Hair appointments; Picking up flowers; Getting ready; The Gown; Our First Look, Girls & Guys Attire, More Photos, Jitters and Communion, Ceremony Decor; Our DIY Ceremony Programs, Prayers, Readings and Music, Walking Down the Aisle, More Ceremony Shots, The Getaway Car, Reception Table Centerpieces, Wishing Tree & Photo Displays, Photos From Our DIY Photobooth!, Analysis of our iPod Wedding, Our Honeymoon and List of Wedding Vendors}

Hello all! I’m back with a list of the Etsy sellers that we used. I highly recommend all of them, but the sellers that created custom items for us (especially Lovliday, The Lucky Button and Boutique Sophia) were a dream to work with.

Lovliday: Guestbook Tree

Paloma’s Nest: Bouquet Charm, Jewelry Bowls (for Bridesmaids and Moms) – “You Are” version

Oatmeal Lace Design: Bridal Clutch

LeahLeah: Burlap Pew Bows

The Lucky Button: Boutonnieres

Y&E Bridal: Hair fascinator (flower)

BPoetic: Shoe Clips

Nomsa: Earrings (for Bridesmaids)

Whisker Graphics: Yellow and White Baker’s Twine

Whisker Works: Mustache Props – Photobooth

Love to Create Stamps: Return Address Stamp

Galla 15: Yellow Fashion Ring (Bride)

Allegro Art: Silver Swirl Card Holders – for Reception

Vintage Time Machine: Ladies Vintage Hat – Photobooth

Queen London’s Carriage: Men’s Vintage Hat – Photobooth

Maxim Creative Invites: Monogrammed Stickers – for wedding invitations

Earmark: “Just Married” banner for getaway car

A Remark You Made: Eco-friendly wooden placecard holders

QA Create: Baseball cufflinks (Groom)

Boutique Sophia: Custom flower girl dresses (tutu dresses)

South House Boutique: Burlap wine holder bags – for wedding helper gifts

Satin and Birch: Little soaps – shower hostess gifts

Oh Louise Designs: Personalized Stationery – shower hostess gifts

[Photo by Creative Kindling]

Hair appointments; Picking up flowers; Getting ready; The Gown; Our First Look, Girls & Guys Attire, More Photos, Jitters and Communion, Ceremony Decor; Our DIY Ceremony Programs, Prayers, Readings and Music, Walking Down the Aisle and More Ceremony Shots}

For our getaway car, I really wanted to rent or borrow an old classic car to ride away in. Luckily, one of my father’s coworkers restores cars, and he allowed us to borrow his classic Chevrolet free of charge (actually, all he requested as payment was a photo of us with the car, looking overjoyed – how sweet is that!). It was so much fun to ride away in it. My lovely father drove us from the ceremony to the reception; here are a few pictures!

The only downside to the car was that being a classic car, it lacked air conditioning. Since we were married on literally the hottest day of the year, it was quite miserable inside the confines of that car. However, our emotions were running at an all-time high, so we were too overjoyed with the variety of people honking at us in celebration to care much about the heat!

For those of you that are curious, our “Just Married” sign came from Etsy seller Earmark – it was whimsical and perfect!

Up next: the centerpieces at our wedding reception!

[All photos by Creative Kindling, who we couldn't recommend higher!]

Hair appointments; Picking up flowers; Getting ready; The Gown; Our First Look, Girls & Guys Attire, More Photos, and Jitters and Communion}

Before we get into the actual wedding ceremony, I thought it would be fun to show you how we decorated the chapel space! Because the chapel at Augustana is already so, so beautiful, we wanted to keep the decor simple. So, we lined the center aisle with candles in mason jars tied with ribbon…

And after a failed attempt at creating these tissue paper pom-poms to hang on each pew,  I purchased these rustic-looking burlap bows from Etsy! I purchased these from a seller who had used them for her own wedding; how fun! I added some grey and yellow ribbon to these, and I also adorned each bow with a brooch that I purchased at an antique store in Lincoln, Nebraska, before Jordan and I were even engaged!

