Our wedding in pictures

We got our wedding photos back! So exciting, here is a glimpse of our big day!

Our first look! There were a few hops left for us to take photos in :) 

The amazing wedding party! <3 

Me and the boys! 

and Ben and the boys! 

My fam <3 

Best. Flower girl. Ever. 

My grandma putting my "something old" on my finger! 

Ben's family! 

Ben and his brothers 

Me and my lovely ladies 

The ceremony site. 

Coloring books for the kids 

Programs (designed by the one and only Megan Devencenzi) 

Our guest book "tree" 

Uninvited but entertaining guests. 

Melts my heart! She just ran right to him! <3

My poppa singing "I loved her first."

The reception tables 

Lunch! Courtesy of so many wonderful helpers! 

Pinky promise! 

I made the cake topper myself for less than $2! (Although I borrowed
the idea from an etsy shop!)

Bubbles!

Mario and Princess Peach, my husband's idea! :) 

And our photographer's take on our wedding is here!

Wedding projects

We made a lot of things ourselves for the wedding. And got a lot of ideas from Pinterest! Here are some of the things we DIYed.

Invitations! By saying "we" made them, I mean that my friend Megan designed them and figured out all the logistics and then Ben and I just put them together. She did pretty much all the work!

Mini pies! Again, by saying "we" made them, I mean my mom did. She made them all. I didn't help at all. But they were BEAUTIFUL and DELICIOUS and I wish I had one right now!

Little coloring books for the little kiddos in attendance at the wedding. I got the file through Pinterest from Lovely Indeed.

Gifts for the groomsmen and a few other people! This idea we got from Etsy. We were about to order some of these, but then I realized we could just make them for way less. It took us a few tries before we figured it out, but it's super easy if you have the right stencils! We got all the materials from Michael's for about $40 and then got beer steins from the dollar store. They turned out pretty great!

I also made some bags for the girls. Another Pinterest idea :) Pretty easy to make and they turned out really pretty. If I had more time, I would have made the letters look way nicer :/ Here is the link to the website!

Flowers! My sister put the bouquets and centerpieces together after we picked the right colored Dahlias out from Frey's Dahlia Farm in Turner, OR. It was fun to go out and see what colors we wanted, and they were soooo beautiful. She had them all cut and ready for us on Friday morning when we picked them up, then my sissy spent a good couple hours making them look amazing. 

Last but not least, we also made the favors. Mom had a billion little succulents growing in her garden, so we just picked them and put them in some peat pellet pots and then wrapped them in sandwich baggies and burlap. They looked so cute!

 Jesse made us some amaaazing signs that we stuck next to the road to show people where to go. They were so beautiful! I kind of want to just hang them up in our apartment!

Source: weddingbee.com via Amy on Pinterest

We made other signs too, one similar to this one, using chalkboard paint and a "chalk" marker that I got at Michael's. I used that and "chalkboard" placecards for the buffet table so everyone would know what was being served!



That is all I can think of for now that we made. Lots of projects, but they were all so much fun and I'm glad we were able to make the wedding so personal :)

We're married?

We've been married for 18 days! I live in a new place, have a new job, and even have a new name now. I don't even know who I am anymore! ;) But I love it! We had the most amazing wedding ever. Seriously. We had SO MUCH FUN. I hope everyone else did too! The food was amazing, ceremony was memorable (turkeys, anyone?), music was great, and everyone who was there was so near and dear to us!

Then we ran off to the airport and spent a wooonderful week in St. Thomas. Hurricane season, schmuricane season! The weather was PERFECT. In the 80's, and would have felt MUCH hotter had it not been a little cloudy every day. We got to do some snorkeling, swimming, movie-watching-on-the-beach, shopping and lounging around. Then we got back, Ben went back to work and I started my new job at Witch Hazel Elementary. I adore the students, love my hours (although our bank account might not!), and am really excited to really help these kids learn to read better!

