(Don’t you wish you had some of that!?)

I think we’re all getting pretty excited about next Saturday – we will see everyone very soon!

Our wedding bands! They’re made from strips of wood veneer, boiled so they are bendy, and then meticulously glued layer over layer, then sanded and buffed and polished and coated to make them shiny.  They are just beautiful.  Having David hand make our bands is a wonderful gift and will make things all the more special for us.

Yesterday was marriage license day.   A special little room in the courthouse where you can pay for the right to get married or to own a gun.  Yes, a shotgun wedding joke was made.  It took all of 10 minutes and was incredibly anticlimactic!  David complained that we should have at least gotten a sucker with it or something.  We celebrated with ice cream from up the street.

The day is almost here!

Whew!

– Georgia Aquarium –

(everyone applauded!)

(trying for our best fish faces)

– Marietta Square –

awww…thanks William!

Now when you receive yours, I expect you’ll be blown away by the quality and consistency, but let me tell you that Katie made each one of these by hand. Each one is designed in Photoshop, printed on our own printer, hand-stamped, handwritten, and has a hand-tinted “Postcard” sticker.

And while we’re at it, here are a couple more updates:

We’ve figured out our “silverware.” It’s wood! It’s woodware! They’re like a mix of tongue depressors and the little spoons you got with ice cream when you were in kindergarten. We got them here. And then Katie wrapped them up with napkins and a raffia bow.

Last but not least, we bought some pretty awesome stamps for our invitations! You will see them soon enough…

]]> http://KandDGetMarried.com/?feed=rss2&p=481 1 http://KandDGetMarried.com/?p=435 http://KandDGetMarried.com/?p=435#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 01:44:35 +0000 K&D http://kanddgetmarried.com/?p=435 We weren’t sure how much would be blooming at the end of March and we did say that we’d do as much ourselves as we could and so for the next few months it’s paper flower makin’ time!

Instructions:

Cut a length of streamer about 4 or 5 inches long and then cut that in half length-wise.  Each piece will make one flower.

For the “petals”, make cuts starting at the top and cutting almost to the bottom – make sure to leave a 1/4 inch or so at the bottom or your petals will be fragile or will fall/tear off in the next step.  My piece of streamer looks so small because I fold it up a few times so I don’t have to make as many cuts – just unfold it again for the next step.

Place your twig at one end of the fringed streamer piece and make sure that enough of the streamer overlaps the twig so later there will be enough room to secure it with wire.

Roll her up!

Cut a length of wire about 3 inches long.  Could be longer or shorter depending on how big a twig you’re using for your flower.

Putting a little kink at the end of the wire helped me get the wire wrapping process started.  I used  a pair of jewelry making pliers, but needlenose would work too.

Hook your little wire bend around your flower and make sure there is a nice amount of twig underneath so that things wont just slide off the end when you’re done.

It doesn’t have to be beautiful since it will be covered later with thread, but it is easier if the wire doesn’t overlap in too many spots since the bulkier it is, the harder it is to cover and the more thread you’ll have to use.   And I can’t tell you how many twigs I broke on this step!

Pick your thread color and I use a slew of it each time.  You’ll have to experiment with length, but the more you use, the easier it is to cover all that ugly wire – and it will look more polished too.

Start winding the thread around the same way you did the wire.  Your aim is to cover the wire and be sure to also cover over the free end of your thread.  When you’re all done, use a dot of craft glue (I used Elmer’s and that worked just fine) to secure the end of your thread.

Ta da!

They’re based loosely on a Martha Stewart how-to…of course hers include the use of fancy ribbon and realistic looking middles instead of twigs from the backyard and bright thread.  I have found that crepe myrtle twigs are awesome and I had the surprising luck of having half of a small azalea bush die so that I now have a huge and intricate branch that will make a nice bouquet all on its own.  Once I can wrap each end with the paper flowers that is.

We don’t want to give too much away, but here’s a sneak peak for ya:

and a little sneak peak of the invitation too:

for those of you interested in this sort of thing, i’ve been using a handful of free Photoshop brushes (flowers, stitches, scroll banner and some sort of watercolor brush that I used to “paint” color onto the flowers) and two fonts (bree and callie).

Mostly, I didn’t want it to cost huge amounts of money and I didn’t care to get the “royal treatment” from a fancy boutique.  So we started (and finished!) at good ole’ David’s Bridal after I picked through their site and found about 10 dresses I liked.  There is usually some sort of sale going on and you don’t have to have an appointment…it just seemed like a place where I wouldn’t be too overwhelmed or pressured.

The lady I worked with was very nice and even gave me some surplus beads and sequins once I mentioned I was going to try and make my own matching flower hairpiece.  And the dress certainly looks more like me than any of the others and I couldn’t be more pleased!  What a HUGE check off the wedding list!

We’re getting questions about the colors we’ve chosen for the wedding.  Up until now, we hadn’t discussed this particular point since we’ve only worked on collecting the mismatched plates and it has been anything goes color-wise.  So! we started flipping though magazines and some of my inspiration journals for ideas.   Here are a few pages that we’ll be using for color inspiration – and these are our favorites to be used in the wedding:  buttery yellow, sea glass blue, and light minty green…with a little coral thrown in maybe.

Perfect for spring, right?