We're still waiting on RSVPs.....but hopefully people will get to us soon so we can invite more if we're able!!! Although that will also mean making more invitations which doesn't sound like fun :/
Anyway, I'm also waiting on emails from like five people right now about wedding-related things. Hair and makeup, photography, etc. So much just waiting for answers when planning a wedding! But we're getting there! We got the vests and ties for the guys. We got some burlap table runners from a friend of Kevin's who used them at their wedding! We are getting blue mason jars from a family member to use as centerpieces. I got the table cloths a while back. I need to order napkins still. We are going to do little plants for the favors (still need to order little flower pots). I think I found some shoes. We are working on rehearsal dinner plans. We booked manicures and pedicures (yay Sharing Spree and sites like that for good deals!). We have an amazing couple who has volunteered to help get the food ready on the day of and tons of amazing family members who are making delicious goodies for us to serve. Which brings us to the current issue.
I have been going back and forth for the past few weeks on whether to do the meat ourselves or buying the pulled pork from the food cart guy across the street from my work. He makes amazing smoked meats and offered to give me suuuuch a good deal (Go visit him! He's on SW 4th between Clay and Columbia downtown Portland. Get the pulled pork tray with Asian sauce over rice. YUM.). Any catering places I checked charge between $11 and $15 per pound for pulled pork. Well we are serving 200 people (about 1/2 pound per person is the normal serving amount), which would equal about 125 pounds of pork (figuring in some extra)! That's between $1300 and $1800 just for the meat! He was going to charge me a fraction of that, but still about $600-700 more than it would cost to do the meat ourselves....So. We're back to the plan of making it. Really, storage space is the biggest issue. All we have to do is stick it in a crock pot and let it cook. So it will take time and space more than anything, not much actual preparation work. And we can do it in batches, so I think it will be fine.
But then we come to other foods. We want to have pasta salad, potato salad, green salad and cole slaw along with the main dish. I know about 1/2 pound per person of meat is what we should prepare, and that is easy enough to figure out. But how much salad?! 1/2 cup per person is the normal serving size for salad. And one gallon has 16 cups, so one gallon of salad is about 32 servings. Again allowing for extra, we'd want about 8 gallons of salad. But we don't want 8 gallons of EACH salad. I've been trying to figure out how much of each salad we should have. And would 8 gallons really be enough total? We don't want to run out of food! 2 gallons of each salad doesn't quite seem right. What if one salad is way more popular than another? So what I'm thinking is that we will shoot for 3 gallons of each salad. Which would be 96 full-sized servings, but people take less when there are more salads to choose from. So. That's what we're shooting for. I'll post afterward how that worked out since apparently no one on the whole internet has information like that!
So now to arrange all the food-makers and helpers. And get serving platters and figure out how and where to store all the food. Wish me luck! And any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Some websites that have been helpful in giving ideas for quantities:
Ellen's Kitchen
Great Party Recipes
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Invitations and other updates
Oh my goodness. Where has the time gone? I'm done with school, how am I busier now than when I had 12 credits of classes?!?! According to my Knot.com profile, there are 44 days to go to the wedding. WHAT?! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!?!
Just kidding. Mostly. We really have a lot taken care of! Okay, so what has happened since I finished school and last blogged. Has it really only been one month? Wowza. Here's a quick rundown of the past month: Ben surprised me with some amazing graduation parties, we helped my parents get some stuff done to get their house ready to sell (Sad. But exciting for them! Go here to check it out and buy it!), we put the invitations together and sent them out, we found an apartment and Ben moved into it (I will move in after we get married in 44 days!), we booked our honeymoon plane tickets, the honeymoon plane tickets went down by $150 each (lesson learned: after booking tickets, RESIST THE URGE to check the prices), we started our premarital counseling, I have been applying for all kinds of jobs, I moved in with Kevin and Helen (yay roomies! Although I am not here very often!), and we have gotten a lot of wedding stuff figured out.
1 of 2 surprise graduation parties planned by my amazing fiance! Some of our amazing
house church friends met us at Benihana for a surprise dinner for me! Then later that weekend,
surprise party #2 at my parent's place! <3
First let's talk about the invitations! My roommate (former! sad!) Megan did an amaaazing job on them and designed some beautiful pieces for us! After finally finding the right paper and envelopes, and changing our minds about a million different things a billion different times (sorry, Megs!), we finally got stuff printed. I don't even know how that happened, she had to like change the alignment and rotation and blahdy blah designy things, but she got everything printed.