Back to the wedding! We attempted to do a lot on a little budget. We started out with $5500. I wanted good food, pretty decorations and a fun time. With a lot of guests. I wondered at times if it was possible. I considered running away to Vegas at times. Or just to the courthouse, screw weddings!!!! But we pushed through it and made it to the other side. And I am so glad we did! We could NOT have done it without the help of a billion people. This wedding should have easily cost twice what it did. But we had people cooking, organizing, flower-arranging, deejaying and graphic designing as volunteers. And we had moms buying things for us and making last-minute Costco runs.

The day of, I didn't do a single thing but have a list prepared of what to do, and boxes organized with labels saying where they should go. Then I just made myself pretty (with the help of Jillian Hibbs at Trend Designs in Philomath) and had fun. By the time the ceremony started, everything was beautiful and in its place thanks to our amazing helpers. Pretty much our entire House Church showed up to work their butts off and put things together. I didn't worry about a single thing, and I couldn't have done anything better myself. It was PERFECT.

I cannot thank the people who helped us enough. I literally don't know how to thank them all. I could give them all a million dollars and thank them every day and wash their feet with my hair. But that wouldn't adequately express our appreciation. So I'll just blog about it...

Anyway, for those who are planning a budget wedding, let me tell you that it is possible. But it is a LOT of work. Without a ton of helpers, it's not really possible I don't think! Get some good people surrounding you who will donate time and energy to your big day! Really the only reason we were able to do this for the amount we did was because we paid only a few hundred dollars total for food. We had so many people buying and making food for us that we just didn't have to spend much there. Here is a breakdown of how we spent our money! Our plan was $5500. We ended up spending about $7100, but $1000 of that came from spending extra on photography that we hadn't budgeted for. Worth it. Here is where it all went:

	Final cost	Budgeted
Venue fees	1065	1025
Alcohol	1037	600
Dress	971	1121
Food	264	650
Favors	130	100
Decorations	311	200
Invitations/postage	397	300
Officiant/counseling	140	150
shoes/hair/makeup	261	200
flowers	90	100
Gifts/tips	736	500
Photography	1500	500
Limo	144	0
Other	68	0
TOTAL	7114	5446

So basically, without the extra for photography, we only went $600 over our original budget. Which is pretty amazing if you ask me! Everyone that I talked to who did DIY weddings and who did a wedding on a budget regretted not spending more on a photographer. So we took their advice and booked a good photographer (although she was still way cheaper than anyone else we found!) even though we knew we were going to be spending $1000 more than we budgeted for photography. We loved her, and are so excited to see the pictures and know they are going to be amazing! So we don't feel bad at all about that! The extra $600 really came from extra alcohol and extra gifts for people helping us. While we have plenty of leftover alcohol and could have saved some there, we really wanted to thank those who helped us the best we could, so again were willing to go over budget to do so.

My advice for DIYers?

• Find someone who you really trust, who is totally willing to work their butts of on the day of the wedding to get everything done for you. Get that person a lot of helpers. 
• Ask friends and family to bring your favorite food dishes if you are doing your own catering. 
• Don't be cheap when it comes to photography, that's the one thing that lasts. 
• Invite everyone you want. Trust the statistics that say that only 30% of those invited will show up. We ended up with way fewer guests than we hoped and planned for because we didn't trust that and didn't invite everyone up front. There were a lot more people we wanted to invite, but didn't by the time we realized we'd have more space than we thought based on our RSVPs, it was too late to invite more! We invited 240 to start with, and ended up inviting about 50 more after we received our first round of invited, but had a good 50 more we would have invited if we realized how things were going to end up! I don't have an exact total, but I think we had about 120 guests. And had enough food for 200. Anyone want some pulled pork...? :/
• And get on Pinterst. Seriously. Don't be afraid to try being crafty yourself! You wouldn't believe how many Pinterest ideas we borrowed for our wedding!

