Invitations Are Out!
Apr 6th
We hope everyone had a great Easter weekend! And we have big news – Invitations went out last week! We’ve received word that they’ve reached as far as Michigan already, so hopefully most everyone has gotten theirs by now. The invitations were custom-designed by Dolce Design; these are the invites we won at the silent auction at Get Hitched, Give Hope last year. We have to say, they’re quite amazing! Clean, simple, and classy, with a retro/deco feel – they totally fit that Mad Men/”Swanky Elegance” theme we’re planning. We won’t post pictures of the actual invites here – we want that to be a surprise for you when you get them in the mail! But take a look to the right and you’ll see a whole batch of them all ready to mail.
As with our Save The Dates, we hand made the wraparound address labels. This time we kicked it up a notch, using our theme fonts, the same as on the actual invitations, and the background matches the berry-colored envelope liner. See… now you know a little bit of what the invitations look like :) A while back we saw a blog post by another couple who had separate male and female theme fonts, and we loved that idea, so you’ll see that used throughout all of the paper products from now until the wedding. Call us geeks or over-planners or whatever, but we think it adds a neat extra touch that ties everything together :) We’re still planning a future post that will share our label templates for anyone that wants to do your own fantastic labels – look for that in the next couple of weeks!
So anyway, those are our invitations! Don’t forget to RSVP by May 1st!
We’ll leave you with a fun photo of us out on Whidbey Island from a few weeks ago when we had Ben’s parents visit – it was a beautiful day to drive around Western Washington and take in the views of the ocean with the mountains in the distance. This is at Fort Casey, which looked to me like a great location for filming “24” (sadly, it’s been cancelled after this season, so that’ll never happen). Views like this are just one of the things everyone who’s never been to Seattle can look forward to in May! BTW, we also visited Deception Pass State Park on our adventurous drive – check out all the pictures on Ben’s Flickr page.
An Overdue Update
Feb 1st
Well, we’re down to only 109 days before the wedding and it’s been over a month since we last posted – we’ve been super busy! So it’s about time that we updated you on everything that’s been going on…
Let’s see, where to start? Well, we celebrated Alexa’s Birthday and the holidays here in Kirkland a few days before Christmas, since we both flew home to spend the 25th with our families for the last time as “single” people (wow, kinda scary, huh?!?!) It was great to be home with everyone, but it was a bit odd to be apart – we’re definitely looking forward to spending the holidays together next year :) But to celebrate this year, we chose to make stockings for each other. Yes, we actually sewed them! And then of course stuffed them with fun little presents :) We hung them on our improvised stocking holders (random wine bottles) and put them on our mantle. As always, I’ve included a cute photo for you to see!
We also got our engagement photos back from Azzura, and put them up on our new photo wall. It looks really great! We can’t wait to add photos from our wedding. *Bonus points to anyone who can name where we got the fancy frame shelf.*
As for wedding planning, we’ve been super busy! We’ve picked Fiore Blossoms as our florist/decorator, chosen our DJ, Wave Link Music, and our invitations are being designed by Dolce Design! Check out all the people working on our wedding on our Twitter list: @APandBBetz/our-wedding-vendors. We’ve also been working on a few cool surprises and fun things we won’t talk about just yet. Gotta have some suspense, right? We did spend a nice afternoon at the Seattle Wedding Show two weekends ago. Ok, yeah, not exactly a guy thing – really, I went to eat all the cake tasters :) Oh, and to have fun with Alexa, of course!
There’s still lots more to do, and only a few months left! We know many of you are interested in our registries – we’re furiously working on finishing those up, and should have them all set to go in a week or so. We’ll be sure to post to the blog to let you know. And someday soon, Alexa will start posting on here too – I know you’re all waiting on the edge of your seat!
ShareSave the Dates Are Out!
Dec 17th
We just sent out our first batch of Save the Dates this week, in hopes that everyone will get them before Christmas. We’ll still have to mail a few later as we get the rest of the addresses for everyone, but we wanted to get the most of them out as soon as we could! On the right is a picture of Alexa attaching one of our amazing address labels to the envelope – I think this one was for her grandparents.