Then we went to this place in Beaverton where we got them all cut. For $15. Seriously. We could have literally spent HOURS cutting each invitation from the page. They did it in 5 minutes. (Of course, Megan had printed crop marks on the papers which made it possible for them to cut in the right places!). Highly recommend doing that if you DIY your invites. Save yourself the time, stress and lost appendages and just get it cut somewhere! They just charged us the shop minimum since there were so few papers (compared to the normal quantities they deal with).
So after gettting them cut, we spent an evening putting them together. Ben and I had a pretty good assembly line going and we really got things done pretty quickly. We had gone back and forth on using an RSVP card, but finally decided on having one. We went with a Mad Libs style RSVP, which has been so fun! We found some samples online (yay Pinerest!) and combined them to create the wording we wanted. We did it postcard-style and the front of the card had the actual mad libs with a place for the guests to fill in their name (more on that later). The back had our address and a place for the number of guests. Since we have limited space, we filled in how many seats we had reserved for them, then allowed a place for them to fill out how many would actually be attending. We didn't want people bringing their cousins and brother's girlfriends, or things would get quickly out of hand. So we had to be kind of specific. Now, here's the issue we had with the Mad Libs portion. I was afraid people were going to send the cards back without actually filling out the Mad Libs and wouldn't fill in their names, so we wouldn't know who was coming or not. After going back and forth, I decided to fill in the names ahead of time on most of them. On those who we allowed to bring a "guest," I just wrote a number that corresponded to their name on my Excel spreadsheet instead of filling out the name so I would still know who it was. I am pretty proud of myself for this, because we have received some without names, but I still knew who it was.
We still hate that we weren't able to invite EVERYONE that we wanted. Although not many people have RSVPd yet, so maybe we'll get to invite more after all... (If you are reading this and received an invite but haven't yet RSVP'd, please do so!). Anyway, now we are awaiting the responses and working out all the other details! More to come on that later!
Here is a list of resources we used for the invites:
- Paperworks.com for paper bag-colored paper and matching envelopes. Cheaper than anywhere else and really great quality paper! We paid a little under $50 for 100 sheets of cover-weight paper and 150 matching size 10 envelopes, with shipping included.
- We also got some paper from Michael's (less than $4 for 100 sheets of paper bag-colored cover-weight paper, but the color wasn't quite right, so we used that for the RSVP cards) and from Paper Source ($5ish for 10 sheets of paper....which was too light anyway besides costing way too much, so we used that for the little registry tag).
- Amazon.com for the lace ribbon and twine we used to tie everything together (that link will take you to the specific ribbon). The ribbon was really pretty and good quality. Not quite as soft as I imagined, but it still looked beautiful and wasn't too bulky in the envelope. I also ordered a small hole punch from Amazon since the twine we used was really thin, it would have looked weird with a normal-sized hole.
- The US Post Office, clearly. The invites themselves didn't weigh too much, so by weight we could have used just one normal $.45 (or whatever postage is...) stamp. But because the ribbon we tied made it a tiny bit bulky, they had to hand-process them which cost an extra $.20 per invite. So glad Megan suggested we go in to check about postage before buying stamps/mailing them, we would have gotten a lot of things returned....! We also bought postcard stamps for the RSVP cards (again-going to the post office to make sure our postcards were an appropriate size to not have issues when mailing!).
All in all, we didn't need that much material and the time it took to put them together was really low! Megan spent more time designing them than we did putting them together I think! We spent a total of
about $225 on the invitations, including all materials and postage. We made about 120-ish inviations, but have the materials to make more. We actually have a ton of paper left, which will be convenient for programs!
