Reaching Centerpiece Peace

As I'm guessing any reading this are avid wedding blog readers, you know that centerpieces can often break the bank. When Rebecca and I were planning our wedding we'd spend time figuring out our budget and things we wanted to spend money on, then go bang our heads into the wall when we realized that we forgot to budget for centerpieces. If there's one business I'd now like to get into, it's the centerpiece business. Centerpiece business owners should probably just go ahead and read a different post because this isn't going to pretty.

So, let's think of a business model. What's something that people don't really care about all that much, but feel obligated to spend tons of money on? What's something that people don't REALLY know the cost of so we can just say it's SUPER expensive? What's something we can get for cheap, but can mark up 1000%? What's something that people could most likely do themselves, but once they really think about doing it themselves they'll say "meh, let's just pay someone else to worry about this!"? CENTERPIECES! Let's do this! We'll make a killing!

I reached inner centerpiece peace during a conversation with Rebecca. A moment of clarity during our planning. If you're looking to save a buck you only have to spend enough to make your centerpieces forgettable. We'll never be able to afford enough to make guests go home and say "damn those were beautiful elegant centerpieces" - so we just wanted to spend enough to make guests go home without saying "damn those were the stupidest/ugliest centerpieces". Just make them forgettable! That being said, I think we came up with great centerpieces, that would be classy, nice, and perhaps just 1 notch up from unforgettable.

We quickly decided not to have flowers arrangements. It was just not in our budget. We could go to the flower market and get wholesale flowers, but we questioned if they'd survive a 4 hour drive the day before the wedding and if they'd really look fresh. Plus we questioned if we'd want to actually arrange the flowers. We were lucky enough to be married in a garden, and then have our dinner/reception in an outdoor area surrounded by flowers and fresh herbs. We didn't need to spend the money on the flowers. We decided that we wanted to decorate with light. I just think there's something nice about a candle, especially at an outdoor wedding.

We went out and we found affordable glass vases and candles. Rebecca found awesome ceramic birds at a great price, and spray painted them to give them the vintage feel. Then we hit ebay and found vintage photo frames that Rebecca spruced up with high gloss yellow spray paint. Did I forget to tell you guys that I'm married to Banksy? So much spray painting before the wedding!

Our final centerpiece arrangement I think was a masterpiece. I think it was exactly what we wanted. Something pretty, casually chic, with a pop of diy. The vases were ultimately a bit beautifully forgettable, but we made our centerpieces memorable by our guests by injecting some of ourselves into the table. The birds and the picture frames that had our table numbers, which were funny pictures of our puppy. He couldn't be at our wedding, so we wanted him there somehow. Here are some pictures of our tables:

Lastly, I just want to mention that our centerpieces are now for sale! We've sold the birds, but everything else is still available. We have 12 large vases (I think they are like 20" tall), 33 smaller bubble looking vases, and 8 picture frames. Email me if you want prices! Let us help you reach CenterPEACE-of-Mind!

DIY? Ok, np!

This weekend we saw a major DIY win at the Temple of Groom household. Very exciting when one of these diy projects actually works as planned.

We finally crossed the escort card board off our list. Not going to lie, Rebecca did most of this project, but I was there when we bought everything and I'd like to think I helped out a lot.

Saturday morning was spent at Michael's getting our ketubah put on stretchers and wandering through the aisles for a few hours. One of the larger items on our to-do list is the escort card board.

Obligatory rant: Okay look, I get that there needs to be escort cards, or some sort of cards that tell everyone where they should sit. I just think it's one of those things that we easily start to stress about. Oooh, what's a cool way to tell people where to sit? Look, I love all the little details as much as the next guy, strike that, MORE than the next guy - because I have a wedding blog and the "next guy" doesn't. It just seems like one of those details now where we have to think about what we're going to do, and make it look nice and presentable, because if we DON'T have it, mass chaos ensues. And you know what, I will say this, I wasn't incredibly helpful during the planning stages of our escort card board. Instead of having a definitive idea, and executing it, Rebecca shot so many ideas my way. And you know what? I liked them all. They were all fine. It was something I just wanted to get done, and I didn't really care what the finished product was: cute little paper chairs with people's names printed on them, just printed out little cards, etc etc etc... It was something that I said, and I admit this goes against the nature of my blog, "If you like it, I'm totally behind you". That being said, I do love the end result.

