10.04.08 – The Details

At the onset of the planning process, I knew I wanted everything wedding-related to be very cohesive.  Since during our engagement, we attended EIGHT other weddings, and had gone to three others during the 1.5 years before getting engaged, we’d seen A LOT of others’ wedding materials, and to be honest, most of them seemed pretty scatterbrained.  We’d get a Save the Date with one motif, and invitation with completely different style, and then attend a wedding where the programs didn’t go with anything.  The inevitable slideshow had obviously been thrown together without thought back to any of its predecessors.  We made a conscious effort to coordinate the event from start to finish (notice, I didn’t say “match” everything…)

Our Save the Dates linked to our big wedding day surpise, which we told nobody, save the MOH, about, prior to the day of.  Care to guess what the surprise was?

I know it’s become more common-place, but when we booked it, photobooths at weddings were rare; luckily, they still are in Milwaukee!

We made a conscious effort to execute the STDs in a prefessional manner; this meant:

• Taking LOTS of pictures at a real photobooth in a mall. (note: it is MUCh easier to do all four shots with one sign at a time, rather than trying to switch signs, position them, make a funny face, and be cute all within the three seconds between each shot!)
• Doing the pictures in color, and then converting to black and white in Photoshop to get a larger range in color.  Ours actually had a slight blue tint in order to maximize to look.
• Picking our favorite shots to make the cutest possible series.
• Running the photostrips through a Xyron (http://edushop.edu4kids.com/product_info.php?s=ghop&products_id=29592) machine, which laminated one side and magnetized the other – we highly recommend this!

 We hunted endlessly for the right invitations, which would relay our intent that the event be simple and FUN, and which would lend itself to our brown/orange color scheme and a possible polka dot motif.  We found the perfect option at Broadway Paper in Milwaukee’s Third Ward, but they were priced FAR beyond our budget, so we decided to recreate them!

Our inspiration:

Our version (three pages, held together by a grommet in the upper-left corner like the example):

 The right-hand portion of the last page was perforated for return of the response postcard, which worked out perfectly!  We received SO MANY compliments on them!

We lined the envelopes with a pattern that I found online, and then used the same print for our website.

Our programs continued the theme:

And finally, coming full-circle, were our Thank-You cards (not the best picture, since we totally forgot about them until the end of the night – oops!).  I know it probably goes without saying, but this is our proof, so the card was foled in half, width-wise, with us on the front and our logo on the back.

I’ll also note that our slideshow was a big hit with our guests.  We began each section with a title page to match our logo; i.e. “Paul” in a circle, then “Jill” in a circle, and then “Paul + Jill”.  We also used Tom Petty songs throughout: Runnin’ Down a Dream for him, American Girl for me, and then…maybe Wildflowers (?) for us together.

Overall, we were both really proud of how everything turned out, as we did it ourselves, without much outside help.  It was amazing to work with my husband-to-be in such a creative manner and have our ideas so in synch. (…love.him…)