I hope you are saving the date!

Our save the dates finally went out in the mail today
(just a few weeks later than I had planned). Most cards had a different set of photos on them so here are the ones you didn't see!

Do you esty?

because I know I sure as heck do!! I honestly have more then 10 pages of favorite items and countless favorite sellers. I know too many right? BUT I just love them so much. Here are my super top favorites:

1) Dear Powdered Sugar Dress could you have a cuter name? How I wish you were slightly less expensive so I would not feel guilty buying you to wear at our wedding reception. By the lovely: Sarah Seven

2) "Would you love me Wedding Ring Dish" I am buying two of these; one for each of the boys to hold at the wedding. I love them and I love the name almost as much. From: Block Party Press


3) Letterpress recipe card box! Wouldn't it be lovely to just pull the little cards out instead of the whole dang book? and then one day I could pass the stained and tattered cards to our children... You can have one of these too from here: 1 canoe 2


4) The envelope closes for goodness sake! I think they are trying to kill me with cuteness. this seller has a ton of adorable goodies check her out: Yellow Squirrel

5) If you are coming to the wedding reception we are having in Montana for those who won't be able to make it to California (more on this later) expect to see these!! From my number one favorite seller: Miss Pickle Press

Tie one on..

Casey and I have been looking at Mens Warehouse and think we have narrowed the tux choice down but, the ties are a whole different story. There are so many unique and amazing tie options! Which do you like?

Tie 1)



Okay so totally not for a wedding but I love it because it reminds me of the meat grinder Casey has.

Tie 2)



I love it but not so much Casey's style

Tie 4)



Who doesn't love a wish bone?

Tie 5)



This one is totally my favorite!

The rings...

Who knew I would care so much about wedding rings, I honestly don't know if there is anything else for the wedding that has made me more nervous... Here is the story of our rings which probably isn't really that nerve wracking.

Casey gave me my engagement ring almost two years ago while watching the yule log in my downtown apartment and it was exactly what I wanted. I honestly think that ring really fit the city living girl I was when Casey bought it for me.

Here is my original ring:



Fast forward to almost two years later... One of my kiddos from work and I stopped by the jewelery store to get my ring cleaned and within the first few seconds in the store he had fallen in love with one of the rings in the case. The problem was I fell in love as well and once he said "lissa that a beautiful crystal" I knew I had to at least have Casey look at it. The only problem was that I didn't want to just shove my original ring back in its box and forget about it. Luckily our amazing jeweler was able to come up with a plan to use every bit of my original ring to create a new wedding set.

and so became my new engagement ring:



The large center diamond was used from my old engagement ring and the original band will be reshaped into my wedding band.




The came the search for Casey's wedding band.


That dang ring has caused me to have nightmares.. Okay maybe it wasn't that bad but I have been super nervous about making sure that I chose the "right" ring. After much looking and then a nervous "commit to buy" click Casey's ring has been ordered.




It is a titanium band but has a rosewood interior. Doesn't that interior just make you think of a manly lumberjack, or ice road trucker, or a hunting guide?

Perfect if you ask me.

Keeping up the crafting.

This weekend my only plan was to purchase the paper for our programs as well as some ink for the printer because I used so much during our RSVP cards! I did get a few more things done though I started the save the date cards and I even got a mock up finished up!


Here is a sample of the process.



and because I love our formal invitations I can't leave them out! Here is a teaser of those as well.





Has anyone else started on invitations super early and regretted it just because you can't wait to share them?

Gifting the girl with the flowers.

I have been looking at gifts for my super lovely flower girl lately. Ms. Flower Girl was one of my first kiddo's at the 4th "R" Program I worked at in California and I can remember her little kindergarten face hiding behind mom her first day (over 2 years ago now!) She was and is the sweetest and most adorable little girl I have ever met in my life so of course she needs a gift as equally as awesome as she is. After looking at a few books little nick nacks I came along this:



Which can be purchased from: www.sweettutu.blogspot.com

I am totally buying Ms. Flower Girl something adorable from this site!! How will I ever choose though a tutu, a beanie, a headband, all of the above? Check back in a few weeks for a photo of the final product. XOXO

"You don't want a head table?"

Okay the truth is I think head tables are super awkward. I mean what about if a bridesmaid wants to bring her boyfriend or fiancee who am I to say sure bring him but he can't sit up here at the table with us. So strange to me. After looking it seems that there are three options

A) A head table: the bridal party hangs out at table in the front of the room together.

B) A sweetheart table: just the bride and groom sit together and cuddle. With all eyes only on them yeeps!

C) A kings or family table: where the table is set down the middle of the reception and not only the bridal party but close family and friends sit together as well.




Okay the family table is by far my favorite choice and Casey James loves it as well. What option do you think is the best?

Okay so this is totally not really wedding related. Although I can say that I look forward to relaxing on the car ride back home from the wedding and reading.



