wedding

Paper Lantern Wedding Photobooth

Projects, Stuff and Things

If you’re going to build a photo booth, why not do it with some style?

I’m finally getting around to posting about some of the projects that we did for the wedding. Because, if I don’t do it now… it’s never going to happen.

Laurel and I knew that we wanted to have a photobooth at our wedding. We have some great pictures from early in our relationship that were taken at photobooths in Bethany, MD and  Manassas, VA. But when we picked the wedding location in Natural Bridge Va we realized that getting a photobooth all the way down ther was going to be pretty expensive. Over $1500 type of expensive. So I looked into building one of my own. I found a lot of great resources out there.  PhotoBoof being one. But they are charging $600 for their software, which is pretty awesome, but a little overkill for my needs.  If you want to use the photobooth professionally this may be the best option, but I can’t even sell door knockers and hoodies on Etsy, so I’m not getting into the photo booth business.

Read More inside and more pictures!

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Draw your Party Wedding Invitations

Art, Projects


One of the things that made our wedding special was the creativity of all of our friends and their willingness to go along with our crazy schemes. The RSVP card that was included with the invitation had a blank section with instructions to “Draw your Party”. It was actually kind of useful because when I was designing the card I had forgotten to put a space to say how many people you were bringing with you. Some people were very quick and some people stressed about it. But everyone did a great job at giving us just what we wanted; a little memory of all of you.

See the rest after the break

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Our Wedding at the Natural Bridge

Life, Women


There is no doubt in my mind that we had the best wedding we could possibly have dreamed of for us. The Natural Bridge hotel and confrence center was very accommodating for us and all of our out of town guests. While my parents would have liked us to have the wedding nearer to our homes in Northern Virginia, we strongly believe that the Shenandoah Valley is the most beautiful part of Virginia and the only place we wanted to get married. We fell in love with the bridge on our first visit down there, it’s sort of a forgotten natural wonder. I think the heyday of the hotel may have been in the 1960’s as things don’t seem to have been updated since then, which is fine with us. The main hotel has a certain charm to it of an older elegance and the staff are very nice and will go out of their way to help. Maybe it’s because we were the bridal party but we never heard a word about our whole wedding taking over the cottages and partying late for 2 nights. At one point we even joined forces with the noon wedding and partied into the night. It was an incredible experience and the hotel was great about it.

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10 Days Till The Wedding

Randomness

I haven’t been updating this blog very much recently because all my free time has been spent cutting out tiny leaves for the centerpieces. Or working on the information packet. Or working out the kinks in the photo booth software. Or printing cards for the table gift. Or planning the honeymoon.

All I know is in 12 days we leave for Peru and I need a vacation.

DIY Wedding Invitations

Projects, Stuff and Things


We finally finished our wedding invitations and got almost all of them in the mail yesterday. They are a perfect metaphor for who we are as a couple. I designed them with a sophisticated look but with cool distressed fonts and fun elements. The main parts are printed on tree-free banana husk paper. The envelopes are natural vellum and the outside wrapper is fine art paper with mango leaves or banana husks embedded in them.

But what is more like Laurel and me is that we were too focused on the little things about the design and missed a few major things. Like the fact that the red card stock was about a quarter inch too short and wouldn’t properly gate fold around our card. Or that the only reason we had to use the card stock in the first place was that we couldn’t find a natural card stock that was thick enough, so we rigged something up with paper from the craft store. Or that we procrastinated until the last minute and then realized that our design was a little complicated, forcing us to glue, fold, insert, label, and stamp 76 of them in two days. In hindsight I wish that I’d made them a little bigger and spent longer looking for some kind of all natural card stock for the gate fold.

Way too many pictures and a cost breakdown after the break.

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