We also placed seven beeswax candles on the altar to honor our grandparents who have passed away. We used yellow mulberries (from my mother’s collection!) to adorn the silver charger plate.

Also, now would probably be a great time to show you our guestbook, which we placed just outside the sanctuary in an entryway. From Etsy seller Lovliday, we had our guests stamp their thumbprints on this canvas and sign their name nearby. How fun!

Next up: A glimpse into the readings, music and prayers that we used in our ceremony!

[All photos by the outstanding Creative Kindling]

{Click here to catch up on our wedding recaps: Hair appointments, Picking up flowers, Getting ready, The Gown, and Our First Look}

While Jordan and I were having our “First Look” moment and snapping a few pictures, our bridesmaids, groomsmen, ushers and flower girls were getting dressed!

If you can recall, I had one heck of a time selecting a dress for my gal pals to wear on our wedding day. But, looking back, I couldn’t be more pleased with our final dress selection (dresses by Dessy)!

Here’s a picture or two of my beautiful bridesmaids; don’t they look gorgeous!? {NOTE: Preview pictures from the ceremony!!}

The guys (both groomsmen and ushers) looked equally fabulous in tuxes that we rented from Evelyn’s Floral and Formalware in Sioux Falls; I believe that the tuxes were Calvin Klein:

And, who could forget my darling little flower girls! Dresses were made by BoutiqueSophia on Etsy:

And now, the cutest baby picture ever: our niece and flower-girl-in-training, little Miss Harper:

Love that baby!

Up next: a few posed shots of my hubby and I, our wedding party, and our families! Stay tuned…

[All photos by the amazing Creative Kindling]

Just a quick note on this chilly (where I am!) Thursday morning to let you all know that our wedding has been featured! McKay over at Oatmeal Lace Design (the lovely, lovely lady who made my bridal clutch for me!) asked to feature our wedding, and the post is now live! Big thanks to McKay!

Go check it out here! And then, go check out McKay’s Etsy shop!

I promise, more wedding recaps to come very soon…

After a morning full of hair appointments, picking up our bouquets and applying make-up, it was finally time to put on my wedding gown!

As you all know, I haven’t yet revealed the gown that I chose to wear – so, without further delay, here it is! I chose an ivory Alfred Angelo tiered lace gown with an ivory satin bodice and sash :)

The gown has since been discontinued (actually, this gown was discontinued a mere two weeks after we ordered it!) – I love knowing that I am one of the last women to wear this beautiful, vintage-inspired gown.

My Mom helped me get into my gown…

Then it was time for jewelry…

I wore beautiful pearl earrings that Jordan gave me as a gift; a Norwegian brooch that has been in my family for generations; a Norwegian necklace that my grandmother gave to me when I was young; a fun yellow-gold ring that I purchased from Galla15 on Etsy; and a lovely pearl bracelet that my friend and bridesmaid Serena gave me.

And then, it was time for my veil! I purchased my veil at a local bridal shop; it’s by Signature Bridal.

Next up were my (hand-crafted and homemade!) garters and my shoes, featuring shoe clips from BPoetic on Etsy!

And with a few tears from my bridesmaids and my Mom…

…I put the finishing touches on my bouquet (isn’t it beautiful!!)…

…took a few bridal portraits…

…and headed over to the chapel to meet Jordan for our “First Look!”

Coming up next: my favorite part of our day – our “First Look!”

What do you think of my gown? Was it worth the wait?

[All photos by the outstanding Creative Kindling]

Remember those inspiration boards that I created for my bouquet and my girls’ bouquets on Style Me Pretty’s Style Circle? I brought these to Twyla, our florist at The Flower Shop, to use as inspiration for our florals.

Well, I can’t wait to show you how our lovely flowers turned out!

In the top picture, notice the sunflower bouquet on the left; that was my throw-away bouquet! It was wrapped in burlap and was simple but beautiful. The other bouquets in that photo are my girls’ bouquets; they turned out perfectly! Very organic – they look like they were just picked right from a field before the wedding! The bouquet with the succulent is Kristen’s, to make hers a little special, as the maid of honor.

