DIY Check: Wreaths!

I've been trying to get some things done before school starts back in a few days. Yesterday, I made silk peony wreaths that will go on the church doors. I hit the jackpot at AC Moore and found 32 stems on sale for $0.50 each --> AMAZING (they had been $3 each). I bought 18" grapevine wreaths and some green wire to attach the flowers with. I'm really excited about how well they came out! I may get some wooden letters for our first names and put them in the middle, but I'm not sure yet. I had to hang them with a ribbon on my wall to take a picture, but I'll figure out a pretty way to hang them with a bow or ribbon for the church doors. Here's what they look like:

OOT Bags/Baskets

We're going to do OOT bags or baskets for our guests. We will have the hotels place one in each guest room in our room blocks to welcome everyone to Raleigh. So, I've been trying to come up with things to include in the baskets and this is what I have so far:

- Welcome letter from bride and groom

- NC Map

- Raleigh Visitor's Guide

- snacks and drinks, including NC items

- soap or toiletries

- customized map and directions to ceremony and reception

- cards, cheap games, etc.

A few months ago, I had found this super cute DIY idea, of individually wrapping soaps with a note from the bride and groom for the OOT bags. You can find instructions, here. Well, I decided to do mine slightly differently, and will include them in the OOT baskets. Here are the materials that I use: soap, ribbon and wrapping paper. Then, I'll add a tag with our monogram or a little note saying "soap from the bride and groom" or "welcome" etc.

Invitation Design

Here are some pictures I made of a mock up of our invitation set that we will be ordering soon. The wording may be changed some and we might tweak the font, but this is pretty much it! I'm really loving the silver and charcoal colored inks! I'm also hoping to bring in some pink with a light pink bow wrapped around the set! :)

Booking Our Honeymoon!

Tomorrow, we're finally going to put a deposit down on our honeymoon!!!!!!

I might be one of the most indecisive people in the world, so trying to figure out where in the entire world we wanted to go for our honeymoon was intimidating. Well, we've decided on PARIS! We're paying the deposit for our 7-night apartment rental tomorrow! The apartment is through www.ParisPerfect.com, which I found a couple of weeks ago. Well, most of their apartments were booked :( for our week, but fortunately, we were able to find one that is going to work out "perfectly!"

It's the Syrah apartment in Paris' 7e arrondissement. It's only a couple of blocks away from the Eiffel Tower and is on the famous Rue Cler. (Rick Steves' Europe: Rue Cler: The Art of Parisian Living) We love cooking and this little apartment has a kitchen to prepare meals with ingredients from the fresh market below. There's also a cute balcony to sit and relax or eat a meal. The living room is so parisian and full of light. I could ramble on forever about how amazing everything looks, but I'll let you see for yourselves! This is the actual apartment that we'll be staying at:

Invitations!! :)

Tonight we came very, very close to finalizing the invitations for the wedding. I'm SUPER EXCITED about these. I had considered doing DIY, but I've got a lot going on in the next couple of months and didn't know how much time I'd have for DIYing invitations. Well, we found some beautiful invitations that we really like. They're awesome, here are the details:

Crane & Co. Letterpress

2 ink color flourish design

Double envelopes w/return address and envelope liner

Reception card

Response card and envelope with address

Eeeeek! They are going to be gorgeous and sooo luxurious!

We're getting them from Swoozies in Cameron Village.

We're going to order them in the next week or so, we're just waiting to hear back from them to make sure our color changes/combinations can be done.

This is what they look like. We'll be changing the light brown motif to silver and the text to a darker gray/charcoal color. The envelope liner will also be silver. This shows the paper in ecru and we are hoping to change it to an off white, but we're not sure if it's possible yet. Oh and we've discussed adding a pink ribbon to tie it all up, but so far it's mainly silver/gray. It's pretty traditional, but I think it will really be pretty!