The final wedding post.

Well, almost nine months after our wedding, I'm finally winding down the wedding posts. I still love going back and looking through our photos from the day and I'm sure I always will!

I wanted to show some of the details that Tall Guy and I put together for our day. We really were a DIY couple during the nine months we were planning the wedding.

Our colors were navy, gray with accents of apple green and peacock feathers.

First up, our centerpieces. My mom, sisters and I knocked these out one afternoon after a few months of me trying to decide what I wanted to do. Since we were getting married in November and I didn't want to pay for a lot of flowers, I decided to do a branch based centerpiece that ended up only costing about $6 each!

We also made three centerpieces for our ceremony location that were a bit larger. I used split peas in the base to tie in our apple green accent color. 

I also made all of the boutonnieres for the guys, our dads and grandpas along with the wrist corsages for our moms and grandmas.

Our invitations were also done completely by us. I designed them in InDesign, we printed them at home, embossed the peacock feather and made the wrap around labels. Invitations weren't really that important to me as long as they had the info everyone needed to get to the wedding so we saved a lot of money by going this route!

Front of envelope (all the paper was from Paper Source)

Back of envelope

Invite (the bright green is the belly band that held together the invite and RSVP card)

The RSVP card

Again, we kept these really simple and clean to save time and money. I was really happy with out it all turned out in the end! We also had people RSVP via email (minus a few old school family members), so we didn't have to pay for the extra stamps either!

The biggest labor of love that we created were our favors. After going back and forth about what we wanted to do, we decided to make coasters with our colors on them and a little sticker with our names and wedding date in the corner. While they turned out wonderfully and were really cheap (less than $1 per pair), they were a ton of work! We made 450 coasters! But, I still get comments from people on how they use them all the time and how nice they turned out. We still have about 80 left over so our coasters are making an appearance all over our new house :)  Tall Guy was a huge help on this project! 

They also served as the escort cards and meal indicators for the wait staff.

I also designed and printed some simple programs for the ceremony, even though at first I thought they were unnecessary. But once we decided that we weren't going to do a grand entrance with all of our bridal party into the reception, I figured it would be helpful for the guests to know who was who in the bridal party. It also gave us a chance to recognize those that couldn't be with us that day or who left us too early. I also created the little monogram that we used on a few of our items. 

We had quite a few signs that I worked up as well to make it easier for people to know what to do. I like to make things as simple as possible for people to figure out!

For the kids at the wedding, I made little bags for each one with a few pieces of candy, some glow bracelets, temporary tattoos and a few other small things. I also put out some coloring books, crayons, stickers, pipe cleaners and some little games on the tables to keep them entertained. I think they were a hit!

As part of my bridesmaid gifts, I gave each girl a personalized hanger. Tall Guy did most of the work because my attempt at bending the wire into letters was pretty pathetic. I had to blur my sister's names, so they look weird here, but they turned out great in person! Tall Guy also made me one and I got some photos with my dress hanging on it. 

And, as a final farewell to the wedding posts, here is one of my favorite photo booth pictures of the night!

Yay for marriage! 

Another wedding!

My sister got engaged tonight! It was her and her fiance's 4 year anniversary today and he gathered about 20 of their closest friends and family at their house for a surprise engagement party. It was so awesome and I'm so happy for them! Now I can pass along all of my words of wedding planning wisdom!

Congrats M + G!

Wedding PIctures, Round 9- Winding Down.

At the end of the night, we had one last dance to Don't Stop Believin' and Piano Man. Everyone who was left at the reception got in a big circle surrounding Tall Guy and I in the middle while we slow danced. It was amazing! Unfortunately, our photographers were long gone by this point so I don't have many photos of those moments, but it felt awesome to be surrounded by our closest friends and family!

Once we were getting kicked out of the Metropolitan Club at the end of the night, we took our rented shuttle 3 whole blocks to Cosmos in the Graves Hotel. We actually had quite a few people show up to our unplanned, informal after party. People were just hanging out and having a good time winding down from the day's activities. It was daylight savings night so the bar was open an extra hour too!