Just kidding. Mostly. We really have a lot taken care of! Okay, so what has happened since I finished school and last blogged. Has it really only been one month? Wowza. Here's a quick rundown of the past month: Ben surprised me with some amazing graduation parties, we helped my parents get some stuff done to get their house ready to sell (Sad. But exciting for them! Go here to check it out and buy it!), we put the invitations together and sent them out, we found an apartment and Ben moved into it (I will move in after we get married in 44 days!), we booked our honeymoon plane tickets, the honeymoon plane tickets went down by $150 each (lesson learned: after booking tickets, RESIST THE URGE to check the prices), we started our premarital counseling, I have been applying for all kinds of jobs, I moved in with Kevin and Helen (yay roomies! Although I am not here very often!), and we have gotten a lot of wedding stuff figured out.
house church friends met us at Benihana for a surprise dinner for me! Then later that weekend,
surprise party #2 at my parent's place! <3
First let's talk about the invitations! My roommate (former! sad!) Megan did an amaaazing job on them and designed some beautiful pieces for us! After finally finding the right paper and envelopes, and changing our minds about a million different things a billion different times (sorry, Megs!), we finally got stuff printed. I don't even know how that happened, she had to like change the alignment and rotation and blahdy blah designy things, but she got everything printed.
Then we went to this place in Beaverton where we got them all cut. For $15. Seriously. We could have literally spent HOURS cutting each invitation from the page. They did it in 5 minutes. (Of course, Megan had printed crop marks on the papers which made it possible for them to cut in the right places!). Highly recommend doing that if you DIY your invites. Save yourself the time, stress and lost appendages and just get it cut somewhere! They just charged us the shop minimum since there were so few papers (compared to the normal quantities they deal with).
So after gettting them cut, we spent an evening putting them together. Ben and I had a pretty good assembly line going and we really got things done pretty quickly. We had gone back and forth on using an RSVP card, but finally decided on having one. We went with a Mad Libs style RSVP, which has been so fun! We found some samples online (yay Pinerest!) and combined them to create the wording we wanted. We did it postcard-style and the front of the card had the actual mad libs with a place for the guests to fill in their name (more on that later). The back had our address and a place for the number of guests. Since we have limited space, we filled in how many seats we had reserved for them, then allowed a place for them to fill out how many would actually be attending. We didn't want people bringing their cousins and brother's girlfriends, or things would get quickly out of hand. So we had to be kind of specific. Now, here's the issue we had with the Mad Libs portion. I was afraid people were going to send the cards back without actually filling out the Mad Libs and wouldn't fill in their names, so we wouldn't know who was coming or not. After going back and forth, I decided to fill in the names ahead of time on most of them. On those who we allowed to bring a "guest," I just wrote a number that corresponded to their name on my Excel spreadsheet instead of filling out the name so I would still know who it was. I am pretty proud of myself for this, because we have received some without names, but I still knew who it was.
We still hate that we weren't able to invite EVERYONE that we wanted. Although not many people have RSVPd yet, so maybe we'll get to invite more after all... (If you are reading this and received an invite but haven't yet RSVP'd, please do so!). Anyway, now we are awaiting the responses and working out all the other details! More to come on that later!
Here is a list of resources we used for the invites:
- Paperworks.com for paper bag-colored paper and matching envelopes. Cheaper than anywhere else and really great quality paper! We paid a little under $50 for 100 sheets of cover-weight paper and 150 matching size 10 envelopes, with shipping included.
- We also got some paper from Michael's (less than $4 for 100 sheets of paper bag-colored cover-weight paper, but the color wasn't quite right, so we used that for the RSVP cards) and from Paper Source ($5ish for 10 sheets of paper....which was too light anyway besides costing way too much, so we used that for the little registry tag).
- Amazon.com for the lace ribbon and twine we used to tie everything together (that link will take you to the specific ribbon). The ribbon was really pretty and good quality. Not quite as soft as I imagined, but it still looked beautiful and wasn't too bulky in the envelope. I also ordered a small hole punch from Amazon since the twine we used was really thin, it would have looked weird with a normal-sized hole.
- The US Post Office, clearly. The invites themselves didn't weigh too much, so by weight we could have used just one normal $.45 (or whatever postage is...) stamp. But because the ribbon we tied made it a tiny bit bulky, they had to hand-process them which cost an extra $.20 per invite. So glad Megan suggested we go in to check about postage before buying stamps/mailing them, we would have gotten a lot of things returned....! We also bought postcard stamps for the RSVP cards (again-going to the post office to make sure our postcards were an appropriate size to not have issues when mailing!).
All in all, we didn't need that much material and the time it took to put them together was really low! Megan spent more time designing them than we did putting them together I think! We spent a total of
about $225 on the invitations, including all materials and postage. We made about 120-ish inviations, but have the materials to make more. We actually have a ton of paper left, which will be convenient for programs!
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