Thank you StyleUnveiled & Mojuba!

Holy wow, Batman... I just won something from Twitter! Well, another something. Seriously, I freakin’ love Twitter! This time, it was a giveaway featured on StyleUnveiled’s twitter page and featuring bags from My_Mojuba.

This time, I won a MyMojuba Bride bag. What the hell is a MyMojuba Bride bag you ask? It’s a wedding day emergency kit chock full of all kinds of goodies! I’m hoping I get the black one cuz black suits me more than white... plus, white gets dirty.=)

click for larger image, source: MyMojuba

List of the contents:
Priceless
Kiss My Boo Boo band-aids
Madame Paulette™ couture stain removal kit
L’Occitane® luxurious hand cream
Confident
BugCatcherz® fashion tape to keep your clothes in place
Ms. Manicure® nail files
Nail polish remover
Picture Perfect
Soft rice paper to powder your beautiful face
Charles Worthington® hairspray
Bobby pins
Dramatic
Sniff® tissues to dry your joyful tears
Gentle eye drops
Makeup remover
Sparkle
Little i® breath fresheners for close encounters
Colgate® toothpaste and a toothbrush
Scope® mouthwash
Memories
Mojuba™ Kodak® camera to capture spontaneous moments
Mojuba™ pen and notepad for your thoughts
Pucker up
Clear straws to sip champagne without smudging your lipstick
Clear lip gloss
Essential
Advil® for splitting headache relief
Gilchrist and Soames® sewing kit with pre-threaded needles
La Fresh® hand sanitizer
Soothing
Dancin’ Feet® cushions for your dancing feet
Pepcid Complete® to quiet your butterflies
Details
Keep-your-cool with Dove® deodorant
Nail polish for touch-ups and to stop stocking runs
Static Guard®
Anticipate
Scissors to snip unruly threads
Krazy Glue®
Lint sheets
Stuff just for chicks
.... And a little something to make you smile

And I *won* it! For free! Just by retweeting the entry "form" a few times over the course of the contest. YIPPEEEE!!!

Etsy Shop

i really need to get my #etsy shop going again.

just out of curiosity, how much would you pay for this garter? (which, by the way, is the one I made for Abby and it was a HUGE hit with everyone that saw it!)

Or this blanket?

Or this baby blanket?

Yarn-y Goodness

The yarn! The yarn! It has arrived! And by "the yarn," I mean the yarn for my beautiful wedding veil trimmed in orange and blue.

Eventually, one day, I will be able to start working on it. I love it! It's a wrap, set to become a veil, so I can wrap it around myself after the wedding.

Hotels, Cupcakes & My Veil!

I realized pretty late last night that I should stop price checking hotels and flights from RDU. Why, you ask? Because we have no flippin’ idea where we’ll be living in 6-7 months! For all I know, we’ll be living in Vegas or Virginia or Orlando or any number of other places. And of course, the prices I’m checking are all non-refundable!

Last week, the lovely Jennifer of @TheNearlyWed sent us 4 cupcakes from Retro Bakery. While they priced quoted us a lot more than I expected for a simple cake, their cupcakes are reasonably priced and I’m pretty sure (like 95%) that we’re getting a cupcake tower from them for the wedding! Also, they are aMAZing! Jenn sent us 1 each of their Red Carpet, Peanut Butter Cup, Cinnamon Toast, and Mint Chocolate Chip. We loved them all, in different levels of *love* but any way you look at it, we LOVED them all.

Yes, I broke SoBe to eat wedding cupcakes. It was worth it too!

Also also, the yarn for my veil is back in stock! So guess what I’m doing today? That’s right, ordering 7 skeins of yarn from Knitpicks, 5 in Cream, 1 in Sweet Potato (orange), and one in Blue Note Heather.  The orange and blue are for the trim to have a few rows of each color. Granted, I don’t know when I’ll be able to start on it since I have about 800 projects for events that occur before our wedding, like 4 pregnant co-workers! Seriously, my friends need to stop having babies so I can catch up on my own knitting! 

OK, I think that’s about it. Happy Wednesday!

Vote for Lola!

OK, so it's not wedding related, but it's my fur-baby!

She's #51 in the poll, so please go vote for her! The poll is in the left sidebar at the bottom. You can vote for more than one, but make sure you vote for Lola! #51!

Thanks :)

Big ol' Post about shoes & other important things

OK, so here’s the latest…

I found a ketubah that we both agree on.. until Steve said he thought he was drawing it. So, yay! It’ll be totally personalized and totally us. Now to find a calligrapher since, while my handwriting is nice, it’s not that nice. I’ve got a few calligrapher friends on Twitter, so I’m putting the word out over there.

image source

I started calling/ emailing around to hotels on the Strip about food. Aside from the debacle with the cake bakeries, I think Albertson’s is the way we’re going to go. After getting prices for receptions and even restaurants, I’m thinking cake and champagne reception in our room after the ceremony and pictures are done. The cheapest meal so far is the buffet at the Flamingo, but it’s still $22++ per person and we just don’t have $400 extra floating around.

As far as our hotel room goes, I’d love to stay in a really snazzy hotel with gorgeous furniture in it, but those are way pricey. We’re talking like $200 a night pricey. Our whole trip/ wedding budget is $1500, most of which is being eating by hotel and airfare expenses. Just out of curiosity, I asked 2 of my friends with husband’s working at hotels about discounts. As it turns out, they get friends and family discounts for the MGM family of hotels! Oh so amazing. I think bookings should be open in about a month. Trust me, I check religiously!

