Happy Friday! (And some special shout outs)

Woooo! Happy Memorial Day weekend all! I have a half day at work today than a three day weekend! Thank Goooodddd. This week was a killer. What are you guys up to? I hoping to get some crafting done, finish the table numbers, actually spend time outside (heavens!) and hang out with friends.

Oh and did I mention our anniversary is this weekend? Yes its true. It was 5 years ago when I was graduating college over Memorial Day weekend ( and sick with mono but that's a different tale...worst tonsilitis ever!). Also, did I mention its the first year I remembered? Yes I am a bad person. I don't know why it is so hard for me to remember but my mind is probably full of love mush from that magical summer. So Ry: I love you to pieces. Thanks for sticking it out with me so long and heres to more years of magical summers.

And of course, congrats to another Lisa who gets married tommorrow! Your wedding will be amazing and it will be a total blast! Take a serious break from making things after this one :)

Good luck to anyone else getting married this weekend! Have an amazing day!



from when we were first dating...

pick a number, any number

So as I've mentioned several times on this blog, we are not doing assigned seating. We're all adults (well except the kids) and we can find our own seats and be merry with whomever we sit with. But we are having table numbers. We had a couple different ideas on the signs but this is what I have done so far (I'm up to table 16 but here are some of my favorites; please keep mind I'll be resizing them too!):







and as a bonus, the sign for the buffet:

Things On My Mind

1. I need a new super fun poppy sing-a-long cd for hot sticky summer days. Suggestions??*

2. I need to buy salad dressing that will make me eat salad but not plump me up. Suggestions??

3. my bestest friend

5. the BEST returned rsvp card yet!

It totally made my day! I mean really, how great is this???

* sorry for the crazy use of question marks

Bridal Shower fun (a sneak peak)

*
This is the look of a girl psyched to eat some scones (less psyched to have fat arms but thats besides the point). So we had a fabulous tea party complete with various teas, scones, mini sandwiches and strawberry shortcake. There was about 10 or so people there which was perfect and small and it was wicked tasty and fun! Also, I don't know if you can see it but I am wearing a very cute headband that I bought about 10 minutes before the shower (because I felt like I need to accessorize a little since I was wearing no accessories whatsoever) and everyone said 'love your headband!'. It was $8 at Target. Invest, my dears.


My best friend, my sister and I. So color coordinated.


My two best ladies wearing hats the tea lady brought with her.


Me and my super fabulous mother in law


I like this picture because it looks like I am telling a hilarious story (my friends Jill on the left and Heather on the right). Which either means I am talking about my grandmother or the time my aunt found a dead body (true story! slighty more horrifying than funny though, I'm betting on funny Nana stories instead)

More to come! Most notably the more hilarious photos of the day.

So I'm thinking for 'bachlorette': bad horror movies and homemade cocktails! Who's in?

* all photos by my mom

Saturday Bonus Post!

That's right peeps. A bonus post! So here's what I've been up to but here's a couple thoughts first:

1- thank you to everyone who has already rsvp'd to our wedding. Way to be quick! (thank you Jen for the extra 'woot, woot' at the bottom of the card too :)
2- I love having a 'rustic and artsy' wedding since anything I make that looks weird I can just call 'rustic and artsy'

So, I did some painting on my faux cake topper (since we have no cake it'll just be hanging out near the cupcakes. I made one just because I love cake toppers and wanted to include us and our cats).





So there's an image of the whole thing then a close up of the cats. I bought siamese porcelain cats and repainted them with porcelain paint to look like our kit-cats. Heres some pictures of the real guys for reference:


Tinker and Pirate having a dance-off


Beets in the manger

I am very happy how they turned out. I haven't finished detailing me or really painted Ry at all since I am not sure sure of his outfit/ hair style of the big day and don't want to force him into anything by painting it (ex. you have to match the cake topper! ha ha)

Also, I finished gluing the eyelet fabric to the vases. I am stoked since I was putting this off for whatever silly reason. I am also so glad that I have these storage boxes that I ordered the vases in since it will make transporting the flowers easier.





Can I also just say I am having a fabulous day? First off, I ate half a cupcake for breakfast and solidified cupcake plans with the bakery for 170 cupcakes, half of them will be 'babycake' (basically a super delic hostess) and half red velvet. Then we went on adventures and I picked up some materials to bring to the crafty shower tomorrow. Today was also one of many days where I just looked at Ryan while we were driving around and squeezed his hand and smiled, thinking how excited I am to be marrying this guy. Overall, a very good day so far.

Now off to cut out a zillion fabric circles! I will post pictures after the shower. Hopefully we will get some serious crafting done. We are planning to work on yarn poms, fabric poms and tissue poms. It'll be pom city at my mom's house.

Shout out

(image via here)

I am sending love towards this awesome lady because she is getting married....TODAY! She always has such amazing posts and is always so sweet to leave comments on mine too.