As you can see in the bottom picture, the girls’ bouquets were wrapped in ribbon, and I had Twyla attach a brooch to each of their bouquets (I spent the months before the wedding searching flea markets and antique stores for brooches!)

And now, a peek at my bouquet (more of the full bouquet after I reveal my wedding gown!):

I had Twyla wrap the stem of the bouquet in burlap, to echo the organic, nature-inspired feel of our wedding (as well as the burlap on the reception tables!). I then wrapped a piece of lace around the stem – my great-Grandma Sophie made the lace! As you can see from the bottom picture, I also had Paloma’s Nest on Etsy make me a bouquet charm (my something blue! notice the blue string?). I just LOVED the bouquet charm; it says “i carry your heart with me,” after the e.e. cummings poem we had read during our wedding ceremony. I also attached to the stem of my bouquet a little brooch that Kristen gave me – it was perfect!

In my bouquet, Twyla used sunflowers, succulents, dusty miller, billy balls, lisianthus, spray roses and much, much more. It was literally the bouquet of my dreams – I couldn’t have been more pleased!

A big plus – I had Twyla ensure to utilize as many locally grown blooms for our flowers as possible!

Stay tuned for what’s up next: me and my girls (and Jordan and his guys!) getting ready, plus a full list of make-up products that my sister-in-law used to achieve my bridal look!

[Inspiration boards made by me on Style Me Pretty's Style Circle; all photos by the amazingly talented Creative Kindling]

Dear readers, I don’t even know where to begin with this post, except to say that Jordan and I are SO excited to share our DIY wedding invitations with you today! This post is rather lengthy, but for you budget-brides out there, I wanted to give you an extensive look into what it takes to DIY your own wedding invitation suite.

A note on our inspiration

It was quite a challenge to try and explain to Jordan (or anyone, really) what “vintage” means to me, and how exactly I envision us capturing that feel in our wedding invitations. So, I frequented many a web site, from Etsy to super awesome stationery sites to simple Google searches of random objects (mason jars, for instance).

Jordan and I began the design process with the idea that we would utilize Adobe Photo Shop brushes. Since little touches of birds, nature and aviary motifs will appear throughout our wedding, we felt it was important to include a bird in our wedding invitations. We found a Photo Shop brush of a tree, and we started working with that.

However, with each draft of the invitation, we began to hate the look and the feel of it more and more. It didn’t look elegant, it didn’t look lovely, and it didn’t look vintage. So, much to my chagrin (seriously, I was stressed!), we scrapped that idea and started over, a mere month-and-a-half before we wanted to start the printing process.

However, in re-conceptualizing our DIY wedding invitations, I remembered an art class that I took in middle school, where we carved images into a wood block, and then used that wood block to stamp with ink. (I’m sure this was a Mother’s or Father’s Day project from way back when.)

So, I started to try and tell Jordan about what I envisioned based on this look. Then I saw a few invitations around the web utilizing different fonts and a woodblock/boxed layout, and after brainstorming with Jordan, we downloaded a variety of fonts (which is over-simplifying the process – I was very picky about what fonts I wanted to use, and Jordan just would not let me go with Feel Script, no matter how badly I wanted to shell out the money for it – and he was right in the end…) and we  got to work bringing together all of our inspiration into one invitation suite.

A note on the design process

Jordan and I used Adobe Fireworks to design our invitations. Jordan is very familiar with this program, and I found it to be a rather intuitive program myself after playing with it for 20 minutes or so.

Since Jordan and I are living 45 miles apart right now, we designed our entire invitation suite on the weekends we were able to be together. For us, the process worked like this:

1. Sara tells Jordan in advance, “We need to work on this part of our invitation suite this weekend.”
2. Sara sends Jordan links of what she’s found that she likes (“I like this overall look, but with this wording and this graphic and this font.”)
3. Jordan comes home, sits on the couch and designs away, making sure Sara doesn’t look over his shoulder until the project is near completion (it drove him nuts!).
4. Sara edits, says what she’d like changed, and Jordan makes the changes.
5. When Sara and Jordan are both satisfied with the design, they PDF the file and send it to their right-hand person to print a proof.
6. After final proof approval, the document goes to the printer, and a few days later, the final product arrives at Sara’s house.

