Two Months to Go...

And SO many things to do before I DO!!! In less than 2 months, Ryan and I will finally be getting married (52 days to be exact, but who’s really counting?). :) We’ve been together now for 5 and a half years and have been engaged for 15 months!! And even though it has been so much fun planning this wedding, I’m ready for it to just get here already!! Hurry up July!! I'm dying to wear that dress!!

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, the invitations are out there and have been received by our guests. And now the RSVP cards are slowly trickling in. Very very slowly. In fact, I don’t think we’ve received even one in the last four days. Come on people! I know it’s hard to decide whether you want bison, trout or chicken, but trust me, they’re ALL AMAZING. You can’t go wrong. Pick a meal and send me your card already!! Just kidding!!

Basically, the reason I’m so anxious to get those reply cards back is so I know exactly how many people to expect so I can start on some of my last-minute projects on my to do list. Anyone who knows me well knows that I always have a running "To Do" list (it's genetic, I get it from my dad who is "List Master of the Universe"). My lists are bulleted, prioritized, possibly even alphabetized and even have sub-bullet-point lists of their own. Lately my Wedding To Do list has been growing, instead of shrinking. It seems like every time I got to cross one thing off the list, I end up adding about 4 more things. Right now I have a “To Do” list that’s about 9 pages long!! And a LOT of the stuff cannot be done until we know how many people to expect...hence needing that head count asap!!

The biggest thing on the list is ordering/gathering/making all the items for the welcome bags. The welcome bags have become my new obsession. Since we’re having such a small wedding, we’re planning on completely spoiling the guests that are traveling all the way out to Wyoming to celebrate with us. I’d love to be able to stock them all full of champagne and spa treatments and a steak dinner (ok, maybe not), but that’s not quite realistic on our budget. However, I am trying to come up with some unique ideas of things to include that I feel like the guests would appreciate. Nope…I’m not telling…you’re just going to have to wait until you get to Jackson Hole to find out!!

Also on the To Do list are the following tasks: making favors for the rehearsal dinner, making arrangements for the brunch and happy hour, printing programs/menus/escort cards/etc., making a seating chart, ordering gondola tickets, working out transportation arrangements, finish pomanders, write vows, pick out readings, buy gifts, confirm videographer, make boutonnieres, pick out rings and figure out what to do for a guest book. Wow...have I done ANY thing for this wedding yet?! Anyone want to help??

But with all there still is to do, I’m so excited for each and every thing. I really want to soak in these last few months of being engaged. This has been such an exciting time for us. And even though it hasn’t been an easy process, we’ve made it through it fine so far, which makes me think this whole marriage thing just may work out after all!! Regardless, he's not getting out of it now!! :)

A Garden Party Bridal Shower

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...I have the most amazing friends in the entire world. I really could not be luckier. My bridesmaids have gone above and beyond to help me out in any way they can. They are responsible and attentive and interested in all the little details, no matter how long I've been rambling on and on about wedding crap, because they know how much it matters to me. They want to be involved and part of the process. They make sure that I’m happy with all the decisions they make, but still have a way of keeping everything a surprise for me. I’ve been absolutely blown away by how amazing they’ve been.

Last weekend, three of my bridesmaids, Kasey, Jacquie and Heather threw me a bridal shower for family. And boy did they do an amazing job!! Since we're having a destination/vacation wedding in Wyoming, most of our family members will be unable to attend - so this bridal shower was the perfect way to celebrate the wedding with them. The girls really went above and beyond to make sure it was exactly what I wanted and that everyone was taken care of. They were great!! And we had an amazing turnout - I had aunts, grandparents and cousins that traveled from all over the state to make it. It was so great to see everyone and be able to celebrate with family.

The shower was hosted at the home of a friend of my maid of honor, who owns her own catering business and catered the shower. Bistro 517 - http://www.bistrostlouis.com/ Talk about amazing food!! There was a breakfast/brunch buffet with Praline French Toast, sausage, bacon, cinnamon rolls, croissants, egg casserole, asparagus, fresh fruit, and the most amazing Cheddar Cheese Grits. I've never had grits before and I haven't been able to stop thinking about them for a week!! And the service was incredible...so friendly and nice and I never had an empty glass of champagne!!

Here are some pictures...

One of the gorgeous flower arrangements that Bistro 517 used as centerpieces

My maid of honor, Kasey and me

Mel, Kasey, Jacquie and me

The whole crew

Me and my beautiful bridesmaid Jacquie

Me and my gorgeous bridesmaid Heather

Iris, Julie, me and Jacquie

Ryan's aunt Laura, cousins Allison and Ani, family friend Rita and aunt MaryAnn

Me and bridesmaid Iris

Me with my grandmother and mother

Me with my aunt Jane, stepmom Kelly and MaMa

Aunt Cathy, cousin Jessica, aunt Diane, mom, me and cousin Suzy

PRESENTS!!!