I will eat a cupcake in your honor today (no joke: we are going to a bakery today!)

things on my mind

there are a couple topics floating around the wedding blogs right now that are never far from my mind: food (more specifically dieting and even more specifically dieting for your wedding) and having kids. If I was a better writer, I would probably spilt this into two posts. But I'm not. So heres a jumbled mess of a looney person.

chapter 1- food vs. lisa

lets just start by saying yes I am putting off doing wedding stuff right now. Isn't that clear yet? ha ha. alright, so weight and diets have always been touchy subjects for me. Me and food have always had a pretty serious relationship. Some of my earliest memories are food related. My beloved cheez-its, the italian wedding soup my grandmother made, these super sugary granola bars a best friend in high school always had at her house, eating poptarts at another friends house, the lollipops they handed out after dance practice (what? everyone didn't do ballet for the candy?), buttered 'wagon wheel' pasta my dad always made. I remember being excited to go to camp because we would get bagel sandwiches. being at camp and eating taffy and I recall very specifically eating dinner once which was comprised of cheese ravioli and mashed potatoes (maybe I wanted pierogis??). I realize that was long and ridiculous but my dear readers, that ain't even the half of it. Lucky for you, you do not have to hear the rest of my list of foods I enjoy (I think I already mention them enough on this blog as it is). Basically, read this book and you'll get the idea (now I never had any eating disorders other than body images issues but so much of the rest of this book rang true. Oh and its awesome and hilarious too). Also, I have also had a love hate/relationship with exercise. Well, lets be real: a hate relationship. I'll do it for a while, get distracted stop, feel bad, eat, feel worse, exercise. I am not super good with self control.

So anyways here I am an engaged woman of 26 who has promised herself about 30 times since the start of the engagement but the diet starts today. I haven't lost weight yet except for the couple months when Jillian Michaels was yelling at me every morning. I realized I may have said this over and over but at this point, with 3 months to go I'm hoping I just look good in my dress as me. I'm not going to be this crazy skinny girl I always want to be. I don't think these hips of mine would let me weight 115 anways. I'm still working toward feeling better about myself but luckily I have an awesome man in my life who thinks I'm smokin. He always makes me feel good.

chapter 2- kiddies (which is a nice segue-way from the above sentence about my serious "birthing" hips)

God I love babies. I have wanted to be a mom since I was about 13. I have already had several conversations about Thomas the Tank Engine with my poor friends after hanging out with one of my favorite little guys (my little cousin who is also going to be our ring bearer). My one worry is one that always haunts me: $$$. Babies cost a lot and I would not want anything but a super awesome life for the little ones. But they will have extremely loving parents, cool cats to hang and handcrafted baby toys (I've made them for everyone else, I hope soon I can make them for me!). Always in the back of my mind, I think of our old downstairs neighbors when we lived in our apartment. I always think if they could do it, we definetly can. Basically picture if Deb from Napoleon Dynamite (complete with side pony and popped collar) married Danny Bonaduce and had 2 little boys who never wore shirts but always had farmers tans. Granted there are many things they do/did that I would not but they made it work. So can we. Also, I probably need to stop reading blogs like this where I just end up being being jealous and angry that I can handcraft clothing while growing the best garden of all time while being a super mom and cooking organic healthy meals and making art all at the same time with my 17 arms.

Sigh. Sorry to offload that craziness (but thanks for listening)

cue the creepy music

(image via here)

So....... who else is feeling this? The right before-the-Freddy or Jason-gets-you kinda eerie calm feeling? I mailed my invites today. I was freakin' out the other day because there is a typo and the type is pretty small on the directions. But I gave the invites out to my co-workers today and you know what? They totally loved them. They actually asked me to make color copies of the rsvp card to keep before they filled them out and gave them to me. Also they are also going sans significant others and are going to just go as a group instead, which is pretty rad. This also goes to show that I need to stop doing things like pointing out flaws in things I make because people might not notice them otherwise. So ya I'm feeling pretty good now. 40 things left to do on my knot list!? I can do that with my eyes closed. Somehow 75 things to do on the project wedding list? I can do that up too, it will take slightly longer for some reason but I can handle it. I am feeling re-energized, people. This weekend is visiting the cupcake people (and i'm sure nibbling a bite or two of their delicious cakes) and Sunday is bridal/ crafty shower. I....am....psyched!

I should probably start pre-gaming now.

wait they don't love you like i love you aka maps

so I did finish addressing my invite minus one or two whose addresses/zip codes are missing but I have a real reason why it took so long to do this. I have been waffling over doing directions/maps because I thought I was fine telling people to check our wedding website. However, we have gotten several wedding invites in the past week or so and all of them had directions, so I decided to make these today and just print them myself at home on cardstock:



'cause if you plan on driving up to our venue in anything other than the batmobile, just turn around.

(also, did you guys have a good weekend? I did! It was filled with lots of non wedding but super fun things like cookouts and picnics!)

alright, alright

okay, time to get serious: I need to address my invites tonight. What has been keeping me from doing it thus far?

