Not such a whirlwind of a weekend

So this has got to be one of the periods of time I have been at my parents house in a long time. Got done Wednesday night. I'm either leaving Monday night or Tuesday morning.

Wednesday I got a ride from the person who answered my Boreal ad and it turned out I vaguely knew. That got me to Duluth two hours before my shuttle. Read a really cheesy romance novel about a time travelling Viking....which I heard about in one of my favorite webcomics, Questionable Content. I'm not a big fan of romance novels but they are easy reads...and the premise was too goofy to pass up. Apparently everyone else thinks so to because there was at least 5 holds on the book before me.

Anyway, got to the Mall of America around 3pm, locked my suitcase in a locker and wandered for the hour or so until Mom got there to pick me up..but we didn't want to tackle traffic and wandered the stores for another hour and a half or so.
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We printed all the sheets of vellum for the invites and let them dry just in case. Cut them all on Friday. Got the layout for the other piece figured out today and we hope to print and put together on Sunday. After that we just need to do the RSVP cards....and stuff envelopes (and label them).

My SIL came over today and played with makeup. I don't normally wear it. In fact it is possible that the last time I wore anything other than costume or stage makeup was probably at her wedding slightly over 3 years ago. So after we finally got that figured out we ran to Ridgedale and bought the things she wanted me to have my own of. Also took care of a couple other things.

Once we got back again we hashed out a basic timeline for the day of.

Jumping back a day, yesterday we went to the venue in the early afternoon to ask questions and  look again and then went to buy fabric for my flowergirl's dress......I swear the pattern looked easy but when we started trying to figure out what we needed, we got confused. And the first saleslady was really freaking snippy with us. Not cool.

Anyway...I think that's most of it for now.More in the next couple days..

Update on the car and wedding prep

Well, my car should be done getting repaired in the next day or two. In the meantime, I made myself drive Nathan's car to work on a couple days, even though stickshift makes me nervous, doubly so in winter. It was easier than getting rides. I hate making people go out of their way for me. Then there was the added "bonus" of my coworker getting stuck on our 1/4 mile ice sheet downhill driveway. I had told her I'd meet her at the top, but ran behind so she started down cause "it didn't look that bad". Obviously it was bad, cause her truck got stuck. Thank goodness for the sand in the back. The good part that came out of it though....my landlord, who is also my neighbor, was stuck behind us for a few minutes while we tried to get moving. Before this episode the only spot sanded was the turn to their place. Now, according to Nathan, the whole thing is sanded...why they couldn't have done that before, I don't know.

Anyway, to get to the cities, I had Maureen post a request on Boreal....by that night I had a ride offer to Duluth, from where I will then catch a shuttle to the Mall of America and hang out until my mom can come get me.

Shortly after I posted last time, I did order the Spectators. Will test them out when they get here and see if I want to go with them or not.

Our wedding rings came a couple of days ago....here's what mine looks like. Its an Irish-Gaelic phrase that means My Soul Mate.

I could have sworn I had more to write but I'm not thinking of it right now.

More life and weddingness

So, was planning to drive down to the cities February 2nd or 3rd and stay there for a few days to tackle a bunch of wedding stuff. Most importantly the fitting of my wedding dress! We've got the real fabric now instead of just the muslin we used to work out the design. I will be able to get a much better grasp of how the finished result is going to look...but we can't exactly do that if I am not there.

So, why would I possibly not be able to go? Yeah, I definitely crashed my car into a sign after a nice 180 on a slushy/icy road and its not currently driveable. Didn't know that anything was really wrong the night of it, but when I got it towed the next day, issues started becoming apparent. Repairs would be costing me a very large chunk of change if I didn't have insurance. As it is, my deductible is $1000. Not what I need when I'm getting close to my wedding. Add onto this that in the months since we got engaged, Nathan also had to do exceedingly expensive repairs on his car after the timing belt broke and destroyed a good part of his engine. Not starting off on the right foot for money saving!