Books I've read are bold. Books I've read in part are italics.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Tootie! Did you see this movie)

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Just to give credit I totally swiped this from the blog "cross country wed" which can be viewed @ www.crosscountrywed.blogspot.com

Fill this out?

I am sure everyone is getting sick of the many emails and facebook postings that all start with "can you fill this out?" If you did follow that link you would have been directed to a website asking questions like your name and address and a bunch of other pretty reasonable questions. This information is then placed into a delightful spreadsheet by the ever amazing google so we have everything ready to go in one place!


(click on me to make it bigger)

So even though I covered others personal information you get the gist. Isn't it amazing! (okay well I think so at least)

"Oh Moose"

Everyone once in a while I begin to think about the idea of having the dogs in (some) of our engagements photos. I love them both and I really love that for the first time in my life I have my own puppy. Now in case you happened to find this site after google searching something like "crazy gocco woman" Moose is just over a year old and is a HUGE beast. He also tends to get really excited about things which leads his tail to wag and in turn to break things. It's not his fault really he is just big and kind of dorky sometimes... need proof? check these babies out!









So what do you think? Should we have a few pictures with our beasts or leave them at home?

Lemon Cookies!!

So I have been searching for easy peasy cookie recipes that I can make ahead for the wedding for the favor tables. Last night I whipped up a batch of lemon cookies with a simple powered sugar frosting that were great!! Even better the dough can be kept in the fridge up to 48 hours before cooking. In case you want some before the wedding here you go:

INGREDIENTS:

* 1 (18.25 ounce) package lemon cake mix
* 2 eggs
* 1/3 cup vegetable oil
* 1 teaspoon lemon extract
* 1/3 cup confectioners' sugar for decoration

DIRECTIONS

*Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C).
* Pour cake mix into a large bowl. Stir in eggs, oil, and lemon extract until well blended. Drop teaspoonfuls of dough into a bowl of confectioners' sugar. Roll them around until they're lightly covered. Once sugared, put them on an ungreased cookie sheet. ( I always grease my cookie sheet shhhhh)
* Bake for 6 to 9 minutes in the preheated oven. The bottoms will be light brown, and the insides chewy.

Helpful Hints: I cooked them only for 6 minutes and then set them under the broiler for about 2 to make sure the tops were nice and done.
I also think I would make a simple raspberry frosting for the tops if I did them again.

Wedding Weekend

Since Casey was away this weekend I had most of the weekend to myself which in my eyes meant wedding crafts galore!

The first thing I wanted and needed to get done was the sample invitation for my mom, which I quickly found out was going to be harder than I thought. The printing of inserts (maps, rsvp, ect.) was a huge pain with my walmart printer and tiny little rsvp cards.





Yes I blurred the image of my mess because I have to keep some things a secret! I started off wanting to only print a sample for my mom but it was so much work to get everything lined up that I just printed them all (since they were already lined up)!

I also worked on a few smaller projects like the basket of flips flops for the ladies to wear when their shoes get uncomfie.





I also took this picture of me looking happy with long hair I have been growing out for the wedding which is now a daily reminder that the wedding is growing closer day by day.

Have I mentioned I like cake?

Unfortunately planning for our big day has taken a back burner to planning for my finals (all of which are now completed). I was lucky enough to have a week long break when Casey's family came to visit us and almost as exciting as having visitors out here in the wilderness of Montana they brought CAKE SAMPLES! As many of you already know I love cake, ALOT. So the wedding cake was very important to me although not really as important to Casey James. "Can you just make sure it tastes plain?" I finally found out this means no chocolate and no off the wall fillings. The two cake samples Casey's parents lugged all the way from California came from Timothy's Bakery in Woodland, California and River City Cake Company in Elk Grove, California.

We had thought that Timothy's would be the only cake we would be tasting this was not the case though. A few days before Casey's parents were scheduled to come out I set up a time for cake samples to be picked up from the bakery both chocolate and vanilla with raspberry were selected. However, when the group consisting of my Grandma, Casey's Mom Brenda, and Casey's Aunt Fran all arrived at the bakery and nothing was ready for them. After almost an hour of waiting they left with 2 small frozen cakes and a photo copied brochure. I think my grandma called me the second she walked in the door and told me there was no way that was "the cake place" and still (almost a week later) is talking about that photocopied brochure!

Luckily, Brenda called as they were having lunch and asked about the bakery I had called in Elk Grove. Casey and I were out of town shopping so after thinking of the name I was goggling the phone number on my trusty sidekick phone. Once I called a super friendly guy named Patrick answered and said he could have a sample plate ready for Brenda and Fran to pick up as soon as they wanted. I was shocked and when I tasted the cake I was shocked and in love. The cake was amazing! Every single piece was gone by that night! I cannot wait to go in see and see them to design the cake (and eat some more of course!)