Ryan's family

Suzy, me and Grandma Bert

More beautiful flowers

Pictures of the house

The amazing food!!

Me with Diane, owner of Bistro 517

My two aunts, Diane and Cathy

Melissa and Jacquie

Me, Jane, Kelly, Lindsey and Barb

My unbelievably amazing maid of honor, Kasey

The tote bags I gave the girls as hostess gifts

The amazing favors the guests received.

Jars of home-made vanilla, cookie cutters and a recipe for delicious sugar cookies!

I told you these girls were good!

Lucky Me!

I know it's a kind of preppy, but I've always wanted a monogram. It would be like having a logo of my new initials that I could slap on everything. So what better time for designing a monogram than a wedding! In my new obsession of all things wedding-related, I started noticing wedding monograms more and more. A wedding monogram should ideally represent the couple and perhaps even reflect aspects of the wedding (like color palette, theme or location). I think we have such a unique wedding theme for our Jackson Hole mountain wedding that I was really excited to do something with it.

However, as I mentioned in my post below, I have zero artistic ability - the extent of my skill would be me experimenting with different fonts in Word - not really all that cool. Luckily, there are about a million different websites out there that specialize in creating custom monograms. But where to even start? As most of you know, this wedding planning process has not been easy for a control-freak like me. Murphy's Law seems to rule and some days it feels like nothing will ever work out. However, in a rare and unexpected twist of fate, the stars aligned and something finally went right. I WON a free custom monogram from Lucky Designs for entering a contest on their blog, LuckyMe (which I stalk because it's so awesome). How cool is that?! Lucky me is right!

Check out the blog here: http://www.eluckyme.com/
Check out the shop here: http://www.eluckydesigns.com/Home.htm

So, I was immediately contacted by Erin at LuckyDesigns about what I had in mind. I sent her all kinds of details about the wedding and a bunch of inspiration boards and pictures that I thought reflected the style of the wedding. Erin was fantastic! Within a few weeks I had 5 amazing monograms to pick from.

It was such a tough choice (I love that moose). But Ryan and I both fell in love with #3, the gorgeous "M" with the fly-fishing flies incorporated into it. We felt it was perfect for us! So, we went with that one and had Erin make a few minor modifications to it. And this is our final monogram!

Amazing! It was such a fun process to work with Erin on designing this. And because I also loved the fancy box around our names, but couldn't decide on whether it was too fancy or not, she gave me the file for both, so I have a choice! We've ordered a ton of notecards with this new monogram on it and expect to use it for years to come. Thank you SO much Erin and Lucky Designs!!

And They're Off...

Well, the invitations are officially in the mail and have been received by our guests. We even got a few responses already! So I guess we're now officially on the hook for going through with this whole marriage thing. :)

When I first started wedding planning, invitations were definitely not high on my priority list. Although I've received some absolutely gorgeous wedding invitations (Alice and Paige, in particular), they didn't seem important enough to me to warrant spending a lot of time or money on. I even considered making them myself on some cardstock from my closet and that would be that. Ha! This was not even close to what happened. Somewhere along the way, everything related to the wedding has turned into a personal reflection of who I am and what my wedding will be like. Is this true for all brides or just me? I don't know. But I didn't want the invitations to look cheap or home-made. I wanted them to be classy and elegant, yet rustic (like the wedding), but creative and unique (like us!). After all, the invitation sets the tone for the wedding and who wants cheap and crappy to be their theme? Not I!

So I started scouring the internet for ideas. I wanted something that would reflect the fact that we were having an outdoor destination wedding in the mountains of Jackson Hole. Our wedding venue (the Lazy Moose) is so gorgeous (very woodsy and Western), so I wanted something that reflected those qualities. Last summer I stumbled upon an invitaiton made of wood...how cool! Oslo Press had the most beautiful and unique invitations I'd ever seen (see picture below). Unfortunately they were SO far out my price range that it made me cringe.

So, the search continued but I didn't give up on the idea of doing our invitation on wood. I was determined to find a way to make it happen and still fit within our budget. Surprisingly, there were a couple of places that had wood invitations. However, either they were super expensive or I just didn't like the designs they offered. Yes, they were usually very nature-oriented (trees, acorns, etc.), but they weren't personal to us and didn't reflect the mountain-aspect we wanted. So I realized that I would probably have to design them myself. Which meant that I needed a reputable place that would print my design on the wood, relatively inexpensively. Enter lazerdesigns.com - BINGO! I ordered a sample of their invite and it was perfect. Exactly what I wanted and within our price range. And I could just send them a PDF of whatever design I wanted and they'd get it printed on wood.