1- laziness

2- sleepiness

3- laziness and sleepiness

4- episodes of Chapelle show that needed to be watched for the millionth time (and clearly needed my full attention!)

5- hanging out with my cat*

*I need to clarify. I always hang out with the kit-cats however, one of them is not as snuggly (I'm sorry "snuggly" is a word, spell-check). This is compared to the two boy cats who basically want to climb into my womb. So last night, she (Tinker) decided to be my best friend of all time and she was all about hanging out. So clearly, this took precedence to anything else on my plate.

Tonight: No excuses! Lets do this thing.

***also, did I mention I got flowers at work yesterday from my 'cat'? I love my guy to pieces. It took me totally by surprise and, as I told him yesterday, it elevated his status to 'super stud' according to my co-workers.

beware: self deprecating rant

Sometimes when wedding (and/or life) things are stressing me out, I feel like an awkward teen again. Like I'll never be cool enough, thin enough, good enough ( another reason I need to prevent myself from looking at sites like this where the average bride's waist is the size of my forearm. le sigh.). I feel pudgy and uncomfortable in my skin... awww just like I'm a teen again! Also? The stress leads me to breakouts and eating, further driving home the geeky teen chunk within. Sorry for the rant everyone (if you want to know what spurred it on: I was invited to something this summer where I have to wear a bathing suit. effffff.....)

(image from here)

blerg.

it's the freakin weekend baby (i'm about to have me some fun)

Sorry for a fairly uneventful week, folks. Here is a list of things I didn't do:

- call the cupcake people

- actually start working on the table numbers

- address the invites

here what I did do:

- watched ridiculous tv (marathon of billy the exterminator anyone?)

- ate ridiculous food ( you know those days where you apparently forget how to cook and then eat popsicles and cereal instead of dinner? no? well uh not me either)

- and on a wedding note, I think I decided on a father/daughter song.

Now I am not a fan of the whole my dad giving me away business but you know what? I love my dad. He totally rocks. We love to cook together and to talk about music, politics and 30 rock. So I am having him walk me down the aisle and having a father/daughter dance. Now I didn't want basically any song written for this occasion ( no offense to people who love those songs but 'butterfly kisses' creeps me out!). So I googled 'not lame father/daughter dance songs'. No dice. I think it actually googled extra lame ones. I also wanted to make absolutely sure I didn't accidentally pick a song about something crazy inappropriate ala Michael and Maeby singing 'Afternoon Delight'.

(the clip is about 3 minutes 10 seconds in, fyi)

So I decided on Warren Zevon's "Tenderness On the Block" because:

1- warren rules

2-my dad thinks warren rules

3- its not creepy

(I wanted to post a youtube link but no such luck. feel free to listen to jackson browne's acoustic version because thats all youtube's giving ya)

geek love

So we want to have table numbers so it will make it easier for the buffet style food at the wedding. No assigned seating but I will need to make about 20 or so table numbers (the more the merrier, I can probably put sign at various areas like food, photobooth, etc). So an idea I had was to use comic images and to put numbers with them (the comic theme is obv all over the invites but really nowhere else). I was thinking along the lines of this:


(image from here)

I would love to use the line images and then put numbers with them. I love that image of the head and the lightning. Can I just add that me and Ryan first got together over music not comics (Elvis Costello if you're wondering)? I had never read a comic before him. Now I do read the occasional graphic novel or indie comic. I was thinking it would be cool to use images from books I love too. For example:


(craig thompson's goodbye chunky rice image from here)


(daniel clowes...i think from 'like a velvet glove cast in iron'? image from here)


(jamie hernandez's maggie and hopey from love and rockets image from here)

or Adrian Tomine or Gilbert Hernandez or Charles Burns, etc etc etc

Ryan asked me the other day if I was going to regret having a wedding with superhero elements and I said no. The more I think about it, the more excited I am to have a wedding that is totally us. There's been a lot of talk about how no one's wedding is unique lately and I totally agree with that. I am finding that the less I worry about having the most 'unique crafty wedding to end all weddings', the more excited I am.

the other dresses

If any of you are like me and have a million wedding to attend in the next coming months along with you own, get thee to the nearest Target! They have some super sweet dresses* (even Zac Posen!) I bought:

(all images via target.com)

* please don't judge me for buying a 'junior' dress (top one). its wicked cute

also, did I mention I only spent about $60?!

fail or win?

So I finished assembling, lining, stamping and stuffing the invites. All that's left is addressing. But I did stumble upon something as I put them together which made me have to go back through them and do some 'editing'.

So here is the page I photocopied to use as the envelope liners. I just flipped through the comic and found it at random:

Pretty good right? Lots of stuff happening, good color. So I cut it into strips and lined just the top half of the envelopes. As I got near the end, I actually read some of the dialog (which looks particularly bad when cut off):

So I had to do some copy/pasting as not to cause great aunts to think less of me. Otherwise, it is fairly hilarious.

What do you think? Fail or win?