So here's what we got:

Michael's: 18x24 picture frame (50% off!), magnets, small paper flowers, spray paint, chalkboard spray paint

Home Depot: large piece of sheet metal

When we got home I fixed the pool shed roof that I fell through a couple months ago and Rebecca started spray painting the picture frame a high gloss white. Then she cut sheet metal down to 18x24 and sprayed it with chalkboard paint.

I came in with an 18x24 piece of plywood that we mounted the sheet metal onto and then fit it into the frame! "We" made an awesome framed magnetic chalkboard. Then Rebecca took the small paper flowers glued them onto the magnets. Once we have our guest list finalized and our seating charts done, I'll print names out on small pieces of paper and we'll use the flower magnets to put them on the chalkboard.

Sure we could have bought something exactly like this online w/o having to spend a day working on it, but we have such a connection to this damn chalk board now! It's great. At the end of the day we did save money too. We love it. We'll hang it in our kitchen when the wedding is over. Who would have thought, I'd love an escort board?

It's just nice to have a DIY win!

Gocco-a-No No

I mentioned last week in my post about string lights that some things are just going to defeat me when it comes to wedding planning. We took the smarter route with our string lights, and at the end of the day it will prove to be an excellent decision. Some things I guess are just going to be FDDIY (fucking don't do it yourself!) projects for me. I'd love to tell you the next chapter in the story of getting completely OWNED by one of our wedding ideas.

Pretty much EXACTLY a year ago I somehow got it in my head that not only was I going to design the save-the-dates, the wedding invitations, the programs (if we had them), and the thank you cards, but I was also going to do the printing all by myself as well. Then in a stupid fucking game of one-ups-manship with MYSELF I raised the stakes and decided to screen print the invitations as well. "Oh, computer printers are for chumps. When people get our screen printed invitations and can feel the ink on the paper, they'll be so impressed." So, like a naive little idiot I packed my bag and began trekking through the internet to far and distant lands to buy a Gocco machine. (cue the Japanese gong) The little machine looks incredible. To this day, I'm still very very intrigued by it. It's like an easy bake oven meets a serious screen printer. I did my research... I read that I needed lots of bulbs, I read that I needed lots of screens, I read that I needed lots of inks.... so I found them all.... from a nice man in Japan. I was prepared. Nobody was going to pry that Gocco ebay auction from this groomzilla. I woke up at 3am to outbid people at the last possible second. After my win, too giddy to go back to sleep.

I got the machine a few weeks later, and even took pictures unpacking the highly coveted printer from the cardboard boxes with text in a different language. I held off on posting said pictures because I figured it would make more sense to post a big huge "these are my gocco-ed wedding invites" post. The Gocco was our first wedding related purchase. In many ways it kicked off wedding planning. It summoned the beginning of the wedding planning chapter of my life (cue the gong).

Months passed and I continued to do research about Gocco tips. Before using screens, put them in the fridge or the freezer, make carbon/photo copies of what you want to print - computer print outs won't work. I was preparing myself while Goco-zilla silently slept in his cardboard box in the linen closet. When it was time to start thinking about printing the save-the-date Rebecca and I finally decided on an idea that proved to be much too intricate and complex to screen print. It was much too graphic (see our STD here). Rather than setting ourselves up for inevitable failure we let Goco continue to sleep in his lair and got the STDs printed at an eco-friendly printing company.

So the STDs went out and I immediately began preparing for the wedding invitations. I designed our invitation with the Gocco in mind simpler design with only 2-3 colors needed. Here is where the problem beings to occur. I don't know the first thing about actually printing anything (screen printing). I guess I'm the equivalent of an armchair quarterback for photoshopping invitations... sure I know the ins and outs of photoshop/illustrator and I get by with what I believe to be an above average knowledge of photoshop & illustrator, but I could never go pro. I don't know enough about graphic design. Going into the design phase of the invitation here's what I believed would happen. We'd use grey paper purchased at a store, I would print black, white, and purple onto the invitation.

I finished the design for the main invitation card and figured we should buy paper asap because I knew the actual printing would be a arduous trial-and-error project that would take time to perfect. So we made our way to Paper Source with a computer print out of our invitation - sooo ahead of the ball, nearly 2 months before invitations needed to be sent.

