Bridal Shower

Better late than never...I guess. Instead of writing a lot of words I will just post some pictures of the shower.

The invite: gocco'd



the spread:



the dessert: delicious!







and the flowers: gorgeous





Thank you Lauren and Wayan for the photos!

Banded Together

My wedding band is finished and I wanted to share it with you all. I absolutely can't wait to wear it everyday.



This is the ring before . It was a ring my parents gave to me as a purity ring when I was a teenager. It wasn't really my style anymore but I wanted to turn in into something I would have forever.



(look at the beautiful packaging it came in, a little wooden box with a glass lid!)

I found Bario Neal a few months ago and decided to have them make my wedding band. They used the four diamonds from my original ring and recycled the gold for me.



They did an absolutely fabulous job and I am so deeply in love with it. It is perfect for me and I am so happy that it is something no one else will have and that the diamonds are so personal to me. Bario Neal uses all recycled metals and ethically mined gems and they donate some of their profit to charity (and are super reasonably priced to begin with).



They even have my ring on their website under custom work right here.

Cordially Invited

I know I haven't blogged in almost 2 months but lets just pretend that never happened. I promise to get back into the routine. New year, new camera, new events.

From the beginning we knew that we wanted to do all of our save the dates and invites ourselves. This turned out to be a lot of stress but totally worth it. The save the dates weren't that difficult but the invitations turned out to be quite the project.

I gocco'd the reply cards first and they were simple and painless and turned out perfect.



Then came the invitations themselves. Now the problem that I ran into was completely my own fault. I made the image just a tad larger than is recommended and realized that the size limit is there for a reason. I had to jimmy-rig my gocco with cardboard siding to allow for a larger surface area to print onto. It was quite the nightmare for a couple hours but it all worked out and we were able to print exactly the number we needed.



I did take the design from another source but I did hand draw it myself. The fonts were free from dafont. All gocco'd in a row!



I would have loved to have all of the addresses hand calligraphed but in the end it is way out of our budget and most people toss em in the trash anyway. So I just went with labels from Paper Source and they made me just as happy.


(more on the Obama's invitation later)

band camp

I know I have been a bad blogger.



I am trying to take care of some little things for the wedding that can be done now and one of those is getting my wedding band made. I found one online and fell in love with it but then remembered that my parents gave me a ring when I was 16 that has four small diamonds in it that I never wear. Bario Neal was featured on Snippet & Ink and I was just enamored with their rings. Once I saw that they do custom work I emailed them right away with a picture of the original ring I loved and they said they could easily make it with the diamonds I have. It is going to be much cheaper and better for the environment. Bario Neal uses only recycled gold and they donate 1% to charity.





I am so excited to get my wedding band and show it to you all. We haven't looked for Steve's band yet but he wants something simple and silver so that shouldn't be too hard, right?

(images Bario Neal , Melissa Joy Manning , and Yoon Jungyun)

save the dates

Now that everyone has (hopefully) received theirs, I can finally post about our save the dates! This was my first time ever using my Gocco and it was definitely a challenging experience. There are a lot of "learn-as-you-go" aspects to the process but I was happy to learn along the way. I originally was only going to use two screens for the postcards but by taping on the screen to prevent ink bleeding, I ruined another part of it so I ended up using three for this project.

We are getting married in Palm Springs and we wanted to bring that into play with the save the dates but also wanted them to be fairly simple. I hand drew the cacti, banner and "save the date". The rest was done on the computer, printed, and gocco'd. There are two layers to the cacti that had to be printed separately and since we wanted them to have a handmade feel, I didn't worry too much about the imperfections.



The second round was the banner. I definitely could have done the font on the front during this printing as well but with trying to get all of the elements on only 2 screens, I kind of screwed up in the process. This was one of those learning moments that I hope I don't have to learn again.



Here is a close up of the postcard before the writing and with the second layer of the cactus printed.



Lastly, the finished product. The fonts I used are Air Conditioner (found here )and Modern No. 20



I honestly think that the back turned out to be my favorite. I am not super computer savvy so I typed out my own calendar and ended up using a red pen to draw a heart around our date on each card. The labels are from Paper Source and addresses were printed on. The finishing touch is the adorable King and Queen stamps that everyone loves. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!