Greetings from Boise!

Now that I am retired (well, at least until after the wedding), I have all kinds of time to craft and travel. And that is exactly what I have done on my trip this week back to my hometown of Boise, Idaho. I have so many fun projects to post. First up, we finished our ceremony aisle decorations! You might remember the pomander flower balls from this post a while back. Well they are now finished, and here’s how they turned out:

Not too shabby! We figured they actually cost slightly less to make than the ones we could have bought at the store. They do however take quite a bit of time, but I think it was worth the work. One quick note, they did take quite a few more flowers than we thought they would to make and we had to make a couple of extra trips to the dollar store to buy more. So if you are thinking about making some, definitely plan for more flowers than you think you’ll need! For instructions on how to make them, just visit the previous post here. Now we just need to finish spray painting the shepherd’s hooks to hang them on and the ceremony decorations are taken care of!

We also found our card box for the reception. Originally I had wanted to do something like this:

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Cute, simple, how hard could it be to make something like that? It actually probably isn’t that hard, but with our mounting stack of DIY projects to finish before the wedding (which is now only 6 weeks away! Eeek!!), I decided maybe we should just go with something we could buy. Unfortunately those type of card boxes are either ridiculously overpriced (the one shown above is $108!) or kind of ugly and cheap looking (sorry Michael’s). I had seen the idea of using birdcages to hold cards, and I wasn’t sure if I liked that or not, but then I happened across this birdcage at Tai Pan Trading:

I really liked the retro look and the bright color. And I figured after the wedding we’ll have a cool art piece for our house. So we bought it. And now I have another item checked off my list!

Invitations!

Ah finally! I actually finished them a couple of weeks ago, but I have been very bad about posting again, so many of you have already seen them. Oh well! And if you haven’t gotten one yet, don’t worry, there are a couple more to hand out and one more currently in the mail. And if you still haven’t gotten one after that, well I’m sorry but you’re just not invited.

Ta-dah!

They turned out pretty great. J.C. and I are very simple creatures and had no extras in the envelope, like hotel blocks, registry info, or maps. We did this for a couple of reasons, but mostly because we didn’t want to pay for extra postage. Instead of  wasting all that paper, stuffing all those extras into the envelope (which usually just get thrown away anyway), we just directed people to our website where all the hotel blocks, directions, and registry information is. We did our website through The Knot, and it is totally customizable and FREE. Also we did our RSVPs online to save money as well. There’s a great website I found called rsvpify.com which you can use for any sort of event. And it’s free for up to 100 RSVPs!

And here’s a shot of the envelope:

Check out that adorable tandem bike stamp I found at Michael’s! Matched the invitation design and everything!

J.C. and I were extremely happy with the way the invitations turned out. They were simple and inexpensive, and turned out really nice looking. We seriously just bought a box of the invitation paper and envelopes, used the free design template from this website, took it to Kinko’s, and we were finished without breaking the bank!

Finally, J.C. and I had our engagement photos taken in Great Falls this past Tuesday, and got to meet our photographer, Courtney Todd, for the first time! She’s really nice and easy to work with and anyone looking for a photographer in Montana should probably check her out! Here is her website.

We won’t get our photos for another week, but she posted a sneak peek today and we are so excited to see the rest!

Seriously, it was FREEZING. Like 40 degrees. And it snowed an hour after we finished. May in Montana. You can never be sure what it’s gonna do!

An Update

Yep. Hard to believe that exactly 3 months from today, J.C. and I will be getting married! I feel like we have a lot of things accomplished, and yet a ton of things still to go!

I have not been keeping up with this blog like I’ve wanted to. Mostly because of work, and partly because of wedding-related business. But the good news is that in exactly 3 1/2 weeks I will be done with my job and be able to devote a lot more time to the wedding, this blog, the gym, traveling, and relaxing!

So a few updates on what I’ve been up to. First up, we bought J.C.’s wedding ring! Take a look:

 

Not too shabby! He even took it out for a test run the other night, and he didn’t even mind wearing it! And look how cute the rings look together!

Next up, we are currently working on our invitations for the wedding. It is really impressive how expensive those things can be. I found an amazing site that has free downloadable templates for invitations, save the dates, thank you cards, etc. You can check it out here. We used it for our Save the Dates (which turned out great) and I was impressed with how easy it was. I expect the invitations to be a bit more work, but I think it will be so satisfying to do it ourselves. Plus I could not find anything I liked as much as the invitations I found on that site. Here’s a preview of what they will look like:

I love the tandem bike!

Finally, last up we took a trip to Missoula last week and I was able to cross another thing off my to-do list. I had been looking at a couple of ideas for how to do our food and drink menus. I saw a couple of chalkboard menus and some other ones, but the idea I liked the most was writing the menu on an old window, like this:

So when we were in Missoula we went to a store called Home Resource where people can donate things from their houses when they remodel. It was a very cool store to check out and J.C. got a bunch of ideas for a really cool treehouse. And I found exactly what I was looking for! Check it out:

Now I just have to find someone with awesome handwriting!

