Nick & Allie’s Wedding ~ June 6, 2009

Our invitations are about ready to be printed and I am so excited to see them. Our stationer, Beth Buchanan of Buchanan Ink, was so helpful! She was so patient with me as I changed wording, fonts, motifs, and ideas. From the very beginning I knew I wanted an ivory deckle-edged invitation and envelope.  Below is an idea of what a deckled-edge is:

And the envelope will look something like this (in ivory):

Since we couldn’t the monogram to work out for us, we decided to do a tree at the top with some casual wording that would help set the tone for our casual outdoor country wedding:

How cute is that tree? It goes perfect with our names in the pretty calligraphy font, Copperplate Rosemary.  Everything will be written in a brown ink to give it a more earthy feel. I am in love with our invites!

We also have another invitation that will be sent out to our bridal party and immediate families.  Nick and I are doing something a little non-traditional as will be having two wedding ceremonies on June 6th. We will be having a small morning ceremony at St. Edward Catholic Church at 10 AM.  Father Patrick Breen will be performing the ceremony. Since Nick is Catholic and I am Baptist, we found this to be the best way to incorporate both denominations and have the wedding of our dreams but also a very important ceremony in the church. We are very grateful that we are able to do this and that both Father Breen and Pastor Greg Moser, who will be performing the ceremony out on the farm, agreed. The invitations for this ceremony are absolutey adorable! They are smaller than the invitation above and will also be deckle-edged and mailed in the same envelope. Take a look at how cute these are (pardon the blurriness):

I mean! Could that little chapel be any cuter????!!!!

I finally stumbled across the inspiration for our wedding cake the other day! I was looking through Google Images of wedding cakes and found this one. I like that it has different designs on each layer giving it unique interest and that it incorporates a little bit of color with the ribbons. Disregard the tulle all around it- I’m not a big fan of tulle.The cake will be sitting on a really cool whiskey barrel table under the tent.

For a long time, Nick has had his own brand….you know….cowboy brand….like the kind you would brand a horse or cow with. Its this really cool G that he designed and puts on lots of things…like his belt buckle, see below. I had him create a monogram for us, incorporating his G brand and this is what he came up with:

Isn’t it so cool? I love it! We planned on using it on our invitations but we couldn’t get the resolution of the image high enough for it to fit with our invites. The bakery is going to mimic it the top of our cake and we hope to use it on our programs and hopefully in other ares of the wedding as well.

Here is the belt buckle I was talking about.

Yep, he made it. How talented is he??!! Take a look at his website for more custom jewelery, art, and woodworking. If anyone needs a special gift for someone, Nick would be a great person to call.

For some reason I am obsessed with the idea of a really cool and unique guest book. I’ve had trouble coming up with the perfect idea, but surely one of these would work…

This is one of my favorite ideas right now. It is the most unique guest book I have ever seen. Nick could probably even make one of these for us. This one is from an artist on my favorite new website ETSY. It would be cool to use this as a guest book and then add pictures of us on a few pages using photo corners.

I like this and seeing as though we are having a country wedding, it might be perfect. If we could find a wagon like this, it could be really neat. We could use one of the whiskey barrel tables to hold to guest book too. Found here.

From here. This would be neat. We could make a photo book of all our favorite pictures (since we aren’t doing an engagement session) and put it out for friends to sign. My friend Mary makes photo books as a keepsake for each year of her and her husbands life. She makes them over at snapfish.

I am thinking about asking a cousin of mine, who loves to take pictures, do this for me. It would be really neat to have polaroids of all the guests. The guests could then sign the white part below the picture and we can put them in a book. From here.

This picture is one I found on my photographer’s website, whom I plan to write about in a post soon. This idea is really cool. Guests can sign one of many bottles that Nick and I can enjoy each anniversary for years to come. See my photographers website- McCoy Studio.

Anyone have any other ideas that I could add to my list of choices?

Nick and I sent out our save the dates a few weeks ago and we absolutely love them! Our friend Lynlee took the picture of us, probably 2 years ago. She took it without us even knowing about it. It looks like it was posed but it wasn’t at all. That was just us hangin’ with the horses- back when I fit into my skinny jeans! Another cool thing about this picture is it was taken at the farm that we are getting married at. We are so lucky to be getting married on a farm where we spent so much of our time getting to know each other. It is going to be perfect! My brother Austin helped me make the save the date in photoshop…he’s great with all those computer skills. We made them on our own and then my mom had them printed for us at her office. For less than $20 bucks we made 240 save the dates and by sending them as postcards we saved on postage- postcard stamps are only $0.26 per stamp. Here is a shot of our save the date….(sorry that my images are fuzzy here).

I was able to figure out how to use mail merge in excel to print all the addresses on the back of the postcards and then I also put this vintage looking postcard-with-a-feather graphic on the back….courtesy of Martha Stewart (here). No one probably even noticed it but I thought it was such a nice little touch!