Xapa to the World

Tag: Getting Married

  • Getting Married: 9 Weeks – Shopping

    We were able to get a lot of things done this past week.

    Monday, my sister took her daughters, my two junior bridesmaids, to get their dresses. I was able to meet up with them and give my input on styles and such. They are going to be so lovely, I can’t wait to see them when the dresses are altered and they have their hair done up.

    After we left the dress shop, I stopped at Hobby Lobby to see what kind of stands they had for Unity Candles. Let me tell you, they were just pitiful. There was nothing really beautiful. I’ve got a more earthy turn and the ones they had were either glass with gem embellishments or metal with big random hearts all over. Definitely not my style at all.  I shared my dismay with Matt who immediately began searching online for one that would be a better fit.

    He found something so suited to what I wanted, it was fabulous. I ordered a set and it should be here by the beginning of May! I don’t want to share it, but here is the shop on Etsy. She has some other lovely things.

    Matt and I both had Thursday off and so decided to spend the day getting some other shopping done together. The plan was to find his clothes for the wedding (I’m fairly taken care of) and then find some cheap rings for the ceremony.  We went to JCPenney for the clothes and found just about everything we needed! Our bridal party are wearing/alternating of sorts, the wedding colors, and the thought was that to make Matt stand out more, we would have him all in red and then tan khakis. We easily found a red bow tie, but could not find a good fitting red shirt to match. So, Matt decided he’d rather stand out more by wearing a white shirt with the red accents. There’s nothing more frustrating than looking at wedding pictures and not being able to tell the groom apart from the rest of the guys. This would’ve been a problem because the best man (Matt’s brother Adam) would’ve been dressed almost the same as Matt. This will definitely keep him distinguishable.

    Did you know that suspenders are hard to find? I didn’t think they would be, what with the hipster culture going on right now. We are not hipster, but you plan on things being easy to find and when they aren’t, that’s frustrating. So, I went to my default problem-solving website to find what I needed. And, voila! Etsy pulled through again. Albeit, a little more pricey (more than half what the rest of Matt’s outfit cost!!), but I found what I was looking for.

    week09 suspendersThe shop owner is currently on vacation until the end of April, probably sewing up Matt’s suspenders! 😀 I can’t wait to see them in person. I hope they look as wonderful as I think they will.

    We finished up with the clothes and on a whim, stopped by the jewelry selection. We found just what we were looking for, probably cheaper than we could’ve found elsewhere too! It took some convincing, but we finally got the lady to understand that we weren’t looking for anything spectacular. See, Matt’s job requires him to be jewelry-free, including wedding bands. He needs something he can easily take off and put back on. He also needs something that isn’t so expensive that if he loses it, we’re devastated financially. We are willing to pay for certain aspects of this wedding, but other parts are just not a big deal to us. For me, we found a simple, narrow sterling silver band that will sit beautiful next to my white gold engagement ring. Maybe for our anniversary, we’ll spring for the matching band to my engagement ring, but it’s not essential. We just need something for the wedding. What we found cost us just over $75 together! I like that kind of spending.

    Might not be valuable to the world, but they're precious to us!
    Might not be valuable to the world, but they’re precious to us!

    While I’ve got you, I’ll let you in on a secret.

    I was at Target and found this lovely little glass pitcher, the kind with a spigot on the bottom for easy dispensing. It is very sweet. I wanted to add it to our registry, but I didn’t have time to go all the way back to the counter to get a scanner gun configured and go back to scan it and then leave again. It would’ve been a pain. But recently, I added the Target app to my Android. I signed in to my registry on my phone and found this handy-dandy bar code icon at the top of the screen. I touched it and amazingly, I could scan the barcode of the pitcher through my camera. In just a few moments, the pitcher was now on our registry! Remarkable! I was so excited that, had I had more time, I might have run around the store to add some more things on it, but I’m so glad to know that I can do this in the future. You can also manage your registry from there (increasing item counts and such. It’s a great tool. The only thing I couldn’t do was remove an item, but when I got to a computer, I could do that. Anyway, take that knowledge and go with it, m’dears! Oh, and remember that you have to scan the barcode on the actual item, not the one on the shelf with the price. Why they can’t work that out to be the same, I don’t know, but it’s ok. We still love them.