The Paper Source girl ruined everything. Well she saved everything too, just depending which side you're rooting for. If you were rooting for the DIY miracle Goco win, as I was, tough luck. This is where my lack of experience came to bite me in the ass. She started throwing out terms like bleed, negative bleed, offset this and that jibber jabber that. I was clearly overmatched. I was so proud of myself when I told her that I made the image larger than it should be to compensate for borderless printing. But then she asked what I was planning to do for the white text if the paper is gray. Um... just use white ink? I was then informed that there's no such thing as white ink. Is that true? I mean, it makes sense I guess. I just assumed that the ink was like paint. There's white paint. So then we got schooled in the ways of screen printing. To do my design we'd have to get a white piece of paper Gocco it gray leaving the white text un-Gocco-ed. Holy shit... seriously? That would never work. I kind of went dead behind the eyes. The rest of her telling me how difficult my design (that took me about 2 weeks) would take was falling on deaf ears. It was like listening to someone underwater....just plain ol' screwed.

Then Ms. Paper Source came to the rescue. She said that my design was so nice, why don't I just have it professionally printed at her friend's printing company for less than I ever imagined it would cost to have something printed professionally. Granted, we went for the cheaper laser printer method instead of having them screen printed by a professional. It was a good idea to do this, but I was so so dejected. Just felt like I was beaten despite the fact that it was pretty much a win - a win meaning less work/stress for us and not TOO much more expensive.

Over the next week or so I finished all of our designs - sent them to the printer and got a proof. The Gocco watched silently from afar judging me. We decided to buy a nice paper that had a shimmer to it, and have our invitations printed on that instead of just plain white paper. When printed on plain nice heavy stock - the invitation looked a little dead. With the shimmer paper it gave it a pop and made it feel a little less "home printer-y". Seriously, like two days after approving the proof and letting the company know they should commence printing I left the shop with our invitations. It would have taken me months to screen print them.

So, in the end it all worked out. Our invitations are BEAUTIFUL. I really and truly effing love them. I'm so proud that I designed them, Rebecca tied them with ribbon, we printed our envelopes, stuffed em up, and mailed them out. I'm REALLY really pleased, and I still have that sense of DIY accomplishment. There's just a slight part of me that died the day my hopes of Gocco-ing were exterminated, but it was for the best. I guess the real moral of the story is: Sure DIY, but be realistic... and if you can PDIY (partly do it yourself) that's not such a bad thing either. We still saved a boatload of money!

SO my Gocco is going up for sale (cue the Japanese gong)! I know I didn't exactly paint a great picture of it with this post, but it's right for SOMEONE - just not me. I bought a package with a bunch of bulbs and screens and like 30 inks. I've got it all. If you're interested, email me. Look the things are popular for a reason. They're supposedly awesome - I just can't vouch for them!

LASTLY, I wanted to post some quick low quality pics of our invitations. When we take actual nice pictures I'll post them too, but for now I wanted to show them to you all!

Here's what's going on:

Wow, I'm in awe of how wedding bloggers can juggle daily life, work, wedding planning, and STILL find time to blog. Not only do some of you find time to blog, but yo also find time to find awesome and interesting wedding stuff online, THEN blog about it! [slow clap that builds to a standing ovation] I have not been that good! Perhaps I overvalue sleep.

So, we're steadily moving forward with our wedding plans. It's 165 days away. Which seems like such a short amount of time, but I've realized as friends have gotten engaged then married within the time we've been engaged, is plenty of time to get things done. No need to panic about things that aren't done yet!

We've made some progress in the last couple weeks or so! As you've read, we finished registering which took way longer than expected. We also came up with the idea for our E-Session photographs (you'll have to wait and see). I think we potentially found our wedding ceremony musicians, and our reception DJ. OH! I bought my wedding suit! That was awesome. Thanks to a blogger named BowieBride (http://www.bowiebride.com/) who gave me the tip that Barney's Warehouse sale was happening. The suit is beautiful. As soon as I can fit into it, I'll take pictures. Kidding, I can fit.... kind of. Okay, I confess, I bought a suit that has pants that are a little snug. It's my inspiration to lose weight....it's working. Anyway - it's a Michael Kors 3 piece suit. Awesome. Now I just need to find a great shirt, and my sneakers.

