Jen and Orlando's Wedding

This weekend Ben and I attended our special friends Jen and Orlando's wedding.  It was such a beautiful affair!

Black and White Bridal Shower

Back in May I attended the most beautiful bridal shower in honor of my friend Jen.  It was a beautiful day in Southern California for an outdoor shower.  The party was hosted by a interior designer, and boy did she do a beautiful job.  The theme was black and white with polkadots and damask patterns.

As the guest arrived they were greeted by this sign:

Our Wedding

November 6, 2010 I married the love of my life.

We had no actual theme, but tried to create an old-fashioned charm for the event.  We did many DIY projects to personalize the wedding and incorporated many of our favorite things.

Location: Orange County Centennial Heritage Museum

Caterer: Country Garden Caterers
Rentals: Signature Party Rentals

DJ: KIK Entertainment

Photographer: Mia Johnstone

Our Save the Date (Designed by Ben)

Wedding Travel Themed Seating Cards

Seating Cards

We created custom seating cards by using luggage tags and stamping them with travel stamps.  Then we wrote the name of the guest and their destination on the card.  All of the destinations/tables were named after our favorite places in Disneyland.  The tags were hung on brass pins pushed into a styrofoam board that we covered with a vintage looking map.

More Wedding Printables

Being crafty people, we wanted to make sure our wedding had enough DIY present.  Therefore homemade coloring books and scrapbook pages for our guest book were a must have!

Guestbook Scrapbook
I found this scrapbook at Homegoods for around $15, looks nice and weddingy to me without the wedding price tag!  We put out the scrapbook pages with cups of markers and pens and our guests went crazy!

Homemade Save the Date Postcards and Letterpress Invitations

The perks of marrying a graphic designer is that I have free unlimited designs.  First up on the wishlist was a clever save the date.  In case you are not aware, we love reenacting and dressing up = a fun photo shoot for our engagement pictures.  We let our photos guide our design for the save the date, seen below.

Wedding Printables

After featuring the insides of my wedding binder I wanted to share with you printables so that you could make your own binder!

Planning Timeline:

Here is a time order list of everything I felt was important to accomplish based off of many other guides I had found out there (this is a 2 page document).

Click Here to Print

Wedding Binder

It is my opinion that being organized is your biggest stress reliever when wedding planning.  That is why right after I got engaged I spent many hours researching other people's ideas/suggestions for wedding binders and compiled my own.

Things that I included in my binder were:

• Pencil pouch complete with pencils, pens and sticky-notes
• Hole puncher
• Divider tabs
• Clear page holders
• Business card holders
• Calendar leading up to the wedding
• Schedule of when to do things
• Surveys for Bakery, Cater, DJ, and Venue (I didn't make a photographer one, because I knew exactly who I wanted my photographer to be)
• Print outs of all visual things I needed references for (gown, hair, flowers, etc)
• Extra lined paper

Here is what it all looked like:
After we chose our wedding venue I used a picture of the ceremony site as the image for my cover.

Wedding Week

I did it, I survived wedding planning!  I had been looking forward to it so much, and I did greatly enjoy it, but I am so glad to never have to do it again...  After way too many hours watching "Say Yes to the Dress," "Who's Wedding is it Anyways?" "4 Weddings" and other such shows I had my vision for my wedding and how I was going to go about getting there.

It all started with being prepared and creating the most perfect wedding planning binder.
I studied all sorts of resources from the internet, and then designed everything the way I wanted it to be.

Next was designing Save the Dates and Invitations.  With a graphic designer husband and a printer for a father in law, this had to be done by hand...

We also wanted other personal handmade touches in our wedding, so I'll be featuring all of those ideas and sharing all of my printables.