Walking songs

Right now I'm having a bit of a conundrum. There is so much good music out there that I'm having a hard time figuring out which song to walk down the aisle to.

At first I was pretty convinced that I wanted Bittersweet Symphony, but as I was running yesterday (a whole other post in it's own right!) I was inspired by another song by Bloc Party which maybe feels slightly more current for me. But then again, I'm assured that Bittersweet Symphony is a classic. Funnily enough, both videos feature people walking!

Bittersweet Symphony

So Here We Are

Preferences? Any other fabulous suggestions for the perfect song for me?

Chalkboard

Did I mention we had a busy weekend? Well, one of the things we did was to go yard sale-ing in the neighborhood. We saw an old classroom chalkboard for $40 and thought, "Hey that's cool" and then went on our merry way.

Well, after a trip to Michael's and some google searching, we realized that the giant door-like chalkboard was a pretty good deal. The next day, we went back to the house where the sale was and saw that the chalkboard was still there. We offered them $20, and voila the chalkboard was ours!

Now we have to decide how to best use it for the wedding. It's about 6 ft by 3.5 ft. We were thinking about using it to direct people to their tables, but we also wanted to write the menu on a chalkboard. Could we do both with this? Any other ideas?

This photo was taken right after we washed the board, so it isn't all shiny splotchy like in the picture. I should say that the random snowboard binding in the foreground was purchased at the GI Joe's going out of business sale for $16! New Burton Freestyles, and they were practically free!

Busy weekend!

We got so much stuff done this weekend. It was great! We did some important wedding stuff...

One thing we did was our table numbers. We decided that we wanted to continue on with a national park theme, so we ordered some postcards from Ranger Doug.

Then we went to Michael's and found a great deal on unfinished wood frames ($1/piece). I then varnished the frames with a polyurethane seal. We trimmed the postcards to fit inside and voila... Table names!

We are going to have one person or couple at each table fill in their address on the postcard, and then next time we go to that National Park, we'll send them the postcard with a memory from our trip.

Results

What a fun weekend (more on the various details later)... but I had my hair and makeup trial with the fabulous Laura from Salon Bella Vita in Tahoe City and with Jen from Kiss and Make-up (also in Tahoe City).

They did a great job and I'm happy, but if you have suggestions for tweaks, please let me know. The makeup was inspired by Claire Forlani in the second photo in the blog post just below this one and the hair was inspired by Katherine Heigel shown here.


Here's how it turned out:

Hair and makeup trial

This weekend I'm going for a hair trial and trying to organize a make up trial as well... It'll be fun because I have a wedding to go to Saturday night. Knowing nothing about make-up means that I'm kind of shooting in the dark here.

I've found a couple of pictures of make-up that I like (on some of the most beautiful women I can think of-- so it's really not a fair comparison!)

Claire Forlani


Jennifer Connelly looks great here, but I'd definitely lighten the lips!


Input?

Challenges in men's fashion

Do you know how hard it is to find a decent tie/vest combo for formal wear? Jeez. I thought guys were supposed to be the easy part. Maybe it's because my dress makes actual matching impossible, but we worked long and hard to find a tie that we liked... Simple and elegant, but not too blingy with a subtle pattern to give some interest. When we finally did find the right tie, it made finding a vest nearly impossible. Chris really wanted a vest, so we eventually found something that would work.

We got lots of compliments on the tie, and the good news is it was on clearance! $60 tie for $20... not bad. (The one we really liked was $95 at Nordstrom, but that just seemed outrageous).

Signed Sealed Delivered!

Aside from a few last addresses that we've finally wrangled, our invitations are out. Many have been received, so I feel like I can show some images. Yay!


As for details: We received the image from the designer and then uploaded it into gimp and added our text and manipulated our image to make the postcard. We used a free font called Deco Tech from Da Font, but a different font for the fancy capital letters. I scoured high and low to find the information card border. It's got a very art deco feel to it.

We printed these on our home inkjet printer, but were we to do it over, we now know that it is cheaper to get them printed at the UPS store. Printing was a true labor of love. We have a great recommendation of someone who prints in Seattle! Jon (said person) cut our invitations and cardstock to our specifications, and then we mounted the invitation using spray mount.

I then calligraphized all the invitations (with variable results!), but got better as I went along. Working with metallic ink is incredibly difficult. We got wedding ring stamps for the outer envelope and polar bear stamps for the postcards. We then numbered the postcards (well most of them) and sent them off! I can't wait for our first RSVP cards!

We found it!

Today I looked at 1,000s of girls dresses. I tried all sorts of things to find something that would work. I started envisioning different sashes and planning a trip to the fabric store, and this evening just before shutting down the computer to cook dinner-- I found it!

The funny part is that my sister saw the same dress earlier today, but thought it wouldn't work so didn't mention it to me.

Here it is!

Not to be

My sister and I found this cutie at Dillards, but it's not available in any size but 8 (though it is on sale for $30!) We're continuing to look for a cute but different flower girl dress. Any ideas?