 

Tux Shoppin!

So last week we made a surprise visit to Great Falls. Seriously. I woke up Tuesday morning in a mild panic and was like, “We need to figure out the tuxes!” and J.C. said, “Then let’s go to Great Falls!” So we did. I know next to nothing about tuxes, but I did know we liked the looks of this:

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And this:

So we went to Kaufman’s in Great Falls and it was surprisingly easy. I’m pretty sure we were in and out in 30 minutes. We decided to go with a dark gray suit and gray striped tie. The groomsmen will have vests only and J.C. will have a jacket. Here’s some sample pictures of what we decided to go with:

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Pretty snazzy, huh? Oh, and then the shoes. The tuxes come with shoe rental but I really liked the idea of Converse sneakers. But then J.C. informed me that Converse shoes look ridiculous on his big clown feet, so we decided to go with more skater shoes,  maybe something like this:

So we’re all set on the clothes for the guys. Pretty exciting! And for the bonus picture this week, the bar J.C. works at had their Christmas party on Sunday (yes, we know it’s January), and every year they have a white elephant gift exchange. Guess who cleaned up this year?

If you can’t make out the title of the book, it’s called We Don’t Make This Stuff Up. You can check it out here. This is the town I live in people, and it is bonkers. As for the hat, I think it speaks for itself.

Update

Oh, hello there. You may have noticed my extended absence from this blog. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, I’ve recently acquired a new job that takes up A LOT of my free time. Like 56+ hours a week a lot. Secondly, we are in kind of a “waiting period” of time before the wedding. We’ve got a lot of our big stuff done, like booking the venue and vendors, and we have to wait until we get closer to the wedding to get the rest of the stuff done. Which brings me back to my new job. I got hired on as a seasonal employee of the Yellowstone Club back in December; I will be working for them until the end of April. It is the perfect job for me right now, I can make a lot of money in a short amount of time, and get the two months before the wedding off to do all those last minute things that will soon be piling up. I will try to be posting more frequently on this site, now that things have calmed down at work after the holiday rush, my goal is to post something once a week. And that’s about it! What’s that? You want to hear about all the famous people I’ve met at my new job? Well, I’m not one to drop names but let’s just say this couple:

They just might make an appearance at our wedding.*

*That statement cannot be verified. Most likely they don’t remember me at all. But I totally met them, along with Phil Mickelson, Lars Ulrich, Mary Hart, and Elin Nordegren. Boom.

The Bridesmaids Post

Or, the post in which I show you pictures of bridesmaids dresses.

Upon picking my bridesmaids for the wedding I came to two conclusions. One, I don’t have a ton of girlfriends (which is okay, it means I’ll have two of my very best friends up there with me when I get married!). And two, I didn’t want to do the matchy-matchy bridesmaids dresses for my wedding. I figured I would come up with a couple of guidelines and see what kind of dresses they can come up with. Basically I told them any purple dress in a tea length style. I decided on purple for the bridesmaids dresses because I felt like it would be the best choice out of my wedding colors. I thought pink would be too prom-y and orange is…well, I’m not an asshole.

So here are some pictures I recently e-mailed them for inspiration:

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And as much as I don’t like orange for a dress color, I LOVE it as an accent color.

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How cute would orange shoes be with the purple dresses?

In other news, we are headed to Great Falls (again) this weekend to try more BBQ and book our rentals. I also plan to find some (hopefully hilarious) childhood pictures of J.C. to put up at the reception. Also my Chacos recently came in the mail! I have yet to re-size them (it seriously takes me forever) and try them on, but they are so cute! It’s going to be hard to wait until next June to wear them!

Great Falls Trip #3

We went to Great Falls last weekend with our friend Ben (who will also be performing our wedding ceremony). He had a softball tournament there so we rode up with him. I figured we would get to check out the two BBQ joints we were looking at to cater our wedding. We went to Goode’s Q first on Saturday. We went with J.C.’s parents and split 3 different entrees (brisket, pork, and Andouille sausage) and 6 different sides (mac and cheese, BBQ beans, potato salad, coleslaw, hush puppies, and cornbread). Everything was really delicious. I really liked the BBQ beans, cornbread, and the sausage (even though we will probably stick with chicken and brisket for the wedding day).

Our plan was to hit up the other place, Big Mouth BBQ, on Sunday before we left town, but unfortunately they are closed on Sundays. And that is not stated on their website. Boo. So next time we make it up to Great Falls we will make a trip over there to taste test more delicious BBQ and then we can finally decide on our caterer!

