Hey That’s A Nice Life

OK. We did that thing I’ve been mentioning on and off for awhile now. We bought a house. We actually bought it a couple of months ago, I’ve just neglected to write about it because I was busy doing it.

It is, in fact, a little cottage just like I had been dreaming of, and with that little cottage goes plenty of work. Our house is a 1939 brick cape cod with 3 or 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms (I say 3 or 4 because at some point a closet was removed from one of the bedrooms to make a bigger bathroom). We bought it on Oct. 22 and moved about a month later - just before Thanksgiving when we hosted 6 family members.

Here’s a picture of us on the day of our closing:

Don and Susan Whiteside, October 2010

I started this blog when I was planning our wedding. Last weekend we celebrated our one year anniversary. At an art show. In Richmond. Where it was 98 degrees. While I was a little unhappy with the chilly temps and overcast sky on our wedding day, I had to admit it was a lot better than the heat and humidity this year. 

Here we are posing in our booth on the morning of May 2, 2010 - one year after our lovely wedding.

The traditional gift for a one year anniversary is paper. I made a faux Washington Post cover for Don with the headline ”Virginia Couple Sentenced to 99 to Life,” a nod to the inscriptions on our wedding bands. I also gave him tickets to see Lyle Lovett who wrote the song “She’s No Lady She’s Your Wife” which was the original source of the inscriptions.

Don gave me the beautiful Tina Palmer oil on plaster on canvas painting below.  I love it. A lot.

Also, back in April I finally ordered our wedding album. We used a photo book website, Blurb.com, and I am very pleased with the product.

Last year on May 2 it was 85 degrees in Ocean City. When it came time to think about how to make the wedding programs, we had no idea what the weather had in store for us.  Just in case it was hot, we decided on program fans so the guests could fan themselves after crossing the dune and sitting in the potentially hot sun without shade.

Well, if you’ve looked at the weather forecast, you’ll know that’s probably not necessary. 

BUT, they’re done.  I took a picture but really can’t bring myself to upload it right now … so you’ll just have to imagine for now.  The paper matches our invitation suite and they are two sided with a stick in the middle to make the fan.  The first side has the standard wedding ceremony stuff, but the second side is a surprise (tip: bring a pen or pencil).

This turned out to be one of the harder DIY projects.  Gluing the two heavy, coated papers together with a stick in the middle was sort-of a challenge.  Even though my original prototype came out nice and straight, all the fans we made last week turned out a little wavy.  Nonetheless, they are done and they look good.  Many thanks to Katy, Melane and Kate for helping us out.

The RSVP date has come and gone allowing me to finish up the seating charts and table cards. 

I have to say, making the seating chart was the hardest task of wedding planning yet.  Thankfully, I used this great tool on the Martha Stewart web site (I think they are actually the same tools used on the Wedding Channel) to map out the tables.  Don thinks it would have been easier to make index cards and map it out in that way first … and I can see the logic.  BUT, since I was tracking our guest list and responses with the other tools on Martha’s site, SHE organized everything for me and that made it as simple as possible.  Of course, by SHE I mean that Martha herself - not a team of 25 Web developers - helped out.  Right?

Turns out, as simple as possible is not all that simple.  Some tables were really easy - people from work, my closest local friends, Don’s group of friends from Miami.  But there were some people who just won’t know that many people there besides the two of us and I wanted to be sure to put everyone at tables where they would have fun.  Meeting new people is fun, right?

Here’s a sneak peek at a few table cards (you’ll notice there are no duplicate tables below, so you can’t figure out who you’re sitting with yet!):

In the top left corner, you’ll see the table name the guest(s) is seated at, and in the lower right hand corner is the guest’s name.  The cards are held in place by shell magnets (these were made by gluing a rare earth (very strong) magnet onto a sea shell - a lot harder than it sounds, much to my surprise).  The table names are beaches where Don and I have vacationed / visited.  There are 13 tables in total, with 105 guests expected at this time.

I decided many months ago that I would not be ordering flowers for the wedding.  I wanted to try my hand my making my own bouquet and Nice Mama missed her calling in life as a florist.

That left a question about what the men would wear for boutonnieres and the women as corsages.  As I started researching coastal weddings on the Knot and Martha Stewart I found lots of great choices made from shells.

I loved the concept, but it was hard for me to figure out how to put them together and I tried a few concepts. I finally figured out the best way and was able to make three completely different kinds of options.

First, there is very simple version for those who will serve an official role at the wedding or reception - our readers, toasters and the mistress of ceremonies. 

Then there are the boutonnieres for Don (the starfish pictured below) and my dad, his dad, his brother and his brother’s partner (all different types of shells).

Finally, I used very small white shells to make the corsages for my mom and Don’s mom (this picture is a little blurry).

I really like how they turned out.  What do you think?  Will anyone miss the flowers?

As I mentioned yesterday, my friends threw a fabulous shower for me on Saturday, March 28.  I did not, however, mention that my office also held a shower the day before.   So it was a whole weekend of celebrations and gifts … and that means a pile of thank you notes to write.