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    I’m getting married to my, you guessed it, best friend on June 1st, 2013! Matt and I are super-excited and since we have quite a bit of time to plan this thing, I decided it’d be fun to blog about it. Well, maybe not always fun, but at least informative and it might give me a welcome distraction. You can find all the posts by clicking the “Getting Married” tab on the right of this page, or by clicking here. Thanks for stopping by!

    My Pinterest Wedding Board

    Our Wedding Website on WeddingWire.com

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  • Getting Married: 10 Weeks – Fitting in Lithuanian

    70 Days and 10 Weeks. Wow! The time is getting so close!

    This past Sunday, Matt and I met with and booked an awesome DJ! I’ll have some more info up for you after the wedding about DJ B. We are pretty pleased with our pick. He was very organized, detailed, and personable. And he could laugh. That’s always a good sign.

    Tuesday night, Mom and I lugged my wedding dress and accessory clothing to David’s Bridal for my first fitting! It was pretty fun and informative. My dress is so gorgeous and detailed…that means alterations are going to be a bear. We actually have to go back at the end of April for a Part Two because she could only focus on the top part and not the hem. That’s right. I might be long-waisted, but I’m still short and the back was way too loose. The dress looked so pretty when I first tried it on, but it felt wonderful after she clipped it up to the right dimensions on the top.

    Who is this she? Her name is Grazina. From Lithuania and bearing a thick Eastern European accent – she was just what I wanted in a seamstress.  When we bought the dress, we also bought a slip to go under it. It had tulle and a couple layers to make the dress poof out a bit more. When I tried it on for the fitting, Grazina decided that it was too much and found one with tulle only towards the bottom. It fit so much better. Alas, that one was also too long, so she will probably have to alter that as well. But, at least we didn’t have to pay for the second one; she let us swap out the first one.

    I have been putting the finishing touches on the design for some of the favors. We are having a couple different favor choices and I love the variety of the reception so far. We have several cake flavors, different favors, and the decorations are going to be cockamamie – just my style. The music too, will exactly suit our taste, spanning a few decades. I absolutely can’t wait!

    I got a text from both my bridesmatrons. My MOH, Lanna, found her dress and it is so lovely! Amy sent me a picture of the dress she found for her daughter who is my flower girl. Both of those dresses are in yellow and Amy found red shoes to match. I know she is going to be so amazingly adorable. My sister is going to take my nieces out, who are my junior bridesmaids, to find their dresses hopefully this week.

    Things are starting to come together and the RSVP’s are coming in too!  I am so excited for all of this and hope that I don’t get too stressed out throughout the next 70 days. I’m so glad that Matt and I decided to stay home after the wedding if only just to be able to relax and recoup from all the planning and the day. I know that I will be exhausted.

    Oh, I bought a necklace to wear with my dress. I won’t post which one it is, but here is the link to the shop. I think her jewelry is darling!

    I will leave you with another shop to peruse. I’ve been following this Meg Duerksen’s blog for about a year now. She has creative women come to her done-up barn once a month for a crafting weekend and they get crazy! She is a Christian and inspires me in so many ways. She just reopened her online shop, so I think you should check it out.

    This next week will be – shopping for Matt’s outfit and our wedding bands! Yay!

    —————————–

    I’m getting married to my, you guessed it, best friend on June 1st, 2013! Matt and I are super-excited and since we have quite a bit of time to plan this thing, I decided it’d be fun to blog about it. Well, maybe not always fun, but at least informative and it might give me a welcome distraction. You can find all the posts by clicking the “Getting Married” tab on the right of this page, or by clicking here. Thanks for stopping by!

    My Pinterest Wedding Board

    Our Wedding Website on WeddingWire.com

    Related articles

  • Getting Married: 11 Weeks – DIY Invitations #3

    I can’t believe it, but the invitations are finally finished and they were sent out early this week. I am all about helping struggling businesses and I just want to say, “Kudos to the USPS!” Mom dropped off the invites to the post office on Tuesday afternoon. The AFTERNOON people! And I was tagged in a friend’s photo of them on Facebook by late Wednesday morning! Unreal! Friends in Kentucky even got theirs the next day and RSVP’d and everything!

    I’m so pumped. We chose to have our RSVP’s go through our wedding website (http://weddingwire.com/MattandSarahMartin/) and I get an email every time someone uses it. I know about half the people, so some names are a little bit fuzzy for me, but I know Matt will be excited when he sees them.