In other news, we finished our save the dates! I will talk more about them in my next post once I’ve had a chance to address them and get them ready to send out. But I think they look pretty great, and we were able to do them ourselves in a couple of hours!

I’ll leave you today with a picture that came up on my Facebook news feed the other week. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do for my footwear on my wedding day. My high heel days are over for the most part and I wanted something comfortable to dance in. I wasn’t really finding any dress shoes I really liked, and then I came across this picture:

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This is perfect! For anyone who doesn’t know me, I practically live in my Chacos in the summer. Plus it gives me a great excuse to buy a new pair! 🙂

Hair Inspiration

Earlier I posted about some hairstyles I was considering for the big day. Here’s a refresher:

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Unfortunately I think the wreath look might not work with my new dress. So I am doing what I thought I would never do again and am trying to (gasp!) GROW MY HAIR OUT.

Ugh, I know. Long hair does not look good on me. But the hairstyles I’ve found that would look good with my dress are all pulled back. I figure I can deal with long-ish hair for 10 months. And if I can’t, I will chop it off and be back where I started. No biggie. Right now my hair is just above my shoulders, with the rate my hair grows I figure I can get it long enough to pull back and do something like this:

                  

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Or this:

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Or who knows, maybe I’ll get some extensions and go crazy:

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In other news, we will be heading to Great Falls this weekend to find our caterer. We will be visiting two local BBQ joints (yum!) and I will let you know all about our findings early next week. I’m sure they will be delicious.

Boise Trip

I took a trip to my hometown Boise over the 4th of July. My main goal for the trip was to find my dress, which I did! I also wanted to try a couple of DIY crafts I had been saving on my Pinterest board.

First up were some coffee filter flowers I found that I thought would be great for our rehearsal dinner. We actually tried two different methods. The first one you can find the instructions for here. And here’s how they turned out:

I think they turned out pretty good. We just did white filters to try it out, but you can dye the filters as well.

After we made our first set of paper flowers, I found a second tutorial online. I think it might be a little easier to use, and the flowers look relatively similar.

For our second DIY project, we attempted some hanging flower balls. I had this picture for my inspiration:

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I found some instructions on Pinterest that said an easy way to make them is to buy fake flowers, take the stems off, and hot glue them in the holes of a wiffle ball. Easy peasy, right? Kind of. It was really hard for me to find flowers that would match the color and style of the wedding (I decided on orange and pink flowers for the balls). After hitting up all the craft stores in town, we finally found some at the dollar store. The other problem we ran across was it used a lot more flowers than we had anticipated for. We were able to find more pink flowers, but the store didn’t have more orange flowers. So we will just have to keep an eye out and cross our fingers that we can find some similar in color and style. Here are the pictures from that project:

We didn’t quite finish the flower balls, I need to make (another) trip to Great Falls to measure the ribbon for hanging them from the chairs we are going to use for the ceremony. I am pleased with how they turned out so far. Once you have all the items to make them it was pretty easy, however I did find them on Etsy for (probably) cheaper than it will end up costing us to make them. Just some food for thought for other brides in the same boat!

Great Falls Trip #2

I think I’m just gonna start numbering the trips now, since I have a feeling there will be many, many more to come this year. Right after we flew back from Myrtle Beach we jumped in my car and drove two hours to Great Falls. I had a lot of things I wanted to accomplish during our visit. First up I had meetings with two florists in town. I met with My Viola Floral Studio first, I was very impressed with the florist there. I told her my colors and some of the flowers I liked and she put them together so I could get an idea of what the bouquets would look like (with more flowers, obviously).

It’s exactly the colors I wanted from the picture I found online. She e-mailed me the quote a couple of days later and it was even under the budget I had set for flowers. The other florist wouldn’t set up an actual appointment with me a year out, she said she didn’t like to set them up until 6 months before the wedding and I didn’t really want to wait that long. And judging from the price list they gave me, it looked like they might be more expensive. So we booked My Viola Floral Studio. And I checked one more thing off my list.

Next up was heading out to Ryan Dam to check out the reception hall that we weren’t able to take pictures of the first time we were there. Luckily no one was using it this time and the groundskeepers were able to let us in.

There is a TON of space in the hall. Also I love the benches that go around the inside of the room. The one bad thing is there are no beams on the ceiling for me to hang things from, but I think I should be able to either tape or pin to it.

We also took another trip out to the island to look again at where we want to do the ceremony. I decided on two areas I liked, either in front of a really big beautiful tree:

Or in front of another, smaller tree:

We also happened to find a little friend slithering about:

(My mom would have died had he been there our first trip).

We also checked out the rental shop, bus transportation, and visited Amigo Lounge to book our rehearsal dinner.

And today I’m ending this post on a bonus picture, my Fiancé acting like a goof in his dad’s glasses.

This is the guy I’m marrying, people.