On our plate right now we're thinking about videography. I think I came up with one particularly great way to cut costs which I'll share with you later if it comes to fruition. One thing I decided I'm going to do to help combat the astronomical rates I've seen on some of these videographer websites is edit the footage on my own. I know that it's most likely a LOT to chew, but I think that I could easily lay "I had the time of my life" over some reception footage as well as the next guy. Capturing moments on video has always been very important to my family so it's something we need to book, but we're having trouble budgeting it. My dad has been converting all our family videos to DVD and he's been sending me copies. It's been awesome to watch them all, and it makes me realize we really need a videographer.

We're also trying to figure out what our tables are going to look like. I'd really like to go with that "casually eclectic looks effortless but really wasn't" tablescape. SO, at some point we're going to hit up some flea markets and look for cool mismatched vases and potential knickknacks. Also, we're thinking more candles - less flowers.

Which leads me to the next morsel of business! We're going down to the flower district this weekend. Any fellow wedding bloggers out there want to meet us? We'll most likely buy our chuppa poles - and I think Rebecca wants to get some ideas for flowers to carry. I also think she wants to buy flower seed to potentially make her own bouquet.

I know I'm forgetting a whole bunch of stuff we're doing. We need to start designing our invitations. I'm so worried I've bitten off more than I can chew with Gocco. I know we'll eventually understand it, then fall in love with it - I'm just apprehensive. We also need to make time to get up to our wedding venue and meet with rental houses about certain things. Wow.

Oh man... So much to do. Anxiety and panic setting in. Overtaking body. I need a brown paper bag to breathe into. Maybe I can find a cool vintagey decorated one on etsy, or better yet regretsy.

DIY Save the Dates & a short rant

I've been working on these "Save the Dates" all day today because all of a sudden it feels like we're behind. We're still a few days shy of 8 months away but it seems like other people who have weddings AFTER ours have their stuff (not the original word I was going for) together.

To those people I say, "Stop it. Seriously, relax. You're making us all look bad. You've got more than 8 months till you're wedding and you're already over prepared. Just enjoy being engaged. Please. My parents already have me thinking the wedding is falling apart, and my relatives can't believe I haven't told them where to book hotel rooms yet. So stop. Everyone benefits. You get a few days away from yelling at vendors, and I get an anxiety free day where I realize we have a lot of time left."

Anyway - I think the save the dates are coming along nicely. I should be finished soon, and then can jump onto stressing about something else. How is it possible that I was the one that wanted the wedding! Rebecca would have been fine eloping! That's not looking so bad right now. Courthouse pictures could be nice w/ our photographers shooting it!

PS. If you aren't like us (idiots) and just want a ready-made Save The Date, check this cool one out from The Wedding Chicks by clicking here.

Attending a Wedding While Planning a Wedding

This past weekend I attended a wedding while planning a wedding for the first time. It's an entirely different ballgame. You assess and critique EVERYTHING. The usual Post-Wedding Hungover version of myself normally has no clue what my fiance is talking about the next morning when she remembers the dresses, the centerpieces, the programs, etc. The morning after, I'm lucky if I remember the wedding colors, and am doubly lucky if I don't puke from the overexertion of trying to remember colors mixed w/ alcohol poisoning. I kid, I kid...

Even though I drank as much as I normally do this last weekend, I can recall every detail of the wedding. I assume that's because this is the first time I really SAW them. Even though we got drunk enough for Ms. Temple of Groom to randomly talk in a renaissance era accent (I'm not joking, at one point she couldn't find me so she was asking all our friends where her "liege"was) I remember everything. I feel like a superhero after the accident that gave him all of his super powers. In this case imagine a giant wedding planning book dropping on me from space in a vineyard (that's where the wedding took place). I climb out in a tattered suit and yell "I REMEMBER EVERY DETAIL!!!! THE COLORS WERE BURNT ORANGE AND CREAM! PASS ME ANOTHER FRIED RISOTTO BALL!!!" I admit, not the sexiest superpower, but it's a start.

