Our Photo Display

This project was easy and very quick, once we figured out how to actually put it together. It really only took us one evening to make it.

First, we cut two long strips of burlap and then I sewed pockets at the end of each with opening towards the middle of the display.

Second, we cut and sewed lengths of jute twine in between each of the long strips of burlap.

Third, we cut and painted two wooden dowels and then slid about 5 loops of burlap that I had sewn onto one of the dowels.

Fourth, we slide the ends of the dowels into the top and bottom pockets of the burlap strips. The dowel with the loops of burlap when on the top side of the system.

Fifth, we brought the display down to the wedding and had my maid of honor, Rachel, and my bridesmaid, Sam, pick pictures that we and our parents had collected to display.  We hung the display in a large window that looked out onto the patio we had dinner on, so we were able to double side the pictures!

Overall, I think this was a great project and really made a good conversation piece for all of our guests. I'm happy we did it and I hope someday we can find another use for this display!  

Misc. memory from long ago.

This photo was taken during my first trip down to San Diego to visit Adina after we started dating. As an interesting side note, one of the nights we went out to dinner with her room mate, Cara, and her new boyfriend, Mike. They are also now married!

Burlap and Jute Bunting

Back in August, I mentioned here that I had officially picked up all the supplies for all of the crafts I had committed to doing for the wedding.  And then in September, I had mentioned here that I had cut over 120 triangles of burlap.

And well, here is the final product!  Over 200 feet of burlap and jute bunting!

My mom and I started off the project together when she was out to visit for my shower by cutting all of the individual triangles and then starting to sew them to the jute twine.  It took a darn long while and it was messy!  I didn't realize how much the burlap would shed, it reminded me of short dog hair, like a dalmatian.

The night of the rehearsal dinner we asked our officiant, Geoff, and the groomsman, George, to hang the bunting over the dance floor. They did an amazing and awesome job and they came up with the design all on their own.

One of the best parts was how great it made all of our pictures look during our totally awesome dance party.  But more pictures of that to come later!

Our Invitations

We posted back in June (here and here) about making our invitations ourselves with the help of some amazing family! And rather than taking our own pictures to post here of our final product, we decided to wait for the official photos that our photographer would be taking and boy are we glad we waited!  Check these out!

The story behind our invitations is that when we were looking around for idea and everything we liked was earthy looking and had tree's on it.  So we decided to ask our sister-in-law, an amazing artist, to design some sort of redwood tree for our invitations.  She came up with this beautiful sequoia tree image and the stump you see on our RSVP card. Zeke's brother had them scanned at a high resolution and than our work began.  

We used Apple's pages software to design the images and text, which happened to be called "handwriting". Overall it was really simple to manipulate the images and place things just the way we wanted.

We made a main invitation, a rehearsal dinner invitation, an informational card, and an RSVP post card. 

We purchased all the paper at Paperzone up in Shoreline and bought two colors of card stock, a darker brown and moss green, along with the Green Grocer's Brown Bag Paper. We used our HP Inkjet printer and regular black ink cartridges to print everything and then used a double sided sticky tape to attache the Brown Bag Paper to the card stock. 

We tied a navy blue silk ribbon around all of the pieces and placed them in a Brown Paper Bag envelop with a seal from Paper Source that looked like redwood bark.

Overall, we are so happy that we decided to make the invitations ourselves. They turned out so perfect and so personal, especially because of the efforts of our family. And once we got the process started, it was really fun.

Our Venue: Point Lobos Ridge

The California coastline, especially the northern half, is probably our favorite place in the whole world.  We have so many wonderful memories, including getting engaged, along the coast that it just seemed like a given that we would get married there.

If you followed our wedding planning from the start, we thought we had nailed down a venue pretty early on just north of Santa Cruz, but that did not end up working out... So we went back to the drawing board and ended up searching primarily on VBRO.com (Vacation Rental By Owner) and that's how we found Point Lobos Ridge.

We went up to visit the house, but we weren't actually able to go inside or really go on the property at all.  We just got to look over a fence from a distance.  But with the pictures we had seen on their website, we were sold from the beginning.

And now, after the fact, we're clearly able to say, that we couldn't have had our perfect wedding anywhere else...

Photos by Claire Barrett

Married

Awesome Photo by our friend Chris Kerr

Well, we got married and it was an awesome and amazing day.  One might call it even call it perfect. Right now we're enjoying not having to plan a wedding and just being married.  We've gone and come back from our mini-moon to the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. And we've both gone back to regular working lives.

Obviously we have a lot of posts to make about different parts of the wedding and lots of things to share that maybe not everyone got to see or knew the whole story behind. So be patient with us as we slowly get some posts up.  We'll also wait until we've got our official wedding photos so we can tie it all together with Claire's wonderful photos.

Stay tuned!

Slow-Cooker Sundays: Black Bean Enchiladas

Thanks to one awesome groomsman, we are now the proud owners of a Cuisinart Slow-Cooker, and thus have decided to start a new tradition; Slow-Cooker Sundays!

This week we decided to make the Black Bean Enchilada recipe that I found posted on Apartment Therapy a while ago.

Since the recipe contained cheese we decided to use a couple of varieties of sheeps milk cheeses, a manchego, a gouda, and mitica. We also omitted the peppers, because I just don't like cooked peppers.

Overall, it was a super easy recipe to put together and just forget about for about 4 hours.  However, the enchiladas broke up a lot, so it was hard to actually pull out one individual enchilada at a time. But it still tasted great.  I think we might try this recipe again but next time include some shredded chicken.