oh boy

Thanks to UPS, I have emerged from the bathroom or come in the front door to my apartment several times since Saturday and found this exactly:

Yep, he won that battle. Somewhere in the country there is a person at an Amazon shipping facility shaking their head, wondering what on Earth is going on. Vader explained the giant boxes to the UPS guy, who congratulated us and remarked "Huh, guess you can find anything online these days."

After mulling over how to spice up my less-cool-than-swords bridesmaid gifts for some time, I was struck with nerdy inspiration by a conversation with a coworker this afternoon. I know for a fact some of the girls are reading this, or I'd share. Stay tuned for the announcement on July 12th! You know, the night before my wedding. When I'm sure I'll be writing a blog post :)

Like a cold splash of water to the face

You know in movies when somebody chucks a glass of water in somebody's face to wake them up/bring them back to reality? That water to the face this week was our wedding cost in its full glory. 

Way back in February of 2012 when we booked the Portland Club, and hence Black Tie catering, we were given a rough estimate of the cost of food/rentals/space for our wedding reception. The number was high, but  fell in our acceptable price range, and we figured we could wriggle the number lower by changing food options and playing with service options. As we went forward we got ideas for keeping costs low from our event contact, entertained different ideas for food and bar service with cost in mind, and generally progressed with a fuzzy number in the back of our heads for total costs. 

With updated 2013 menus and a tasting under our belts, we designed a few different menus and added up costs and had a pretty specific tally in January of this year. Of course, in the process, we added on appetizer ideas, cupcake flavors, and a ceremony before the reception at the venue. Just a few days ago all of the approximate costs (with a healthy dose of crossed fingers that we were overestimating) were splashed out the window with a nice, cold dose of reality. Our event coordinator pulled together the full proposal with our menu, service, and setup choices and there was no "under budget" part of the proposal. 

The good news: when you add up the total wedding costs and subtract it from our bank account, the number is not negative! The bad news: that number is not huge. We still have a few more months of saving, and this is a push to save more and spend less in anticipation of the wedding. And while we were secretly hoping the wedding would come in under what we were expecting to pay, we made the choices we made for the ultimate celebration with our friends and family and we will have that on July 13th. 

Seemingly minutes after readjusting the working budget for food costs, Vader announced that swords were cheaper than he had seen in months. Perhaps right after getting a final number was not a great time to buy several pricey bits of weaponry, but they are now on their way! More on that next time...

dressing Mom

The wedding planning hiatus is over! Largely due to busy times in other areas of my life, I haven't really done much wedding planning in the last few weeks. 

Until Saturday.

After placing the print order for my invitations, Mom, MOH Moxie and I set out on a Portland adventure hunting for a mother of the bride dress. Mom had an idea of what she wanted in mind, which turned out to be quite difficult to replicate. We tried Macy's, David's Bridal, J.C. Penney, Coldwater Creek, Kohl's, and a particularly crabby shop called Serendipity, all to no avail. Things were too scratchy, too informal, too sparkly, or just plain gross. This may or may not have to do with the fact that all of the stores were pushing their prom gowns heavily, with less focus on "special bridal party members" (yes, that's what some stores call wedding folk who aren't bridesmaids). Since none of us thought Mom should wear a backless, skin tight, sequined cutaway prom dress, we moved on. This was our general opinion of the dresses we had seen so far:

At Burlington Coat Factory we scored the cutest little bow tie for Ringbearer Melmo, who will look positively adorable while he tries to rip it off his neck all day. We then stopped by Michael's on our way home, and I was quite excited to get all the crafty supplies I had written on a list for months. When I got home I realized how underwhelming 3 packs of stickers, a letter stencil set, a giant stamp pad, 4 spools of ribbon, and a #16 decorating tip were - but hey, I was excited! Mostly for a ribbon that actually matched the pink on our invitations!

Once we had exhausted all of our options, we headed home for some online shopping, where Mom promptly learned the potential evil of online shopping. You know when you click "add to bag" on the PERFECT item, only to receive the "no longer in stock" message? We had finally found the perfect dress from Macy's, and it was being discontinued. Mom was crushed when we couldn't find the dress in the right size anywhere online, and further dress searching proved fruitless. Luckily for my mother, her relentless hope for this dress served her well, and she found the dress back in stock a size up the next day! She'll be looking lovely in peach in July, and we're one step closer to having all the important wedding folk outfitted. *Hint hint, bridesmaids and groomsfolk.* 

It was a long day of shopping, but it was nice to spend some time with my Mom and my sister. Can't you tell? 

Paper. (or how to save some wedding $)

I wish I had graphic design skills and/or software.

It turns out there are a lot of documents one needs to throw a wedding: save the date cards, envelopes, invitations, information cards included with invitations, ceremony programs, boatloads of thank you cards, table numbers, escort cards, menus, photo sharing information cards, signs directing folks to the bar, the photobooth, the parking lot, or the restrooms, etc.

Back in the early days of wedding planning I determined that to save money I would make all our our stationary by hand, adding in my stamping and scrapbooking skillz. Ha! After more than a little lusting after beautiful and unique handmade designs from wedding sites and Pinterest, I looked into how much it would cost to put together each item. My dreams of DIY wedding stationary were quickly dashed when I realized that I would spent twice the money and quadruple the time on paper items that would not be able to measure up in quality to professional work.

Dedicated to not shelling out thousands on all-in-one stationary companies, I figured the next best thing to making everything by hand was to have pieces made individually that look nice and then print them en masse via a discount printing service. Enter Vistaprint! There are all kinds of wedding-y folk online that are dying to help other brides save money, and I came across a particularly awesome site written by a former bride (who happened to get married at PL, my childhood summer camp!) describing how to game Vistaprint deal e-mails for wicked cheap wedding stationary. So far I have managed to get photo sharing materials and return address labels for less than $10 total, and there are plans in the works for Thank You cards, ceremony programs, menus, and other signage for purchase with Groupons (another wedding cash-saver) that I am putting together.

Another very helpful resource was finding that more and more Etsy vendors are selling digital files of creative signage for weddings. For a few dollars I can get a well-designed document that I can then upload to Vistaprint and have printed cheaply, leaving me more time for paper-flower folding instead of pretending I understand how open-source graphics software works! If you own the software and understand how it works, look into doing the same thing! Speaking as a design-challenged, short-on-time bride there's some decent money to be made.

So no, you will not be reading our ceremony details the day of the wedding on handmade, individually painted layered programs. But I will still have all my hair (that mass with a mind of its own deserves its own blog post) and we'll even be able to afford to buy you a drink!