Entries tagged with “DIY” from Prom to Altar

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.

I realized that I never posted any photos of our completed invitations. Our friend Meg (who also happens to be Pat's cousin's wife-- my cousin-in-law?) designed our invitations and helped us assemble them. We are forever indebted to her for this sweet and rather huge gift. The design she came up with was perfect, and we could never have executed such a project without her!

To be honest, the invitations were a huge project and caused quite a bit of stress. I love how they came out, but the process was rather trying! Paper that was discontinued, printer issues, printing issues (and more printing issues), it just went on and on. Thank goodness for Meg's guiding hand.

Here they are:

Envelopes, with calligraphy by a family friend-


Front-


back-Inside-

The colors are a little tough to see-- the swirl, our names, and the large fonts on the right are all a deep purple. The smaller font is light brown.



Inserts-

(One of my favorite parts-- the bottom of the response card said: "The back of this card may be used to draw a picture, compose a haiku, or write a note." You can see photos of some of the results at the end of this post.)

We used the swirl design in a bunch of other wedding stuff-- programs, table numbers, and the wedding website.

Due to a family emergency, we ended up back in Albany the same day our invitations were ready to go in the mail. They went out a few days late, but the way it worked out, we were able to have our invitations hand-canceled-- not only that, but they were hand-canceled by Pat's aunt. See, every little bit of these invitations had love poured in to it. I wasn't in a very good frame of mind at the time, but I wish we'd taken pictures at the post office. Oh well, the memory is a nice one.

Materials:
To make the invitations we used:
-Kraft Pocketfolds from Cards & Pockets
-Kraft flourish paper from Paper Source. When we bought it it was printed on Kraft paper. Now they print it on their Eco White paper, which is much flimsier and far more lightweight.
-Cardstock for the invitation and inserts was Classic Crest -- really nice paper. The envelopes were also Classic Crest, ordered from EnvelopeMall.

And here's Pat in Meg's studio, hard at work (this was definitely a team effort on behalf of the two of us, Meg, and her husband Steve.)

 

Oh how I love old fashioned photo booths! And oh how renting one was not in our budget.

We love photos, we love taking photos, and we really wanted some sort of photo fun at our reception. So we researched and brainstormed.

We came up with an alternative to the old fashioned booth, and created our own photo booth area. It consisted of a 3-sided structure designed and built by Patrick, covered in a fabric backdrop that was sewn together by his mom. We bought a couple of work lights to light the area. In front of the "booth" we set up a digital camera on a tripod, which was hooked up to a monitor for photo viewing and a photo printer. We had a guest book nearby along with adhesive, pens and markers.

Next to the booth we set out a basket with various props and a chalkboard for message-writing.

We asked Pat's very creative and tech-savvy cousins to man the station (they are in 5th and 8th grade, and they were the perfect pick for this job). They asked if they could bring their "silly hat collection" and we said ohmygosh YES! We asked the techie husband of one of my friends/bridesmaids to head to the reception early to set up the booth. (You see, this project required a lot of help from many willing and able parties.)

The booth was a huge hit, and everyone loved the silly hats (they made their way into quite a few of our wedding photos!). We have over 100 fabulous shots of our guests: all ages, surprising groupings, poses wacky and demure. Not everyone was up for the booth, but those that were really had fun with it.

You can see the full collection in the set on our wedding Flickr page.

Here are a couple of highlights:

The Save the Dates were our first wedding project, and we had a blast designing them together. We decided that since our invitations were going to be on the formal side, we wanted to have fun with the Save the Dates. We came up with the concept together (along with Meg, our friend/Pat's cousin's wife/our invitation designer).

The whole thing is a reference to the beginnings of our relationship in high school, a short 10 years ago, and the things that have happened in that time.

Here's the story behind all those items:

• The pink stub on the left is the parking stub from Thacher Park (where Patrick proposed), for the day we got engaged last summer.
• The ticket along the bottom is from our trip on the Eurostar from London to Paris. We took the trip in November 2001 when Patrick game to visit me during my semester abroad in London. We ate crepes and went to the top of the Eiffel Tour at night.
  
• The "photo booth" photos we took in our living room in March-- a  black backdrop (fabric found at a thrift store) hung in a doorway, the camera on a tripod, Calvin staring at us like we'd lost our minds.
• The ticket stub on the bottom right is from a Dave Matthews concert at SPAC. Our music tastes have changed a lot since then, but we attended quite a few concerts during our first few summers together. One of the first gifts Pat gave me was Before These Crowded Streets, and the album with Tim Reynolds will always remind me of the first time I visited him at college. I'll always love those late 90s/early 00s DMB albums for the nostalgia invoked.
• The ticket stub above is from the movies, at a second-run movie theater that no longer exists (Cine 10, anyone?).