Planning our wedding! (Part 7)

Man! I was on such a roll with the sharing of wedding posts! Well, seems like this week is a good week for another – we’re just about to celebrate our 1 year anniversary – woo hoo!!

This last (probably) post is mostly an assorted mishmash of the other cool details that I haven’t had a chance to mention yet. Like my accessories! I knew pretty much straight away that I wanted a shrug/capelet from Holly Stalder – and happily for me, she is based out of Portland! I don’t remember when I came across this image, but whoa! I was in love!

Planning our wedding! (Part 6)

Welcome to Post 6! I believe this will be the final post about decorations =)

Obviously no paper decorated wedding would be complete without tissue paper poufs! We ended up buying some pre-cut ones from Michaels (that were on sale) plus also sheets of tissue paper in colors that we wanted that we DIY’ed (and by “we” I mean everyone but me! My strengths do not lie in pouf making! Fortunately Justine took charge there).

We weren’t exactly sure where we were going to put the poufs – we just knew they were too fun to leave out! Similarly, I totally fell in love with large, round balloons! There are 17″ and 36″ giant balloons… look how cool these look!

 

Click for more awesome images!

 

Planning our wedding! (Part 5)

So decorations…. we had our amazing centerpieces, the beautiful giant string-heart, the photobooth. But what we actually spent the majority of our time on was the paper decorations for the backdrops.

Apparently I haven’t met a paper-shapes-on-garland I haven’t fallen in love with! LoL!

Planning our wedding (Part 4)

It is pretty fun re-living our (ridiculous?) plans for our centerpieces! I’m so so so happy with how they turned out! Although we did recently caution a friend who is also getting married in Portland (she lives in STL) – that it was a lot of extra work to organize and get the wheat grass going =)

So, other decor-related items…. Well, pretty early on I got excited about having a photo booth at our wedding. And then I told Justine, who was off-the-hook excited about it! =) So then it was just a matter of making it happen. There are a few different companies that have photo booth things that they set up, more or less elaborate depending on the company. The cost wasn’t unexpected, but considering it was considerably less required than say a venue, food, drinks, outfits, travel… well, it felt a bit hard justifying the expense.

Fortunately the internet was there to help =) We ultimately decided to get a small, local network, photo printer + buy the ‘Event’ level app from Simple Booth for Noah’s iPad mini (plus we also got a tripod for holding the iPad). Then it was just a matter of creating a backdrop and getting props!

I came across this great tutorial for giant crepe paper fringed garlands from Oh Happy Day:

Planning our wedding! (Part 3)

I think it was the decorating that I was most excited about! So many wonderful ideas out there! And Noah was on board with us DIY’ing the various elements. There was four major areas for decorating:

1. The backdrops that would be at the front of the ceremony (two of which we’d have our ceremony in front of, one that would be behind the cupcake display, and one that would serve as the backdrop for our family photos)
2. The center pieces for the tables during dinner
3. A photo booth
4. Everything else =)

THE CENTERPIECES

We had this idea about incorporating some sort of plant into our center pieces. We knew we were into getting cut flowers for them and we are plant scientists, so it made sense to us to have plants! Since our color scheme was ‘ALL THE COLORS’ =) we thought it’d be fun to have some colorful grasses… thinking back now I’m not sure how we ended up on colorful grasses, but *shrug*. We found an Etsy seller, Caribbean Garden, that sold seed for all sorts of great colorful grasses.

Planning our wedding! (Part 2)

 

Obviously another important aspect (after the dress & the suit) is where is the wedding going to happen? We knew that we wanted a downtown Portland location. Something kind of different, but still functional for a dinner and/or reception. Also, we liked the idea of having all the festivities in a single location – save people from having to drive around and find parking.

THE VENUE

We found a number of places that looked like they might work – some downtown, some a bit further out: Urban Studio, The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel, Gerding Theatre at the Armory, and Union Pine. We contacted them and initially only one spot was available the Saturday we wanted – which was a bit of a surprise! A Saturday in November? Really? We were just about to pull the trigger on The Cleaners – super cute space, great location, very friendly contact person – we were just a bit worried that their space was good up to ~50 for  a seated ceremony and we were planning on inviting ~70-80 people.

But then Urban Studio got back to us and said that the event they had booked had cancelled if we were still interested. Turned out that was a better fit for us – more space, still downtown, friendly folks, good reviews on the catering. Plus there were lots of nice photos of the place done up for weddings =)

CATERING

The in-house catering is Pearl Catering. The reviews for them were so good – we were really excited! We booked the venue in July and then when we were in town in August we scheduled a tasting to choose what we wanted served. It was really at this point that we started to realize the shear number of decisions you have to make when putting together something like this! The options for our dinner seemed endless! Did we want hors d’oeuvres? Warm ones? Cold ones? Served or just set out? And that was just for the appetizers! Ah!! Plus everything on the menus they gave us to choose from sounded ~ah-mazing~! So many hard choices!! =)

Planning our wedding! (Part 1)

Now that it’s months later, I find that I’m all nostalgic about our wedding and really want to remember all the fun details that went into our awesome day!

Almost straight away the question most asked was “what’s your color scheme?” LoL!! As I was browsing the internet I realized that the common theme to the things that I (and thus Noah :D) loved best were colorful things! So, in no particular order, here’s the things that went into making our wedding a reality!

THE INVITATIONS

OMG – so many amazing wedding invitation designs out there!! Unfortunately(?) since we only had 4 months between when we got engaged and got married, by the time the invites would be printed and sent to us, and then we send them on to our guests, it’d be too late (particularly folks up in Canada!). So we decided to print our own! I spent a couple of evenings working on them in Illustrator and sent them off to Zazzle. It was kind of a lot of work – especially getting the sizes of everything ~just so~. We got our order pretty quickly, but the invite bands we’d ordered were not good (off-center; the sticky part on the back was in the wrong spot). So we had to get those re-printed and re-shipped.

Once we got everything, it was actually pretty awesome to see it all together! We went with not just colorful but also pattern-ful!! (with the subliminal message of ‘YES’ front and center! hee hee!)

It was extremely exciting when we started getting our RSVP cards back (sent the invites with a pre-stamped, pre-addressed envelope – the smallest size allowable by USPS for the RSVP cards :D)

Pop of Pink

I guess I have colorful things on my mind 🙂 Here’s a few things that have caught my eye lately.. Apparently my eye is especially drawn to pink things!

1. First up, is a photo from Amy Azzarito’s apartment, she’s the editor over at Design*Sponge (a great site for design ideas). I love the pop of pink of this coffee table, especially against the grey sofa. Ya know, WE have a grey sofa…. 😉

http://www.designsponge.com/2013/04/behind-the-scenes-amys-home.html

Colorful!

Phew! It’s been a busy month!! There’s another post I’m writing about all the super cool people that I got to meet & see. Plus we moved – which always ends up taking longer then you think! But we’re getting settled in (including unpacking & setting up the computer where I store all my photos!) First up though I thought I’d share the things I made for my dad’s birthday last month. I kind of went a little crazy with the colors 🙂

I really wanted to crochet something 3-D-like (since I had so much fun with the 3-D hearts) – and after some googling I came across this super awesome crocheted rainbow cake.

I’m so stoked with how mine turned out! Look! It’s a crocheted rainbow cake!