Multiply this by 5 pieces (there are 5 items in our invitation suite), and you have approximately 24 weekends (6 months!) of design work that we spent working to complete this invitation suite. It was definitely a labor of love; there’s no other way to describe it.

A note on invitation wording

It was important to Jordan and I that we acknowledge the contributions that our parents have made to our lives and to making our wedding happen, so we included them in our invitation wording. In determining the other parts of the wording for our invitation, we spent quite a bit of time (probably two weeks) changing words and tweaking the look of the invitation.

Here’s what we ended up with:

Sara’s parents and
Jordan’s parents
Invite you to celebrate the wedding of their children
Sara Jo and
Jordan Wayne
(Ceremony Details)
(When/Where)
Dinner, Dancing & Merriment to immediately follow
at the Washington Pavilion

A note on the details

First, I spent about 8 – 10 hours of time gluing little doilies (see above picture) inside both the mailing envelopes and the RSVP envelopes (a la Holly) – what a project (!!), but I’m SO happy with how well they turned out. (Everyone thought I was nuts, but I was having a great time!)

I then stamped our return address on each of these envelopes, proceeded to freak out when the ink I used wouldn’t dry, and then our envelopes were miraculously saved by a can of hairspray. Moving on…(I just can’t talk about those darn envelopes anymore!)

Next, once everything was printed, we glued the invitation matte directly to the pocketfold, and then glued the wedding invitation on top of the matte, to create a layered look (again, see above picture).

I knew that I wanted our invitation suite to have a few components to it. While the majority of our guests are from South Dakota (and are rather localized to Sioux Falls, where the wedding will be held), I still wanted to provide guests with a map to help them navigate their way to each location. Thanks to a wonderful classmate of mine, we had a lovely hand-drawn map to showcase to our guests. We placed the map on its end in the right-side pocket of the pocketfold.

For our RSVP card, we wanted to make sure that our guests knew to expect an offbeat, relaxed wedding from the moment they received their invitation. So, we utilized the following check box system, as seen on A $2000 Wedding:

- Gladly Attend
- Regretfully Decline
- Regretfully Attend
- Enthusiastically Decline
- I’m in the wedding, so I have to come
- Other ____________________________

Since Jordan and I are coordinating the music for the wedding dance ourselves, we also wanted feedback from our guests to see what would get them out on the dance floor. Our “Request a Song” card was so much fun to design, and Jordan even made the record player graphic himself!

These two cards were tied together with the RSVP envelope using baker’s twine, which is a special type of yarn that blends two colors (our’s was yellow and white) together. This little package was then placed in the pocketfold in front of the wedding map.

A note on the construction and presentation of the invite

I owe a lot to the lovely Holly at Nothing But Bonfires for introducing us to a company without which our invitations would have lacked cohesion: Cards & Pockets. We ordered nearly everything for our DIY invites from Cards & Pockets … from the pocketfolds in which each piece of our invitation suite was placed to the envelopes that carried our invitations to their destination, we found Cards & Pockets to be the best value for our money. And the quality of the materials? Couldn’t have asked for a better product or better customer service along the way. [No, this is not a sponsored/paid post; I just love the company!]

A note on printing

Jordan and I feel extremely blessed to have had the help and support of one of my father’s business colleagues throughout the DIY invitation design and printing process. From our first initial idea to our final proof, having a person to walk us through the process, telling us what worked and what didn’t, was absolutely invaluable.

While I understand that what’s right for us might not be right for everyone, I would encourage readers who are looking to DIY their own invitations to get them printed by a professional (but local!) printing company. All we supplied was the paper (we chose a partially recycled natural ivory linen cardstock), and the printers and our right-hand person handled the printing and the cutting gratis (yes, we were extremely lucky).

