Friday, July 22, 2011

You're Invited

Back in March we started talking about a number of things we were in the process of doing.  Like the majority of our posts, we promised additional updates on a number of in-progress projects.  Well I am happy to report that we are back today with an update on something we promised: our invites.

You may recall that we were having a pretty choke-tastic time swallowing the truth of what wedding invites cost.  You might even recall that we decided this was a task we could DIY in an effort to save money.  We DIY'd our Save The Date Video (for a recap click here) and it turned out great!

We're cheap.  There I said it.  Did we save money?  For sure.  But notice I didn't say, however, that doing these on our own was a great way "to save time"....

You see, one half of this newly matrimonilized duo (made-up word alert!) has an incredibly hard time making decisions.

In truth, designing them was a several month process as I changed, re-changed, changed back and then changed again the design we finally went with.  There was even a moment in my invitation madness where the invites had printed, shipped and been placed before me when I suddenly got the urge to make one more edit.


That didn't go over too well. 


Who we are not:  graphic designers
What we do not have: a graphic designing program

I use Power Point and Paint.  Yes --- I know that is the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard and somewhere a million graphic designers are self imploding because of it.  But I use them.  Obsessively.

When it came time to finally upload my design to our choice printer --- VistaPrint for all of you taking notes --- let's just say, the files were not in the preferred format.  There were several limitations to their program, which added on a lot of time, so I opted to use one of their designs as a base and build upon it with my own design.  I went back and forth on this for weeks, but eventually I ended up with a product we could get behind.

For better or for worse, they were completed and VistaPrint was an economical option.  100 free postcards for new customers?  Um......  ok.  We became new customers a couple of times.   This allowed us to vary the sizes of our 5-piece invitation and create a layered look.  Each piece represented a different outing scheduled for the long weekend and a map.  Then, it was fastened together with a cool paperclip and bound by a black ribbon which would eventually become a sort of theme for our day.... 


New customers also got 250 free business cards -  so we opted to direct all of our guests to RSVP online by including a small (business) card with a link to our wedding website.  This was fantastic.  No extra postage for RSVP cards.  No extra envelopes.  I was adamant on having no inner and no extra envelopes.  And much to the shock and horror of all wedding etiquette enforcers: no one died because of it.  :)  Using Google Sites we set up a basic website with a spreadsheet option for dinner numbers and fun messages.

The other half of this duo LOVES spreadsheets.

Add in a keepsake snapshot from our engagement shoot and you get an idea of how excited we were to be done with this project. 


In the end, we managed to save some money for sure, but I am not certain the time I lost was worth it.  The end product turned out just fine, and accomplished it's mission, but the lesson I learned was that in the interest of time and ability, there are reasons to pay others to do your dirty work sometimes.  Either that or we should really invest in some real design software.

It's one or the other.  But..... I just can't decide.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Was It You?

Today we received two totally awesome wedding gifts by mail.  A cool pair of frames from Pottery Barn and the black flower planters we registered for at Target.  While we were thrilled to get them, we were totally disappointed to find that neither gift contained a card or gift message.  Someone sent them --- Was is you???

Just Married

Yep --- It's official!  After months of planning and projecting, some crazy ideas and last minute changes, The Big Day came and went in the blink of an eye!  It was 100% everything we dreamed and imagined it would be, it unfolded exactly as we planned and it really couldn't have been a more wonderful experience.


We opted for planning around the long holiday weekend of July fourth and in our opinion it was the perfect plan.   Family and friends started arriving in small batches on Thursday and continued through Sunday (our wedding day) and doing it this way really gave us the opportunity to maximize the amount of time we spent with guests and then allowed us to really take in the entire day and celebrate every minute of it.  Monday was the 4th, so several people stuck around to spend a little more time with us.

The fun began on Thursday night with some pampering for the ladies....





On Friday, most of the wedding party and our parents and several other family members were in town and we kicked the weekend off right with a wine tasting at Cellar Rat in downtown KC followed by dinner for 30 during First Fridays in the Crossroads Art District.











Then on Saturday is was time to cook!  We had a house full of chefs and assistants making the amazing Syrian dinner that was served Saturday evening for our rehearsal-less dinner party.








 It was a bit chaotic at times, but in a good way.  The evening kicked off with great eats and went well into the night with several people staying to hang out and visit - exactly what we were hoping would happen!





Of course, you never feel like you have enough time to truly visit with everyone you want to, but when it was all said and done, we both agreed, having the extra day to celebrate was well worth it!

We knew  from the very beginning our goal was to focus on making this day feel like us and to try our hardest not to be distracted from that along the way.  We wanted the vibe to be a fun, laid back and casual one and I think/hope we were able to achieve that.

There were so many incredible highlights to the weekend and so many moments that we wanted to bottle up and save forever.  We are anxious to get some of our professional pictures back and can't wait to share them.  We have really only seen one picture of the two of us together and it's currently our favorite image of the day!  It is a little blurry, so our fingers are crossed that the same one was captured a little clearer.  But - blurry or not you can clearly see the joy we were feeling as the main event was about to be begin.


One of our favorite moments happened at the very end of the night while we and our wedding party were breaking down the event space.  Everyone kept urging us to go home, but we both agreed, being there and seeing all of our work pay off and seeing all of our friends care enough about us to be there 'til the end was truly an amazing sight to behold.  We were feeling the love fo' sho and we didn't want the day to end.



We have a lot of details on projects to share because we essentially built, created or modified just about every aspect of the day, so we'll be getting into everything from the writing of the ceremony to several sneaky money-saving ideas we incorporated.  So you should definitely stay tuned.  We even have the highlights of several home improvement projects wrapped up just in time for our first 3rd floor guests- - so more to come!
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