The weekend started at 3 p.m. on Friday when my co-worker Tori and my boss Susan threw a shower at the office.  A co-ed shower, actually … so Don was able to attend.  We had a great time.  There was lots of champagne and really delicious desserts.  And, of course, presents.  Susan also made a very sweet toast.  The shower theme was “Sunrise to Sunset” and it was a time of day shower (where everyone picked a time and brought something that Don and I could use at that hour of the day).  Very fun!

The next morning, my friend Kelly came to whisk me off for a mani/pedi while Jaimie, Lynda, Katy and Dawn stayed at my house to set up for the next bridal shower.  We had about 22 women there!  The house looked great.  Jaimie’s theme was Margaritaville and they went all out with a big margarita maker, a themed cake, key lime punch - even tattoos for all the girls.  That may have been everyone’s favorite part.

Here’s a picture of me with Jaimie and Lynda:

Before we opened presents, we played “How well does Susan know the groom.”  I did pretty well, only getting one answer totally wrong and offering “It’s either THIS or THIS” for a couple of answers.  Sadly, no one else was very good at picking Don’s answers.  There were 15 questions and the winner (my cousin Amy) got 5 of them correct.

After the game we opened presents (during which the guests played Wedding Gift Bingo) and then we cut into the beautiful cake.

It was a really great weekend.  Even though I was very self conscious about opening the gifts while everyone watched, I was comfortable and relaxed all weekend.  

Here’s a picture of me and Dawn after the festivities had ended:

So, now I’m working on those thank you notes.  And, you won’t be surprised to read, I made the cards myself about a month ago.  Here’s a shot:

I bought the card stock and matching envelopes at Michael’s.  The image is a photograph Don took when we shot the Save the Date cards.  We printed two images per 4 x6 photograph and cut them in half.  Then I used photo tape to adhere them to the cards.  I hope to get them all written and mailed by the end of the weekend.

Last weekend my friends threw a wonderful bridal shower for me (more about that later).  Naturally, my Mom was here for the occasion and she spent the night.  She told me before she came that she wanted to work on a wedding project while she was here.  I decided that a good task for us to tackle would be the menu cards.

There was some prep work to be done before she arrived.  First I designed the page so that we’d get three menu cards out of one 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.  We repeated the font from the invitation.  Next I printed a master sheet and copied it onto the lighter blue metallic paper used in the invitation suite.   Finally, Don cut each sheet of paper into three panels.

Sunday morning, Mom and I got to work.  I cut strips of the darker metallic paper and used this awesome little craft punch I found at Michael’s (part of the Martha Stewart line) to make sand dollars and starfish.  Mom glued the sand dollars to the top of the card and the starfish in alternating locations on the cards.  We finished in about two hours and they look great.

I must have inherited the crafting gene from my Mom.   Check out her awesome work:

It was fun to work with her on this project.  Too bad she’s three hours away; there are at least three more big DIY projects to complete in 30 days.  Yikes!

One more shot from the project (in this one you can see how the starfish are in different places on each card):

Okay, so I haven’t posted in several weeks. It’s not because I didn’t have anything to share, trust me.

The invitations got safely out the door almost a month ago now and responses have been coming in for weeks (yay!). Here’s a look at the final package.

Each invitation package cost less than $1.  Love it!

You may remember that I decided to design a label to match the invitation.   These were printed six per page on full size label sheets and then hand cut.  Kristen helped me label each envelope and emboss our return address on the flap.  And, as I mentioned in my last post, Don hand cancelled the postage before we popped them into the mail.

Here’s a closer look at the label:

Beyond the invitations, I’ve been busy with other projects to tell you about, too.  More posts coming soon!

‘That was easy.’
courtesy of ‘jaxed’

There was a time when I might have been offended. Last week Susan said that she hasn’t said much to people about my photobooth project because - until that week - she hadn’t been sure I’d pull it off in time. Now that I have been in the software development business for almost 20 years, though, I was flattered and amused.

Flattered because she’s been watching me do various tests and proof-of-concepts the last few months. Those have apparently made her believe that I’ve made enough progress and come up with enough solutions that I would be able to be done by the time the wedding rolls around. It’s nice that I can do things that she finds impressive and sees them as a sign that I’m not a complete boob.

Amused because I know that projects like this follow the 80:20 rule. The last 20% of the project is what takes 80% of your time. The first 80%, of course, takes the other 80% of your time. So now that I’ve gotten all the components doing what they need to do it’s a matter of making them play nice together and putting it all in a neat little box. Well, not so little - “normal” photobooths measure something like 5 feet long, 3 feet wide and over 7 feet high.

Be that as it may, here’s the gist: unless everything goes completely pear-shaped at this point, there will be a big old box you can sit in at our wedding. Press a button - a repurposed Easy button, in fact, like the one pictured above - and it’ll count down, take four pictures of you, do some behind-the-scenes magic, and print them out into a strip like you’d get from a boardwalk photo booth.

You can look forward to some more posts about the pieces and process I’ve gone through and what’s to come.