Anyway, yes, attending a wedding while you're in the early planning stages is totally a different experience and it's actually an extremely beneficial experience too. You're looking for new ideas, seeing what worked, seeing what didn't work. You learn so much. Perhaps the best thing I saw at this wedding was the table assignment cards. Instead of getting a piece of paper w/ your name and table assignment on it, the bride and groom wrote a really heartfelt letter to each person/couple. It was such a nice touch. I've never seen that before. What are the rules about stealing this idea?! Another great tidbit I learned from the wedding was born from tragedy. Apparently before the reception the venue noticed the centerpieces kept blowing over (the winds in central CA are pretty gusty!) so the bride had them pull the centerpieces from the tables. That taught us if we're going to DIY our centerpieces, and have an outdoor wedding, we need to take wind into consideration. Also it showed me that a table didn't look lost w/o a grand centerpiece. A centerpiece can be small, simple, classy, and sturdy and be just fine! Lastly, Rebecca and I have always worried about planning something after the reception, or having ideas for our friends who want to afterparty. After the reception last Saturday we realized we no longer have to worry about that. If you have booze hungry adults they will find alcohol on their own. We got them as far as we needed to take them, they are responsible for the rest. WE were able to find the one bar still open in Solvang w/o the bride and groom worrying about us! So we'll do the same.

Mason Jars = Awesome

Does anyone else think mason jars are awesome?
I may need to "borrow" this idea! I think this looks so cool. Our wedding is at night so the more candles/twinkle lights I think the better. I'm thinking we'll go to a flea market and buy a bunch of different types of jars and do a variation of this idea!

Video Save-The-Dates?

Thanks to Maria for sending this one to me. I think a video Save-The-Date is a cool idea. The two in the video below did a great job! I guess you would send everyone a dvd? Or maybe just an email with a youtube link? I wonder how the older guests would view it. True story, I burned a copy of a video onto a DVD for an older woman a couple weeks ago, and when I handed the dvd to her it took her about 10 minutes to understand that she could put it into her dvd player or computer and watch a video. She kept thinking it was pictures on a cd. I kept saying "no, it's video", you can watch a movie on it. I guess I should have just said this in an old timey voice: "It's talkies, see... moving pictures, see! You get me? Put this in your dvd box and you'll have a real gas!"

Anyway - check out the youtube save the date and let me know what you think!

Answer for the DIY Brides/Grooms:

I'm back to answer my Gocco question I posed to the DIY Brides! I did some real hard-hitting, nose-to-the-grindstone research, and now I'm considering making my first wedding purchase/investment. Before I do, I wanted to get your feedback/opinions.

A Gocco (pronounced go-cko) is a Japanese toy that has quickly become an essential tool for print making of all types. People love to use it for invitations, customizing notepads, printing on fabrics, etc. Basically it looks like the equivalent of an easy bake oven, but it actually can be used professionally. (side note: it'd be hilarious if you could actually use an easy bake oven in a professional way) You design an image on your computer, print it out, insert it into the Gocco to make the screen, then print the invitations with real ink on the Gocco. The advantage of using the Gocco instead of a regular high end photo printer is that the invitations will feel extremely professional with the ink sitting on top of the paper.

Here's are some invitations I found online that used the Gocco:

(all invites except for the bottom right corner done by 'Things Are Better With A Parrott')

And here's a great Gocco tutorial video I found:

So there's your answer! What do you think I should do? It's possible to find used Goccos on craigslist, ebay, and some retailers sell them. My guess is after all is said and done the unit (with inks, bulbs, screens, etc) would cost around $200-$275. Additionally, after we use it, we could resell it. Is that too much for DIY invitations? Should we stick to photoshop (consider printing prices here too though!)? Has anyone attempted to use a Gocco? What do you think, what should I do?

Question for the DIY Brides:

What is a Gocco, and do I want one?!

On so many wedding blogs I see women going nuts because they just got their new gocco. I've even gone to the Gocco website and looked at them - all I understand is that it's some kind of Japanese printing machine.

Help me! What's it do? How do you use it? Do I need it? How do you pronounce the name?! What makes it better than using photoshop/illustrator and printing on a high end printer?

Don't just send me the wiki link, I want to hear from you if you've got one! Do you like it? Did you use it?

Teach me your ways! I feel left out of the loop on this one!