Actually, we have a pretty cool story about our save the dates – we won them off of twitter from einvite.com! And even better, we won the twitter contest just hours after also wining a charity silent auction at Get Hitched, Give Hope for our main invites. So our save the dates are pretty cool, because we were able to get some awesome printing done for free :) They’re navy Crane & Co. cards with white engraved printing. For a preview, take a look at einvite’s blog post about them: http://einvitesinsights.blogspot.com/2009/11/alexa-and-bens-simply-gorgeous.html
But we couldn’t just stop at having cool cards, we had to do something fun for the addressing, too. Alexa had read about these Martha Stewart-inspired wraparound labels on a few wedding blogs she follows, so off we went to the craft store to figure out how to make them. Well, really, she convinced me to stop there on the way home from work, and I spent 20 minutes attempting to figure out what kind of paper a label should be printed on. 3 hours of fighting with Word’s mail merge feature later, we had some awesome labels printed, cut, sent through a Xyron 250 Sticker Maker, and voila! We’ll post the template we made in a future blog entry so others can make them, too! The design on the label is inspired by 1960’s-era typography and a bold modern-retro background.
After watching Mad Men and loving the fashion and style of the 1960’s that it illustrates, we realized that would be the inspiration for the look and feel of our wedding (wow, that felt like a UI design discussion…). We use the term “swanky elegance” to describe the atmosphere we’re going for. It’s not really a theme per se, but more of the bit of inspiration we’re using to help us envision our wedding. Anyway, I don’t want to go into that too much right now, so I’ll leave you with a quick shot (on the left) of some of the finished save the date envelopes, from just before we put on the stamps and dropped them at the post office. We hope you look forward to getting yours in the mail!
Our Engagement Photo
Dec 9th
We have been on the lookout for our favorite engagement photo to show up on the Azzura Cafe, our amazing photographer’s blog, and just today noticed it’s now up! Check it out at http://azzurablog.com/blog/2009/12/7/daily-shot-of-inspiration-monday-december-7th.html.
Tania, our photographer, took that photo on a whim when I mentioned I liked the Fish & Chips sign. So, amidst dodging the rain (which made the bike seats a little wet, btw!), and racing to beat the dwindling sun as it began to set behind dark, impending rain clouds, Alexa and I hopped on these old-style bikes and it turned out to be our favorite photo of the whole shoot! A big thanks to Azzura for the great shot!
ShareVideo: Thanksgiving Weekend at Whistler
Nov 29th
Alexa and I spent a great Thanksgiving Weekend up at the Pennak family timeshare in Whistler, BC. We had great weather, with several inches of snow on Saturday! So obviously, we took advantage of the record-setting early season snow and did some skiing. While we were up on the lifts, we shot a quick video blog post for you, so check it out below. Happy Thanksgiving!
Quick notes:
- Just in case you were wondering what I was talking about, Chris Cashman is the host of XBox Live’s 1 vs. 100.
- I misspoke in the video – it’s actually 173 days until our wedding, not 163. That’s what I get for trying count in subzero temperatures.
- The video has closed captioning/subtitles that you can enable via the little triangle button. All videos we post to our blog will be captioned.
176 Days to Go!
Nov 25th
We’ve just finally got this website up (phew! just in time – Save the Dates will be going out in a couple weeks!), and suddenly realized that there’s only 176 days until our wedding! Still lots of planning to do, but at least we can check “wedding website” off the list :) At the moment, we’re working on booking a DJ and florist. Then we have to plan decorations and oh yeah, our honeymoon! So much to do, and only 176 days to do it in! Eeek! Nah, we’ll be fine…
Anyway, be sure to visit the site often – we plan to update with the latest info as we have it. And of course, follow us on twitter – @APAndBBetz if you want up-to-the-minute details!
Can’t wait to see you all at our wedding!
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