I'm hoping that somehow or another I will make it to the cities because in addition to the dress fitting I want to scope out the restaurants in the area near our site so we can choose and hopefully book a place for our rehearsal dinner. I need to buy the fabric for my flowergirl's adorable dress that I want to make. No fairy wings though. Our wedding is going to be odd...I mean "unique" enough for most people as it is :) I love that it is going to be uniquely us...but I don't want to overwhelm people.

One thing I need to get my butt going on is knitting the flowers for my toss bouquet. I've got the pattern I was going to use...I just need to do it! I suppose I need to decide what yarn I'm using. Might help. I was contemplating using the yarn that I made from start to finish....I carded, spun and washed it, and just recently dyed it too. But I kinda want to be selfish and use it for myself.

Not so much a thing I'd deal with while home, but another dilemma is my shoes. I have some cute white ones I bought for the ceremony and dinner part of the reception. But I'm a dance snob. I'm very very particular what is on my feet if I am going to be dancing any period of time. So I've been thinking about buying myself a new pair of dance shoes. Just can't decide which ones! The Rugcutters or the Spectators. Neither one will really match the dress, so its more about what I think will be more comfortable and continue to get use after the wedding. Hmm...just as I was checking the links I noticed one thing else that may factor in. The Spectators have a suede sole which is what I like dancing on. The Rugcutters have a raw leather sole...which is sometimes too slippery for me. And since I haven't been dancing enough lately, I might not be so safe in those. The Spectator has a higher heel but its wide enough that I think I won't crash in them. I hope.

On a different note, the awesome people of Ravelry have been great in supplying the cards I need to make boxes....I'm really curious to find out what people think of them

Well, if you're curious on other wedding details, you can go to our Knot website

Wedding Planning Update

This past weekend was another whirlwind wedding (and family) weekend. We got our engagement photos done (finally, after a few attempts to get one set up...its rather difficult when you live 5 hours away from the photographer!)

Met with people from Queen of Cakes in Edina. Told them about this cake and showed them the picture (via the link on my previous blog post). Figured that it was not going to be doable, being that its fondant, we want buttercream (partly for the taste factor, partly for the cost factor....anything they do in buttercream doesn't cost extra!) But when the first lady looked at it she started getting interested and showed it to another in the room and they were both getting excited about figuring a way to make it work. So I'm pretty thrilled about that.

We talked with our DJ on Sunday since all of our contact up to this point has just been via email or facebook.

Oh yeah....added a ton of stuff to our registries. Target, Bed Bath and Beyond have the most things so far but we're looking into doing REI as well (signed up for it but I don't think I've added anything to the registry yet)

Got all our paper for the invites. I had wanted to get stuff for the programs as well but I really didn't know how I wanted to do it.

what do I want?

I think the hardest part of wedding planning is just deciding what the heck I want out of something. Right now I'm back into looking at wedding cake stuff....trying to decide what I want and what would look good, and what can they do with buttercream (cause even though fondant looks neat, I've heard it doesn't taste all that great...and I think its more expensive?). On one hand I'd love to have a crazy cake like they have on the show Ace of Cakes (if the cost wasn't so understandably astronomical) but on the other, sometimes a simple cake sounds best.

I've been perusing flickr for good stuff. Here is one neat cake with birch bark and another with piped on ferns and fondant mushrooms. Minus the marzipan lemons, this one is a nice design. I should say, the lemons are pretty freaking sweet looking...just would have nothing to do with my theme or interests! Oh...here is one I love, but I'm fairly sure its fondant...but its a cute birch bark tree!

Wedding stuff

Haven't really been posting lately. Been kinda just letting things lapse with the etsy shop for the time being. I've got too many other things on my mind right now...primarily wedding stuff of course.

Thankfully we have lots of friends and family between the two of us who are able to step up and help us out so much! We've already secured our place, minister, caterer, beverage people, florist and photographer.

I've pretty much decided on my favors...its just making them and making it all look good. I'm doing recycled crayons. And just now I latched on the idea of chocolate rocks as a way to connect our love of living so near Lake Superior.