Reeling It In

We are 6 months out from our wedding (HOLY...!!!) and I am at a turning point.

Although our deposits are all in, that only speaks for less than 10% of our overall budget… the time to really start spending is upon us and the shit is hitting the fan. Okay… that sounded negative… what I really mean is that it’s all becoming very real. You can make all the budgets you want, for all the little decorations and useless knick knacks that you think you need for your wedding but when you really start opening your wallet, I guarantee you, you will rethink everything! I thanked Pinterest in my last post, but in this one I will criticize it a bit.

Pinterest has made it so that I want to do ALL of those cute DIY ideas no matter how unnecessary they are or how much they don’t have anything to do with my theme or motif. Yesterday I went through my “LIST” (the list of everything I wanted for my wedding, down to every teeny tiny detail) and I wacked off half of the stuff. Up until then, I had been crossing stuff off if I thought it might not work out (then maybe I could revisit it later)… but yesterday, I straight up deleted stuff. (For me, this is a huge deal; I’m a hoarder… even of electronic files)

Like I said, one reason I did this is because some of my ideas just weren’t meshing, it was like 5 different wedding being squashed into one. Since I’ve started planning, my overall anticipated feeling/theme has changed as well. But the main reason was a talk I had with my fiancé. Like the beer drinking, fly fishing, car show watching man that he is, he thinks I am being ridiculously obsessive about our wedding. He didn’t say those exact words (and what else can I except from a dude) but it really made me see a new perspective. He thinks I am planning “unnecessary” things and mostly, that I am overspending. A guys perspective is, “there are so many other things I would rather spend money on” and my perspective is, “this better be my only wedding and I deserve it to be the wedding of my dreams”. I think that where I can level with him is: “we can throw a beautiful, fun wedding but not have to but every last penny into savings in order to afford it”. Of course, in order to get there, I’m going to make a few cuts.

Maybe I don’t need paper lanterns, mason jar lanterns, arcade garlands and twinkle lights… maybe I only need one (or two?) of those. Sometimes I forget that we are lucky enough to have an insanely pretty venue that doesn’t need much dressing up!

So as I continue planning and purchasing, I am trying super hard to keep in mind that a wedding doesn’t have to eat up savings (or what could be savings). So far, I have done a really good job of staying under our budget and I plan on not straying from that path!

Addressing the Invites and Praising Pinterest

If Pinterest were a person, I would owe that person big time for basically planning my wedding. I say this often, but it’s worth repeating… I don’t know how people planned weddings before the invention of the internet. I mean, I guess there are wedding planners, but even if coordinating weddings is your job, there is no way it was a simple task in the 80’s. Seriously though, even before Pinterest (what I call The Dark Ages) you had to scan hundreds of wedding blogs for the perfect bits of inspiration, and even then, you were bound to miss an easier D.I.Y. method, or the website offering the cheapest tissue garland. Nowadays, Pinterest is making it too easy to collect your thoughts and ideas, to the point where I wonder, “If I had gotten married even 3 years earlier, what kind of hillbilly hoedown would my nuptials end up being?” 

But I digress. I want to do a mini post about my invitations. I’m not ready to come up with a full tutorial type post but I have started printing the addresses on my invite envelopes and I am super excited about how they are turning out. I plan on doing a post after my “Invitation Stuffing Party” (along with a full tutorial) but seeing how the last “party” turned out, I’m sure there will be some sort of mini disaster to sort through when it comes time to actually construct the invitations… soooo, this is like my little “light at the beginning? of the tunnel” before shit starts to really get stressful.

So anyway, I knew exactly how I wanted my envelopes to look before I was even close to deciding on the actual invitations (honestly, I still am not solid on how I want them to look). And here was my inspiration…

It is just a picture that bride posted of her invitations on a weddingbee.com forum!

Basically, the only reason my invites are going to be on “recycled paper” pocket folds is because of this picture. I loved everything about it. I liked the rustic look of the envelopes, I absolutely loved the font and better yet, I loved the fact that it looked like something I could produce on my own. The best part though is that they looked so professional and in reality, they would probably be really affordable to make!

So the first thing I did was purchase the font... way back in October. This font, called "Mishka", is an "open type" font and basically, in layman's terms, what that means is that the font is really like 3 or 4 fonts in one. Each character has a few different ways is can be shown and you can mix and match the different character styles. In the case for the Mishka font, you could go simple or a few different levels of fancy. For example, notice the different styles of each letter:

You can be simple or add flare to certain letters...

So the reason I bought the font so early on in the game was because I knew it would take some time to individually create each guests address for the envelopes... it definitely took quite a but of patience and time to finish all the addresses. Anyway, enough of the font, I have a strange obsession with typography so I got a bit carried away! You can find the opentype font "Mishka" here for about $29 (including tax).

So after I drew up all of the addresses I was super excited to print a few out to see the end result, and here they are...

And since I have purchased a lot of the materials that I will be using on the final invite, I thought I would do a teeny sneak peak...every invitation is going to be a little different but these shots will give you an idea of some of the cute paper I am using!

 

I am so so excited to put together my invites, I think they are going to look awesome... but first things, first... my save the dates that I ordered should be arriving in the mail any day now and then I'll have even more addressing to do!

Cupcake Party A.K.A. Hot Mess

So as I mentioned before, I wanted my bridesmaids and I to make the cupcakes for the reception, and I wanted to have a baking/taste test party. I thought it would be easiest to use Betty Crocker mixes as bases and then add stuff to make super special and delicious flavors. I found about 10 different recipes on the Betty Crocker website, all with the best reviews, and I narrowed it down to about 6 different flavors. I had each of my bridesmaids (minus my maid of honor, my little sister, who is off in far away lands getting an education) bring a few of the special ingredients over my place, last Saturday, which also happened to be paired with our "1st Annual Friends Chili Cook Off".

So for starters, we probably shouldn't have paired a cupcake testing party with a chili testing party, it was crazy inside my house that night, with people, food and a baby flying around... second of all, we probably shouldn't have waited to start baking until after we were each three beverages deep (alcoholic beverages, that is). But all of that aside, I still can't believe how lame the recipes that I had were. Yes, the frosting was too wet and we didn't have red food dye and therefore ended up with green "pink lemonade" cupcakes, but even if we were completely sober and gave the cupcakes our all, I'm still pretty convinced they wouldn't have been winners.

After the first few batches came out, and after we realized that instead of Espresso, Pink Lemonade and Champagne flavored cupcakes, we had chocolate, white and white... we sort of half assed the frosting. Even if the frosting had improved on the "special" flavors that these cupcakes were supposed to be, it was still a lost cause... was it really worth all this work to make Betty Crocker cupcakes?

Can you tell by now my answer is "NO"!!?

Overall, we had a drunken blast making the worst batch of cupcakes I have ever seen... and I am so glad that we decided to do this "trial run" because how bad would it have been if this were the night before my wedding instead of some drunken night with a chili contest? In a way, I'm glad this didn't work out perfectly... now we won't have to worry about baking on the eve of my nuptials. (Maybe we can focus on drinking the rest of the tequila that didn't get used on the "margarita" cupcakes... what a joke!)

Espresso? Or maybe Chocolate Stout... who knows!

Suuuper runny frosting

At least my cake stands look cute

Green Lemonade and Pina Colada (or basically vanilla)

Proud?!

On a more successful note, the 1st Annual Friend Chili Cook Off was a hit... I've never seen so much chili in one place in my life!