Next step was creating a design. I loved the idea of having a design on the invitations that I could use on many elements throughout the wedding (programs, welcome bag, favors, etc.). However, I am not creative. I have no artistic bones in my entire body, so I needed help...preferably in the form of a graphic designer. Enter a little luck. While I was at Edgewood's In the Vineyard last November, I bid on a $250 gift certificate from JB Creatives, LLC for the design of announcment or invitations. I figured with having a wedding and all the wedding-related parties and 30th birthdays we have this year, I'd have plenty of opportunity to use the gift certificate. So now that I needed a graphic designer, I contacted Jeanette Ballinger of JB Creatives to help me out. I assembled all my "inspirational" pictures of invitations that I liked and ideas that I had. We went through hundreds of designs, but one in particular stuck out...

This was an invitation set featured in Martha Stewart weddings for a couple that was married on a farm. Rumor has it that the bride is a graphic designer for Williams-Sonoma and designed the invitation suite. She used the individual graphics (animals and flair elements) from the heart and incorporated them into other wedding elements. This seemed perfect for us...if only we could change the farm animals to mountain animals. Jeanette and I worked on getting everything perfect on the design and finally sent it off to be printed on wood. I think they turned out so BEAUTIFUL!

How cool are those? I know! So, with the invitations done, the next step was the reply card. I wanted a postcard, mainly to cut down on paper and it didn't hurt that postage was cheaper. On the front of the card, we put the same heart from the invitations, followed by our initials and the wedding date. On the back of the card, other than the basic "are you coming?" question, we also asked people for their entree choices for dinner. Since we're having a "local Jackson Hole fare" for dinner at the reception, we used the trout and the bison as two of the meal options. See, we're using those animals already! Then I ordered custom Moose stamps from Zazzle to complete the look. Unfortunately, since our "return by" date straddled a postage rate increase, we also had to add a 1 cent stamp to make sure they'd make it back to us. The Tiffany lamp isn't quite what I had in mind, but it's not too terrible. Oh well.

While I was doing all this "research" on invitations, I also fell in love with the idea of including a map of the local area with the invite. I thought this was especially important since it is a destination wedding and people aren't familiar with the area. Plus the whole idea that Jackson Hole is a couple different towns (including Jackson and Teton Village and Wilson) was a little confusing to me at first, so I thought it'd help clarify things. There were a couple pictures that I found that I really liked. At first I considered making the map myself on the computer and adding some cute graphics (see first picture below). Turned out to be rather hard to do. Then I found some awesome maps by Laura Hooper, that were personalized and hand-drawn (see second picture below). They were just SO cute I knew I had to do something similar.

However, I knew that I couldn't draw this myself (and I didn't really want to spend the money asking Laura to do it), so I came up with the PERFECT solution. Who better to ask than my amazingly talented stepmom Kelly! She's a wonderful artist and finally said yes after me begging her to give it a try. It took her less than a week before I got this in an email...wow!!! I was shocked. It was better than I even imagined it would be. Didn't she do an incredible job?! I'm so impressed with this map - it incorporates all our important wedding places and uses so many adorable symbols (we love that fly fishing rod). I'm just in love with it!

And on the back of the map, we also printed driving directions to the ceremony/reception location.

So, that's it! The whole wedding invitation suite. We added a very cool Mt. McKinley stamp to give them a mountain-top feel. I'm so pleased with the way they turned out! Hopefully you've received yours and can make it to the wedding!! See you in Jackson Hole!!

Bridal Shower

My incredibly wonderful and generous friend Brooke threw me a bridal shower at the beginning of April. I can't even begin to express how much fun it was! Brooke is a recent newlywed herself and has been so supportive and encouraging through the whole wedding planning process. I super-mega-heart this girl! She's not only a wealth of information and ideas, but she has the most impeccable taste, so I love getting her opinion on everything! She's helped with invitations, ettiquette questions, and she even went with me to try on my dress back in December when it finally arrived. Everything she's done has really meant a lot to me...and this shower was icing on the cake.

This was my very first bridal shower and I was so nervous I could barely sleep the night before. I've been to a million bridal showers, but I've never actually be the one to receive the gifts and open them in front of everyone. I was so nervous that I'd get something I didn't like and not be able to pretend very well that I liked it and hurt someone's feelings. Silly me...I guess I temporarily forgot that my friends have AMAZING taste and I LOVED everything! We had a great turnout - it was so good to see everyone. And the food and drinks were fantastic (you can tell I was loving the mimosas in the pictures below!). Thanks again Brooke for doing this for me! You're the best!

Me & Brooke

Alice, Amanda & Me

My bridesmaids Heather, Kasey Jacquie and Me

Me & Michelle

Me & Amanda

Jacquie & Me x 2

Me & Paige

My beautiful bridesmaids

Me, so excited about seafood forks I could barely contain myself