Where should we get married? (the venue part 2)

After the Crawford's Barn disaster I asked Casey to find a place for us to look at for the wedding. On a quick trip to the grocery store Casey saw his choice for a place and was on the phone that morning to make an appointment. That afternoon Casey, his mom, and I were getting the grand tour of the Lockeford Inn, a bed and breakfast which had been restored for over six years before it was opened to the public. It was beautiful both inside and out with classically decorated rooms and a garden that was overflowing with flowers even in December. Most of all we loved Lori the wonderfully adorable inn proprietor who was an amazing story teller and seemed truly interested in who we were and all of our wedding plans. Unfortunately there was a problem we just couldn't get past, both the ceremony and reception had to be held outside and there was no other choice. With a late April wedding we were more than a little worried about a rainy day and unfortunately we had to say goodbye to the Lockeford Inn.

Lets Have a Barn Wedding

Casey and I knew right away that we wanted a rustic wedding and with a little google searching we found Crawford's Barn. The pictures online were wonderful and I was honestly tempted to put down a deposit without even seeing the place... I didn't end up putting the deposit down over the phone and waited to try to check the place out while were home for the holidays. Only two days before Casey and I were scheduled to drive home we decided to go take a "quick" look at a few of the places we were interested in. Of course, the barn was the first place we went to and I think we were all in shock as we drove past. There no parking lot, no fence in sight, and we were only a stones throw from the light rail, it was awful! To say the least we left and I was back to square one on the wedding venue.

A little Lapel Love

Since I have been on a flower kick as you can probably tell from my last post I have also been looking at boutonnieres for Casey and the boys. Three is one problem though I just cannot get a mental picture of Casey wearing a flower... Just saying it out loud makes me giggle. Chances are Casey James will end up wearing a flower but I figured it couldn't hurt to just look for non-flower options.





Interesting if nothing else right? If you are interested there are more that can viewed at:
rosenowfloral.com

Really?

So the more I look at the numbers for flowers the more I feel the need to at least look at alternatives to the hydrangeas I have been in love with. I hope these are better than my fake cake idea...





Not exactly like that but something similar in a short mason jar? what do you think?

Everyone Meet Cricut

I feel awfully sad that I have ignored him for so long during this wedding, that darn Gocco took his place for a while! Well as many of you know I have a program called Sure Cuts A Lot which allows me to import .SVG files and cut them with the cricut. Well because we have had a few minor problems with the invites (getting all the words and images to stamp perfectly is terribly hard!) I have imported the image file to cricut and I am going to cut a invite stencil so that when we have a poor letter or image that gets left off or stamps badly with the Gocco print I can just fill him in!!!

P.S. Don't you love those days when you wake up with such smart ideas?


P.P.S. I will post an image of the cut image when I get it done (I hope)

My first real project!!!

I was super worried about my first Gocco project to say the least! Not only did I want the project to turn out well especially after looking so forward to using the Gocco but I only have 10 Gocco masters and bulbs which means I can only do 10 projects before re-ordering supplies. Well after finally loading up my image and then inserting the light bulbs I closed the lid and waited..and waited...and waited.. So I finally pushed harder and POW super bright flash and super smelly burning BUT it was wonderful!!!!

Casey's Wedding Project

Casey and I seem to have luck on our side with this wedding. So much so that almost seems unreal the way things have fallen into place, like the fact the contract with the old sugar mill was never signed because the rental price on the contract was incorrect. We also seemed to have just fell into to Grace Vineyards along with a long list of other "lucky moments" Well so far our luck hasn't run out. This weekend I came across an invitation I thought was amazing and once I yahoo messaged the image to Casey he was all for it. Am I am going to share the invite yet? No you have to wait the months and months until it lands in your mail box but I can show a little clue of our exciting and lucky weekend.

Doing it myself.

I have been really into little projects for the wedding as of late. Take tonight for example, I researched caramel apples and the various ways to decorate them... Did you know that lots of people roll the finished warm caramel apple in crushed oreo? Okay so maybe the rolling into crushed Oreo may not be the best wedding favor idea (can you image the pictures of Aaron smiling with blacked out teeth from too many crushed oreos?) There are lots of very cute ideas though like rolling them in crushed candies, white and milk chocolate chips, and of course nuts.





Can you imagine how cute these could be at each place setting in a little cellophane bag with a "thank you" tag attached?

Wedding Party Ladies

My Maid of Honor I know it sounds cheesy but she really is my "best friend forever" Friends from way back in our "party days" to our "non-smoker" days. She puts a smile on my face with every "Do you remember that one time?"





Tootie is amazing... end of story. She was the one there helping me pull those big white dresses off and I bet she would have helped me clean up accidents in the 4th "R" bathroom if I would have asked.





Catherine: My best friend of 16th street and by far my best Target shopping friend. The one person I know who will always be honest with me.







Alejandra my secret 4th "R" favorite is now my flower girl! she is amazingly cute and witty for a first grader and inspired the 4th R love for I love you more than cheese.