I realize that I wrote a lot about our wedding right after it happened and then I stopped. I’ll say it was wedding overload. Peter and I just wanted to get through a few weeks without hearing the word wedding. It never happened. I have a theory that once weddings are on your brain, you develop a strange ability to pick up the word when you otherwise would’ve tuned it out. Ex., I’m writing this at a coffee shop and a country song just came on over the speakers. I picked out the phrase “wedding dress” and couldn’t make out a single other word. Has this happened to any of you? I just heard a guy across the room say something about picking up a tuxedo. It’s a sickness, really.
Anyway, what actually happen is that we distanced ourselves a bit from the wedding industry and then our friends Caroline and Nick got engaged. This exciting news breathed a new life into the topics of weddings for me and I’m finally ready to slowly start going through the details of our day. Now, wasn’t that an unnecessarily long way of saying that I’m going to tell you about wedding details? Yes, yes it was.
Our caterer insisted that we print menus and put them on our tables. It became quite clear that her ideal client would’ve adorned each place setting with hand calligraphied, letterpress menus. It was quite annoying. In looking for a way to keep our tablescape relatively simple and inexpensive, we decided to print our menus on empty wine bottles. Peter and I like wine quite a bit (it’s usually the only alcohol I ever drink), so it felt like the wine bottle menus served to make our wedding that much more personal. Plus, the green wine bottles were really pretty in the sunlight.
Once we managed to find an appropriate sized label, the project was easy. We bought the 4.25 x 5.5 inch white labels from Onlinelabels.com . We bought huge labels because we were serving a lot of food!! We ended up with a family style meal where everyone got a little bit of everything. Guests ate salad, several sides, bread, and three entrees. In hindsight it was a lot more food than we ever needed!
I really loved these. If you look closely, you can even see that we credited Caroline for making our wedding cake. We still have several sheets of these labels left, so maybe it’s something that Peter and I will do again for a larger dinner party or Thanksgiving. Have you seen any fun menu ideas? I’d love to see them for future dinner party brainstorming! 
Oh, and now that I’ve warned you about wedding posts, expect to see them more frequently. I promise that I won’t write about them too often.
Photo credit Mary Sledd.
Calligraphy doesn’t exactly fit into our wedding budget, but as the idea of addressing invitations and thank you notes becomes closer and closer to reality, I’ve started looking into buying a custom calligraphy stamp. It all started with a slight obsession with these custom stamps. I would think about how exciting it would be when Peter and I bought a house and how fun it would be to get a custom stamp.
Then a few days ago I came across a stamp by an Etsy seller called Emililies on the Martha Stewart website.
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Then I got nervous and started worrying that the stamp wouldn’t arrive in time for us to send out our invitations, so I started looking for other sellers.
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Now I’m stuck wondering when anyone will get back to me and trying to figure out which one I like best. Which one would you choose? If you want to complicate the decision, go to their websites and look at all the other styles. Excuse me while I go check my mail–again.
Around Valentine’s Day I fell in love with these hearts from the Etsy seller Sarah and Bendrix, but I couldn’t bare to pay the $76 (item plus shipping cost to the United States) that she was asking.
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So, I went to the craft store and bought a heart shaped paper punch and some thick red, gray, and cream card stock.
Luckily, just about everything I bought was on sale. Don’t you just love that about craft stores?!
When I came home I started punching little red hearts. My heart punch is different than the one used by Sarah and Bendrix. Mine has a more defined point, but I like that about it. I also love that it lets you see what you’re punching before you do it.
Fold several of the hearts in half, positioning them in straight lines on the paper. Leave space for one (or more) different colored hearts and a few that have not been folded.
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I spaced the hearts further apart then they were in the original piece, but this choice is just personal preference. I carefully glued the hearts into place, making sure that the lines seemed organized. In my opinion the concept is interesting because it is a balance of order (the rows of hearts) and disorder (the apparently random nature of the folds). If both aspects were disorganized, then it would probably look like a giant mess.
Here’s the end result leaning against a wall:
We assembled ours using Yes Paste and an IKEA 9×9 Ribba (Shadow Bow). The total expense was less than $20 and now that we own a heart punch I could make a second one for the price of the frame plus an extra $0.50 for the card stock. For the next one I may try putting the hearts closer together and using a larger frame that would allow a border the size a a photo mat. Thoughts?
Meg over at House Notes is currently having an Anthropologie Inspired Craft Off. I didn’t manage to participate on this round, but head over to her blog to see some pretty amazing stuff.
