Answers and updates

Happy new year!

As I've said, whenever I feel the urge to blog these days I'm doing it over at my other blog, It's Loverly. I did want to write about a couple of wedding-related things though and answer a few questions that have popped up in the comments of this blog. So here I am.

The post on our homemade photo booth generated some questions I wanted to answer.
First, our photo printer. We did some research and ended up buy the HP Photosmart A612. For about $150, this is a really nice printer. The print quality is great, it's very compact, it prints up to 5x7 photos, and the supplies aren't ridiculously expensive. The printer did great as the photo booth printer, although a lot of people didn't print their photos (no big deal, as we had all the photos on the camera and printed them at home).  We've used it quite a bit since the wedding, and it's fared very well. It even survived a rather violent fall from the table to the floor, almost entirely unscathed save for one slightly loose part. I highly recommend this printer if you're looking for an inexpensive and compact photo printer (a bonus: Staples sells a generic and budget-friendly version of the photo paper it uses).

As for the construction of the photo booth backdrop, this was all Patrick's ingenuity. He built the frame out of PVC piping. Here's the only photo we have of the frame without the fabric over it--

Patrick's mom sewed the fabric backdrop for us. We originally thought about using some fun pattern for the background of the booth, but ended up going with black when we couldn't find anything else we liked. It worked very well. (Again, full set of photo booth photos can be seen here.)

Over the next month or so we're wrapping up the remaining wedding stuff. Just before the holidays we received the DVDs of our final high res wedding photos (and some bonus video clips) from our photographers, Paul Grupp and Brenda Tompkins. This week they sent us the link to the digital proofs for the layout of our coffee table book. We have some changes, but overall we're very happy with it. (You can see the proofs here.) The books are printed in Japan, so once we finalize the layout it will be four to six weeks before we have the books in hand. Once the book layout is done, we'll also be getting a slide show of our photos from Paul and Brenda.  And once we have that, our wedding photo process will be complete. There are a few other things floating around out there-- the video our friend did for us, some guest photos we haven't seen yet, but for the most part all the loose ends are being tied up.

Last week I saw my friend Kerry, who got engaged to our friend Dave in November. I passed along my slew of wedding magazines and books (many of which I inherited from someone else). It felt good to pass them along for someone else to enjoy, and great to get them out of our home! It's amazing how much I don't miss wedding planning, not one little bit. I was recently going through a stack of papers and found wedding to-do lists from early in the summer. I just felt a tremendous sense of relief that we are done with wedding planning forever. This "post-nuptial depression" thing? I never felt it. I've been too busy loving married life.