First Gift!

What did I arrive home to tonight but this box waiting on our front porch.


Is that... Does that say.... Oh my gosh, it's a Crate and Barrel box! Our first wedding gift!!!!

It's like Christmas in August! As I raced off to get the camera and the scissors Nate says "What, are you going to put that on your blog?" Uh, heellllooo. Of course I am.

Nate: "What are you going to do with the blog after the wedding?"
Kelley: "It's not like we won't have a life...I can turn it into a Kelley & Nate blog."
Nate: "Thank god. Just wanted to make sure you were going to have something to do."

Men.

Before I actually opened it we had the "Are we supposed to open it now?!" discussion. I rationalized it by 1) I cannot let a Crate & Barrel box sit unopened for 2 months and 2) My bridal shower is Sunday and I'm opening gifts then. So let the tape breaking begin!

The gift was actually from some friends of Nate's parents who can't make it to the wedding. Lo and behold I present....

The punch bowl I was ogling over every time I got a C&B catalog in the mail! Now I won't have to borrow my mom's punch bowl when I want punch for a party.


It's very simple--clean lines, not ornate. It came with eight glasses. Totally cool.

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Makeup Trial

A few weekends ago between my trips to Seattle, I had my makeup trial for the wedding day. My friend Bethany had given me a suggestion for a makeup artist at a neighboring salon to hers, so on the day of the wedding we should just be able to walk between the two salons!

I couldn't have been more happy with Alisha at La Sienne. I went in with a few ideas, the main one being that I wanted to highlight my eyes and not my lips. Alisha was so nice and talked to me a bit about what makeup I normally wear, what the wedding colors were, etc. We ended up deciding on a combination of brown, gold, and a touch of green for the eyes and more of a nude color on the lips.

She was telling me that she actually prefers color on the lips no matter what, but I wanted to see what it looked like without. I told her I'd go home and take a picture to see how much the colors showed up on film. I certainly don't want to look washed out!

After seeing the pictures, I absolutely love the eyes. Case in point (and pardon that I look a little drunk...I'm not, I swear!)...



They are so pretty and will be perfect for fall. I love the gold shimmer and the touch of green brings out a bit of green in my eyes.

Now you'll notice my lips look quite bare. After seeing the nude lips in a picture, I think I've decided to go with some color on the wedding day. Here I am again after adding some colored lip gloss:

Peps it up a little, eh? So what do you think? The only other thing I think I may have Alisha do is add a bit more blush. Other than that, I'm pretty happy. I still have the natural "me" look, just amped up a little.

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Pew Cones

A long time ago I saw an inspirational photo of a cute pew marker on the Better Homes and Gardens website. I tried making a paper one, but I wasn't really sure how they would hold up when filled with flowers. Ever since then, I've been on the search for another way to do these.

My mom ended up finding some handy instructions online to make pew cones a different way. Styrofoam! Once it's covered with fabric, it looks quite elegant.

[Image from save-on-crafts.com]

One of my concerns with this design is that it uses a holder that slips over the pew. But the pew isn't flat on top, it looks like this:


So, after some consultation, I decided the only way to figure out if these were doable on the pews was to make up a sample. You know what that means. A trip to Michael's! I got all of the items needed except for the fabric, ribbon, and pearl head pins (we'll save the fancy stuff for later!). Before Lindsey left today, I made up the sample for her to take back with her. She's going to give it a shot on the church pew and let me know what happens.

One other suggestion I received was that if the holder doesn't stay put on the pew, we could adhere the holder to the pew with those 3M temporary sticky things, so that we could then remove said sticky things later. "Sticky things" being a very technical term. Ha. I'll keep that idea in my back pocket for Plan B!

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Glue, Glue, Glue

I mentioned dinner menus in my last post. Ah, yes. Another idea that came to life. Was I out of my mind?! Ha, just kidding. I figure if I work on 40 of these per evening, it will only take me approximately 6 days to complete them! But somehow, the kitchen table has looked like this for the past week. Hrumph.


Luckily, Lindsey is coming to my rescue once again. She's here in St. Louis today with me to do some shopping, so we're going to finish these puppies tonight or tomorrow. And with this as the finished product, how could we not want to complete these?!

I apologize for the blur, but I think they turned out rather nicely. Can't wait to see them on display on the tables at the reception!

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Fold. Stuff. Stick.

It's only right to follow up the invitation mailing post with the invitation making post! The last Sunday in July I was able to round up a few of my girlfriends and my mom to help finish the wedding invitations. Let's just say, I owe them BIG TIME for all their help! So girls, any painting, cleaning, landscaping, or other home improvement projects....or if you need some of your own invitations made...give me a call!

We started off the day easy. Lindsey and I made the pockets for the pocketfolds, while Bethany adhered the stamps to the RSVP cards. Then, we all took turns punching out leaves with this puncher:

It looks small and innocent, but don't let it fool you. Those leaves were a b*tch to punch out! I think it's because we were using heavyweight cardstock instead of normal text weight paper. After about 20 punches your thumb would hurt like mad and you'd have a permanent indention from the puncher's thumb pad. Whose brilliant idea was this, anyway? The kicker was these leaves weren't even for the wedding invitations. They were for the dinner menus that I'm making. Just trying to stay on top of things!

So after our thumbs were throughly blistered, Lindsey and I began adhering the invites to the pocketfolds. Then my mom joined the party, so I handed that job over to her and Lindsey and I began creating the belly bands for the outside of the invites, to which we were attaching our monogram. Don't we look like we're enjoying ourselves?