And here are some people you should use for your wedding:

• Venue: Rogue Hop Farm-beautiful, big, fun, lots of freedom, budget-friendly, tons of options.
• Photography: Mai Camera Photography-she's really energetic and sweet and takes great pictures, plus is wonderful with kids!
• Wedding DJ: my wonderful friend Sean Williams. Let me know if you need an amazing DJ and I'll hook you up if he's interested!

Now please excuse me while I go change my name with everyone under the sun.

All growed up

2012 has been a crazy year and it's not even over yet! I got engaged in February, graduated from college in June, am getting married in September and right after that starting a job I am super excited about. I'm growing up! So weird. Except these last ten days leading up to the wedding might kill me. How long can a person go without sleep before they go crazy...? Cuz there's certainly no time for sleep these days.

Not that there's really that much left to do. But I still don't know what song I'm walking down the aisle to. I still have chicken to pull and vows to write. I need to find people to delegate things to on the day of. Plus get a bunch of things ready: decorations, favors, cake topper, gifts for helpers, pack for the honeymoon, move the rest of my stuff to Ben's. At least my dress finally came in today. (The wedding is in ten days. It came in TODAY. Awesome.).

Phew. As long as I can just get these last few songs picked out and the chicken finished, I'll feel better. The rest doesn't really matter as much. Especially since Pinterest practically planned the wedding for me. So the next couple days will be filled with list-making and song-listening. Again.

Here's to the last ten days of singlehood! (P.S. my sister-in-law planned an amazing bachelorette party for me. Any bachelorette party I ever am a part of in the future will be going to Darcelle's for a good ole drag show. So. Fun.). Ten CRAZY stressful days, but it will all be so worth it to marry the man of my dreams :)



Also, Ben and I just got Costco cards. Is it weird that that makes me feel more grown-up than any of the other things? ;)

4 week countdown!! And shoes.

So, here's the thing. I don't wear heels. But apparently there is no such thing as a dainty, pretty, sparkly FLAT sandal. I'd take just one of those adjectives at this point if it meant I could get a pair of shoes and cross that off the dang list. I've tried on a million pairs of shoes. Been to every shoe store in Portland and surrounding areas. Shopped online for hours. Ordered three pairs of shoes from Macy's online. And returned them. ALL.

I might just go barefoot.

Another thing I couldn't find? A cute dress for the bridal shower. Which is tomorrow. Obviously I gave up on that. I just wanted a pretty, girly, flowy dress. I found a lot of pretty, girly, SHORT dresses. Ones that would be too short on a normal-sized girl. I found one I loved, but of course H&M didn't have it in my size. And apparently only one of the ten H&Ms in Portland had that specific dress. So I'll be wearing a dress I've had for years. Not quite so exciting, but it's still cute and hey, at least I didn't have to spend money!

Anyway, these things aside, things have been getting done. That's not to say I didn't have a meltdown the other day. Ben got to his apartment and found me lying on his couch crying. He was PROBABLY thinking "Oh boy, what have I gotten myself into? This chick is crazy." But what he DID was just sit next to me and hold onto me and ask what was going on. He probably couldn't understand most of what I was saying through my crying-voice. Which I'm guessing sounds a lot like Dory in Finding Nemo while she is talking to the whale.

Anyway, he was a dear and let me talk and consoled me and made me feel much better. I've got a pretty great guy!

But there's still a lot to do! Megan, mom and I went to Frey's Dahlia farm in Turner today to pick out flowers for the wedding. There were a million colors to choose from and very soggy dirt to walk in, but we picked out some lovely ones! Then I went "shopping" at Megan's house and found a bunch of things we can use for the wedding. Including a warmer thing we can use for the meat so we don't have to rent anything, yay! I have a hair appointment tomorrow morning for trial wedding hair. So that should be fun! We made some trial favors (little potted succulents) today which looked super cute! 

I still have to figure out music and vows. And get all the decorations settled and prepared. And figure out the layout. And make 125 pounds of pulled pork. One crockpot at a time. And figure out boutonnieres and corsages (do you really have to do those...?).

And FIND SOME FRICKIN SHOES!!!

Food!

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

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!