Y’all saw the invite design I recently posted. I’ve made the suggested changes and sent it to a printer for a quote. I also quoted the announcement cards, RSVP cards and, sure why not, graduation announcements. I love our printer. It’s going to be under $100 for 20 invites, 10 RSVP, 100 announcements, and 200 grad announcements.

Shoes? Who doesn't love shoes?? Oh, especially for wedding shoes. I love these shoes Gabriella Rocha: Ginger in turquoise leather:

image source

and these Annie: Lola in blue satin. And no, not *just* for the name either!

image source

And not wedding related, graduation is so on! My adviser emailed me last night - after midnight! Talk about dedication - about my missing MIS elective. It turns out there is a whole Master’s program for Information and Computer Technology. Dammit, if I’d only known before applying for the MBA. Oh well, it’s been a good 5 years and I’ve made some great friends.

I officially have a replacement class! I’ll be taking Networking Technology for Industry, which may sound horrible to you, but it sounds amazing to me. I am so excited about it!


See? I'm totally stoked!

Favors

woohoo! 50th post!

now onto the actual post..

I bought these today as sample favors. Also to taste the flavors. Really? Tasting lip balm? LOL

The lip balm flavor on the left is honey and the one on the right is tangerine. They are $.75 and $.80 respectively in quantities of 25 for Vegas favors. Plus they come in little pots so I can put my own labels on each one.

I'll letcha know how they are!

left image source: Brandi1181
right image source: MrsHerk

Invitations

..Clicky clicky for a larger version..

Check it out! Yeah, I was loving InDesign a bit this week =) Hopefully we'll have a hotel location within the month. This is the Vegas invite. The announcements will be slightly tweaked. The Miami reception invite will be tweaked with that info on it.

Thoughts on the wording? I'm not crazy crazy about it, but it could grow on me. Ha!

Cakery and my Family

I think I found a cake bakery. Well, potentially 2. Oddly enough, one of them is Albertson's which is directly on the strip right in the middle of everything. As in, we could walk there and not pay delivery fees. The other one quoted me $75. I have to actually contact Albertson's and see if they can remake the cake I like.

Ok, so a totally different subject: My family.

Some of you know the story about my family and our wedding. If we don't have it in Miami, none of them can attend. If we have it in Miami, we can't afford it. If we have it in Miami, we will not have less than 50 guests. I'm not even talking about friends; that's my family only. They all live in south Florida.

It's purely a financial reason that they can't attend. But no way am I going into details here. For similar reasons, we cannot afford thousands of dollars for getting married there. Between the rabbi, the food, the tent, table, chairs, places settings, etc etc etc. I don't care how cheap everything will be for an intimate family wedding; it's still times a minimum of 50 people!

After much deliberation, a few date changes, and my suggestion, we chose Vegas. Jodie suggested SLVW as she and her husband used them for their wedding last year and said they did a great job. I contacted SLVW multiple times and finally worked things out. And my baby brother and his girlfriend (both of whom I adore!) will be in attendance. If I decided to walk down the proverbial aisle, he will be the one to escort me.

Our wedding will cost $399 plus $60 for the marriage license. (It's package 2, but the price was recently increased.) When I say wedding, I mean photography, ceremony, video, flowers, limo transportation, and music. We have to pick the location for the 2 picture locations, one of which will be the ceremony location. At the moment I'm thinking our hotel room and the Welcome to Las Vegas sign. But that could easily change.

Other expenses for any location are the cake, the ketubah (which we can hopefully afford), and plane/ hotel expenses. Our total budget is $1500 for Vegas. $399 (everything) + $60 (license) + tips for photographer, limo driver and reverend are gone already. They're fixed costs. The variable costs right now are our hotel and airfare. I'm estimating/ hoping to get us there and home, for 4 nights, for about $800. But we'll see. Orbitz, Expedia, etc don't even opening bookings for October 2010 until around November. Grrr.

By the way, we are exactly 1 year and 1 week away from being husband and wife!

Just thought I'd throw that out there. <3

vegas sign image source

Celestial Weddings

I just designed my first logo for a wedding company! Go take a look at Miss Sarah's new wedding website, Celestial Weddings. It's fledgling, but she's got great ideas for it. Plus, she's getting married the day before us.

Too Dorky?

Am I too dorky for sending this note in the dress box to the girl that bought my wedding dress? I feel like I got to know her over the last few weeks of emailing back and forth.

"Dear Emily,

Congrats on your big day!

I am so pleased that I was able to get you your dream dress for your wedding and for cheap. I hope you love this dress as much as I did. When I showed my fiance the pictures of me in it (he was superstitious and didn't want to see them), he was sad that I sold the dress I loved so much. So please, wear it and love it and have the best time in it on your wedding!

Best wishes to you and your future husband,
Becca"

Wedding Cake Blues

image source

I love this cake. I love the look and feel of it. It's simple and elegant and just perfect. (Well, without the sprig on top of it, that is.) If i were to have this cake for our wedding, it would be a lighter blue color. and with our own cake topper on it.

I've been in contact with a few bakeries in Las Vegas for cake quotes. Namely Retro Bakery, Amatos Bakery, Freed's Bakery, and a few others.

My biggest problem is the word "wedding" - as soon as i mention it, prices double or even triple. Yes, the wedding industry is lucrative, but i am on a ridiculously tiny budget! With my MBA graduation in May, Steve's beginning grad school in August (hopefully) and a move somewhere in there, we just don't have extra money to spare. It's getting frustrating.

I asked for grocery stores and yummy cake bakeries on Twitter and got a few names. The question will be... do I really trust ordering a cake from across the country without tasting it? And do we really need a cake? Can't we just have dessert at a restaurant after the ceremony?