Lindsey is so like..."Take the picture already!"

Meanwhile, back in the dining room Julie is writing and writing and writing. Yep, I recruited her for her penmanship. I had aspirations of learning calligraphy and writing out my own envelopes, but I never got time to even crack open my Complete Idiot's Guide to Calligraphy. So, that went back to Borders and Julie was my replacement. I mean, look how hard she's working!

That long list of addresses looks intimidating, doesn't it? But with this as the final product, now do you see why I chose her?


I told Julie she should consider learning calligraphy and write invitation envelopes on the side. I really think she could rake in some extra dough!

So we finally had our assembly line going. Lindsey and I making the belly bands, Bethany and my mom putting the belly bands around the invites, Bethany taking the envelopes from Julie and adhering the stamps, and Bethany stuffing the invites in the envelopes while my mom sealed them.

We worked really hard and I think poor Julie never wanted to see another ivory envelope again. What I put my poor friends through! But all ended well. The only slight snafu was that my aunt didn't print enough directions cards for the envelopes, so we had around 25 invitations that we couldn't finish, but I solved that quite easily by completing the rest of them the very next weekend. Ahh....success! This was a big accomplishment. And it is really cool seeing my idea come to life. I hope everyone likes them!

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Already?

It's starting to seem real now. Yep, that's an empty box. What gives, you ask? Well, that empty box represents something. The wedding invitations have been mailed! Yes, you heard right. I can't believe it either. Seems just like yesterday that I had my inspirational idea for the invitation design and now they've been mailed. Where does the wedding planning time go?!

Thanks to some HUGE help from my girlfriends to complete the invitations, I was able to mail them out on Tuesday. I'll post about our final invitation making day soon...and also a little bit more about the details of the invitations once everyone receives them.

If you remember my last post about stamps and the post office you'll recall that I sent myself an invitation through the mail. Well folks, this is exactly why. Behold, this is how it arrived:


Could that lovely postmark {insert sarcasm here } have taken up any more of the envelope? Ugh. I saved this invitation as Exhibit A and was going to use it to make a case for having the invitations hand stamped when I returned to the post office to send them. Fast forward to Tuesday. I presented my case to a nice lady at the post office by showing her the envelope, indicating that they were wedding invitations, and telling her that I would really like them to look nice for this special occasion. She replied that she would normally offer to hand stamp them {yes!}, but they were really busy at the moment {no!!} But would I like to do it myself? {absolutely!}.

I moved off to the corner and stamped to my little hearts content. Approximately 15 minutes later the 137 invitations were ready to go. As I handed them back off to the lady helping me, she said "Now let's hope this prevents them from having that ugly postmark." Uh, I thought this was a for sure thing? Sigh. All I can say is if you receive a wedding invitation with the envelope looking like it's been driven over by a car like the one above, please don't tell me.

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MOB Dress Shopping - Part Dos

Sunday dawned with new dress hopes, and after stops at Michael's (I swear I've never shopped there so much in my life!), Kohl's and Lowe's for other reasons I cannot disclose , we were off to Brentwood where we stopped first at Demetrios. Since we got my dress and the bridesmaid dresses there, we thought they would have some nice mother-of-the-bride choices.

They really didn't end up having that many, but there was one dress from the Caterina line my mom really liked. It was a bit more than she was wanting to spend, but it was really nice and a similar style to the other she had liked at Dillard's:

However, once we got to talking to the sales associates about ordering the dress in chocolate brown (it comes in a few different colors) and how long it would take to ship, we realized we'd have to pay rush shipping and that would still be cutting it close for delivery. Not to mention adding to the cost even more! Based on how long it took for the bridesmaid dresses to come in, neither myself or my mom felt comfortable cutting it that close with the possibility of rushing around like mad close to the wedding, getting alterations, etc. So, we told them we'd think about it, but had pretty much made up our minds to keep looking.

We then headed across the street to The Galleria (yes, another mall!) to look there. We thought we'd give Macy's one more shot, to see if a different store carried different items. Nope, no love. We popped into Dillard's again, and lo and behold, they had some additional items we hadn't seen before. We spent a lot of time there again, but didn't really come up with anything else to put in the running.

So off to our last stop of the day, Nordstrom....and yes, at yet another mall. My car got a workout, as well as our feet! They have quite a bit of selection on Nordy's online, but the store we visited didn't have many of those items in stock. My mom found a two piece elegant skirt/top set she liked, but it only came it gray. Ick. But randomly walking through the mall we happened upon a store called Shaley Bugs, which sells bridal gowns and dresses off the rack. We looked through all their MOB dresses and tried on a few, but the miracle of the day, they had the Caterina dress above in her size for $40 cheaper in a color called copper. Not the brown she was hoping for, but the copper is just a shade darker than the bridesmaid dresses, so she would fit in nicely. She tried it on and liked it enough to put it on 5-day hold. She liked everything about it - the one con was the color...it wasn't brown.

We thought Nordstrom was our last stop of the day, but a spur of the moment decision had us stopping off at Chesterfield Mall on our way home, to purchase the Cachet dress from day 1. Her thoughts? She liked both the Caterina and the Cachet and didn't want to miss out on the Cachet dress by letting it go too long. One thing we've learned throughout all this wedding planning is just buy it...it can always be returned! She is going to stop at a couple more stores in Jeff City this week, after which she will make her decision.

So which will she choose? The bronze bombshell? The copper Caterina? Or something yet undiscovered? Only time will tell. And I'll let you find out at the wedding...

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