    Funny story. We had to make our reception RSVP only since we have such a large family population coming. It’s been sad to have to cross some people off our list, but we hope they can still make it to the wedding ceremony. Anyway, since we were sending invites to some people even though they weren’t going to the reception, I had typed up two lists for my bridesmaids to write from so we didn’t mix up who got a reception card and who didn’t. The last two weeks have been haywire for me. I work 54 hours last week alone and this week was even more. I was so wiped out typing up the lists that I made a couple of typos.

    No, Amy, it wasn’t your fault (even though there were a few envelope casualties). I misspelled the first names of a couple of Matt’s guests. “Arron” became “Aaron.” So, sorry, but it would be a common mistake, I’m sure. “Bob” became “Bon” and we had quite a lot of fun making James Bond-esque jokes. Yes, that we did.

    The topper was my grandmother, whose last name I mistyped. She has such an easy last name too, but there it was, written on the envelope as “Dorothy Book.” I am baffled that it even got to her considering I put her in Latrobe, Ohio instead of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. I guess it’s a blessing that I got the zip code right. Another kudos to the USPS! Y’all are beasts!

    On to what I’m sure you’re really here for. As a recap, let me point you back to a few other posts in this series.

    Week 37 – DIY Invitations, Week 20 – DIY Invitations #2, and Week 15 – Review: The Darkroom.

    Despite the work it took, I had a lot of fun making these. It was my first time doing anything on this scale. I perused online for some ideas and tips, but most of it just came from my brain. I never know how things will turn out when they come from my brain, but I am really pleased with these. Here we go.

    week 11 invite front

    Sorry for the shadow at the bottom. I’m not very skilled at photo-taking with my phone yet. The concept of lighting is nearly lost on me. I saw something very similar to this stamp set on another website. I may have linked to it in the Week 37 post, but I can’t remember. It’s a two-stamp set. One has our names in a pretty font, and the other is the ampersand. These, I actually cut myself out of a rubber pad and glued onto a block of wood to use for pressing. It took a long time to cut out and a long time to get comfortable using, but it is probably my favorite part of the invitation. The bird in a tree stamp was a quick buy from Hobby Lobby. I fell in love.

    week 11 invite inside

    Color blocking has been real popular in recent seasons. I wanted the invitation to focus on this kind of style. I bought both of these stamps at Michaels – the M came from one of the dollar bins. It was perfect, except that the indents on the side of the stamp were really on the top and bottom and didn’t help with comfort when using it. Of course, I did stamp something 1,776 times for these final invitations so that might have been a factor as well. We did the math, and it turned out mighty patriotic, so I guess it’s all for good. 🙂 The wildflower stamp at the top was so worn by the time I finished, you could barely see the black “preview” image on the top of it.

    week 11 invite insert

    Just to be clear, I faded out my phone number on the RSVP cards. I don’t want random people getting my number and harassing me. I already get that dumb “The FBI reports an increase of break-ins in your area…blah blah blah” message all the time on my mobile. I don’t need other misery with it. These are just standard cream paper glued to yellow cardstock glued to red cardstock. Very easy. Glue sticks are wonderful. Next!

    week 11 stamps

    The USPS comes out with new lovey stamps right around February. I managed to get last year’s Love ribbon Forever stamps AND a couple of weeks later got this year’s heart envelope stamps. I like these way better than the dorky wedding ones. No offense if you like those. Plus, these match one of our colors. 😀 I ordered the heart envelope ones through the USPS website and they came in the mail super-quick. That’s kudos #3 for you USPS…right? #4? #16? Oh, I can’t keep track.

    week 11 invite back

    Our faith is so very important to us. We thank God for the blessing He has given us in each other and our relationship. This day is one of many days to celebrate, rejoice and be glad in it and who He is – the Giver of good things.

    —————————–

    I’m getting married to my, you guessed it, best friend on June 1st, 2013! Matt and I are super-excited and since we have quite a bit of time to plan this thing, I decided it’d be fun to blog about it. Well, maybe not always fun, but at least informative and it might give me a welcome distraction. You can find all the posts by clicking the “Getting Married” tab on the right of this page, or by clicking here. Thanks for stopping by!

    My Pinterest Wedding Board

    Our Wedding Website on WeddingWire.com

    Related articles