A note on the materials used

Materials:

From Cards & Pockets:

- Perfetto pocketfolds in “Smoke” (We ordered a sample of one, loved it, and then ordered 90 for our invitations)
- 5.75 inch square invitation mattes in “Lemonade” (Again, we ordered a color swatch, then ordered 90 mattes for our invitations)
- 90 6.5 inch square envelopes in “Lemonade” (to hold the invitation; we scrapped the inner envelope, because I think it’s wasteful and frivolous (no offense))
- 90 RSVP envelopes in “Lemonade” (while we initally thought about designing postcards, I loved these little envelopes, so we went with them)

From Etsy:

- Customized stickers from Maxim Creative Invites on Etsy (we ordered two different designs of stickers, one which we used to close the pocketfold and the other which we used to close the envelope)
- Yellow baker’s twine from Whisker Graphics on Etsy (we used this adorable twine to tie a bow around our RSVP package)
- Return address stamp from Love to Create Stamps on Etsy (we used this stamp as a return address and as the “deliver to” address on our RSVP envelopes)

From around town:

- Partially recycled natural ivory linen cardstock (we printed everything on this stock; we probably utilized 250-300 sheets for invitations for our entire guest list)
- Doilies + glue sticks + glue lines + ink pads from Michael’s craft store
- $0.61 cent wedding cake stamp, plus 2 $0.10 cent clock/nautical stamps, per invite, purchased at our local post office (I really wanted stamps with one of our engagement photos on it, but I couldn’t justify the cost)
- $0.44 cent “Love” stamp for our RSVP cards; we chose the stamp with the King and Queen on it!

A note on final cost

After calculating cost for everything ordered, including postage, it seems that the cost for each invitation suite was $3.74.

Here’s the breakdown:

Pocketfolds: $0.98 per invitation
Invitation Mattes: $0.18 per invitation
Natural Ivory Linen Cardstock: $8.00 per ream, $0.09 per invitation
Mailing Envelopes: $0.17 per invitation
RSVP Envelopes: $0.12 per invitation
Stickers: $0.47 per invitation
Address stamp: $0.08 per invitation (includes RSVP envelope)
Doilies: $0.14 per invitation (includes RSVP envelope)
Glue/Glue Lines/Double-stick Tape: $0.22 per invitation (includes all construction)
Baker’s Twine: $0.04 per invitation
Postage: $0.81 per invitation
Postage: $0.44 per RSVP card

TOTAL: $3.74 per invitation

What do you think of our DIY wedding invitations?

[All photos taken by my soon-to-be father-in-law, Steve!]

I. Want. This. Notebook.

From Etsy seller Your Secret Admiral … you MUST go visit this shop. GO!

Have you ever had to wait for something? (I’m sure you have.) Nail polish to dry? Your doctor to finally enter your exam room at your check-up?

I’ve been doing A LOT of waiting this past month…waiting for one thing in particular. Waiting for ink to dry.

FOR A MONTH.

Here’s the deal: I ordered this super cute rubber stamp with our return address on it, and I used the stamp and ink* to stamp the flap of the envelopes that we’re mailing our wedding invitations in. I did said stamping about one month ago.

Yet this past weekend, THE INK WAS STILL, unbelievably, WET.

My Mom and I tried EVERYTHING from a hair dryer to a heat gun and embossing powder, and nothing was working. I was prepared to order more envelopes and chalk up the $15.00 as wasted funds. (We would have done this a lot sooner, but, well, I had spent about eight hours of my life lining the inside flap of said envelopes…and, well, the prospect of re-lining new envelopes made me want to puke.)

BUT…my Mom had the bright idea to try hair spray to see if that would dry it.

Dear readers … IT WORKED. (Thank you Herbal Essences…sometimes, it pays to purchase cheap hairspray!) The envelopes are FINALLY dry, which means A) my Mom is the hero of the week, B) my brother’s bed (which was previously the drying station for these envelopes) will actually be sleepable when he returns home from college this week, and C) NO MONEY WASTED! Yay, yay, yay.

What unexpected stressors have you encountered while planning your wedding?

*If you’re curious, I used Stampabilities Pigment Ink in silver/grey. DON’T USE THIS. Like EVER.

[Picture from www.yourbestimpression.com/blog]