I later found out that a lot of people stayed down until bar close so I'm glad our guests kept the party going! Tall Guy and I were beat after a long, exciting, emotional day so we ended up heading up to our room around 1:00.

When we walked in I was surprised with our entire suite filled with lit candles, a hot bath drawn, champaign, chocolate covered strawberries and other baskets of goodies from both my sister and her boyfriend and Tall Guy's brother and sis-in-law. Tall Guy had commissioned two of his groomsmen to go up to our room and light all of the candles a little while before we headed up. It was a sweet gesture.

After spending 5 minutes taking out all of my hair pins and clip-in extensions and another 5 trying to get my dress's corset undone, we had a nice bath and promptly fell asleep, as we had a brunch to get to bright and early the next morning!

Next up, the details. 

Sold!

I interrupt the wedding updates to make a big announcement:

Tall Guy and I bought a house!

One Sunday about 5 weeks ago Tall Guy had woken up a bit earlier than me and was playing on his phone in bed. When I woke up, I glanced over and realized he was looking at houses in the area. I asked him what he was doing and he said that he was thinking we should start looking at buying a house sometime this summer. Giddily, I asked him what had made him decide that since we had been thinking we wouldn't be looking for another year or so.

We decided just to check out the pricing and take our time with looking. It's such a great market for buyers right now that we knew things were lining up well for us. We looked at 7-8 houses and liked them, but nothing was screaming out at us as 'the one.' When we had reached a dead end with houses we wanted to look at, our realtor said she'd look around for us within our desired parameters.

We went out looking on a Sunday morning at those and we went to one that was a little bit out of our desired area, but other than that, it was perfect. After we viewed it with our realtor and went to another house, we went back to the first house because they happened to have an open house that day as well. After looking at it again, we made up our minds to put in an offer. We put in the first offer at 6:00 and by 9:30 it was ours!

Now we're just going through the underwriting process and we'll be closing on June 17! We are so excited to be taking yet another step in life together!

Wedding PIctures, Round 8- Time to party!

Once dinner, speeches and special dances were over, the Photo Booth opened up.The Photo Booth was a hit of course. It was something Tall Guy really wanted to have so I figured I could handle it. There weren't many things he insisted on so I had to let him have the few things he wanted!

The DJ was pumping out the tunes to get everyone on the dance floor. I was so happy with his music selection and his ability to keep so many people on the dance floor all night! I hate when weddings don't have good music and nobody is on the dance floor except the bridal party (and it's usually just the women) so I was a little nervous. But, knowing that I come from a family that likes to dance and knowing our DJ was good, it was no problem keeping people on the dance floor and having a blast! 

Up next, we wind down at a bar after the reception ends. 

* The photos in this post are either from Era Photography, Inc or our videographer's assistant. 

wedding PIctures, Round 7- Dessert and Other Snacks

We opted to go with mini cheesecakes for our dessert because 1. I'm not on most cake, 2. I've never really had a great wedding cake and 3. We love cheesecake. We had 6 flavors: Triple Berry, Lemon Drop (my fave), Pumpkin Swirl, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip, Caramel Swirl and Chocolate Toffee and people could choose the flavor they wanted from the little display we had. They were a huge hit and I'm so glad we did it! We even had some leftover to enjoy for a few weeks after the wedding.

We didn't do a cake cutting or anything because we didn't want to buy an extra cake to cut and we think the whole feeding each other thing is corny and didn't want to do it. 

In addition to the cheesecake, we hand made some chocolate dipped pretzels and had them out by the bar all night so people could eat them during cocktail hour or as part of dessert. 

At 10:00 pm, after we'd all been dancing for a few hours, we had a nacho bar set up as a late night snack. Tall Guy or I never actually got any nachos because we were too busy mingling and dancing, but from what we were told, they were really good. I glanced over at the nacho bar at one point and remember thinking that it looked much more robust that I thought it would be so that was a plus! I don't have any pictures of it since our photographer was gone by then.

Now that dessert was finished, it was time to boogie down!