit at the captain's table and where, but I think we've got it pretty ironed out.

I'm very excited. Less than 110 days now! <3

At Last: Wedding Progress!

FINALLY done with all the full-size roses! Well, actually, I'm done constructing them; I still have 40 or more to paint and curl. But THEN I'll be done! I also have to make at least 11 more mini-roses. And then endless beading work and the actual putting together of the bouquets, and then the corsages and boutonnieres.... but hey, at least I don't have to cut out or put together any more big roses!! YAY!

I also walked around English Gardens getting centerpiece inspiration the other day... I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find something I'm happy with.

So, just wanted to be happy about my roses. If I feel motivated, I may post some dress pictures later. :) Oh! We also figured out some things about my veil... turns out you can bustle a cathedral length veil and it looks beautiful. I can't find any pictures online, but I think we'll definitely try it... It might get a little heavy though, so perhaps at some point I'll take it off (maybe after all the photo ops- first dance, cake cutting, etc) <3