beautiful day

Yesterday, Lindy and Carrie accompanied me to buy my wedding dress (yep!). I didn't really need their help picking/purchasing the dress, but I did want them to see it. More than that, though, I wanted them to try on bridesmaid dresses. Mom has wanted to make them from Day 1, but we figured that if we found something off the rack that fit everyone, why go to that trouble? Unfortunately, since Carrie is six feet tall (believe it), everything that looking amazing on petite Lindy made Carrie look like she was wearing her clothes from junior high school. We didn't take many pictures, but here are a few:We all really wanted this dress to look great, because the style is so fabulous but.... obviously it was not a winner. Plus, in this color Carrie kind of looks like an ear of corn.

Lindy needed to see how the dress looked next to a tux before she made a decision. Winner! (but not in brown, obviously)

However, the dress was too short for Carrie and the store does not make it in a "long," so we came home and started combing through patterns. Thank you Vogue! We'll fit the girls for the center dress and hem it at the knee.

The next job, of course, was to find fabric. Mom and I headed into San Francisco this morning to shop at Britex. I was in fabric heaven!


We ended up with a gorgeous silk dupioni in eggplant (the picture does not do it justice). So much prettier than the brushed cotton dress from the bridal store.


Plus something pretty for me too:


While in the city, we walked through the Flower Mart, since we are going to do our own flowers too and stopped in Fantastico, where I found all kinds of tacky bridal accessories:

Bachelorette on the loose!

Tomorrow we are going to visit the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz and will then have to visit the Holbrook Palmer Park in Atherton and make the big venue decison. I'm exhausted just thinking about it!

invites and STDs

We have been getting so much accomplished! I have always sort of turned up my nose regarding wedding planning because it seemed so frivolous and unneccessary, but I've actually been having a lot of fun.

Let's talk stationary. I think it's pretty ridiculous to pay 100s of dollars for paper, so I have known from the beginning that I would be designing and printing my own invitation suite. My mom recieved a gorgeous new printer for Christmas, so we have been itching to do some fun printing. When I came home from Sacramento, my mom and I went into Michaels looking for a fern or orchid stamp to use as a general motif to guide our design process and came out with DIY wedding stationary kits - everything we need for invites, response cards, and save the dates for under $50! We are using the Anna Griffin Wedding Studio Invitation Kit in green:We have also ordered two beautiful stamps from Stampin' Up and ink pads in kiwi to adorn the stationary:

Today I have been working on designing the save the dates (have you noticed how on all the wedding blogs, they shorten "save the dates" to "STDs?" Maybe it's just because I work with hormonally-driven teenagers, but that just really makes me uncomfortable...). I was originally going to just do a basic text save the date with the stamp as decoration, but then I started getting creative. Here is the leading design this evening:

After we print them, we will then circle the number 25 by hand in ink.

Next up, bridesmaid dresses!

clever rhymes

Jessica sent me the sweetest engagement gift today!


I know what Mom and I will be doing when I get home on Saturday.

Other wedding books that I might be sort of interested in, just in case you were thinking of buying me a wedding-related Christmas gift (seriously? When did I become so interested in weddings?):

• Anti-Bride Guide: Tying the Knot Outside of the Box, Gerin & Rosenbaum
• Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides, Stallings
  
• The DIY Bride, Cochran
• Eco-Chic Weddings: Simple Tips to Plan an Earth-Friendly, Socially Responsible, Affordable Green Wedding, Anderson

And I'm buying this for Brian. :)

engagement time!

With the busy-ness and excitement that the last few weeks of school brings, I sort of forgot about this blog. Oops.

Oh yeah, and I got engaged.

For real.

Over Thanksgiving holiday, Brian and I visited both sets of parents. He asked my dad for permission to marry me. My dad cried. Not once, not twice, but three times. It was adorable. When we went to Santa Cruz to hang with the Ellis family, Brian took me down to the beach. We walked past a dead seal (very romantic!), he recited a haiku he wrote for me (yep), then got down on one knee (I said, "Seriously? Do you have to do that?") and gave me my ring. It was not terribly surprising, since, you know, I was there when we bought the ring and when he talked to Pops. What was surprising? Alex and Erica hiding behind an umbrella taking pictures of the whole proposal!


We then got an impromptu photo shoot. Here are but a sampling of the 250 pictures Alex took (most of which feature at least one of us with our eyes all squinty, or me doing my ridiculous open mouth-closed eye laugh. Look out, wedding photogs, you've got a difficult couple on your hands...):


Consider this blog officially back in action, especially since Brian has limited patience for wedding-talk, since he just started a new job. And since it's only taken me.... 3 weeks to blog about the actual engagement, I'm sure this will just be a hot-bed of wedding planning updates!