Beyond Excited (Wedding Planning Part 1)

In the past couple of weeks you may have noticed that I’ve been blogging a little “lite.”  Fewer actual photo-shoots.  Some fun stuff.  Whatever.  I want you to know that I have a good reason for all that…I’ve been busy planning my wedding!  Since we were out of school over the holidays and most of January, Branden and I have been trying to get as much planning done as possible during our “free time.”  We went up to Big Bear and booked our rental company just in the nick of time.  I’m proud to say that our guests will be able to sit on a chair, paired with a table while they eat their food.  Basic, yes, but essential and exciting to me nonetheless.  Which brings me to our next little piece of business.  We booked our caterer and I am so so so happy that our first choice agreed to make the drive up the mountain for us.  Lucille’s BBQ Smokehouse is so amazingly delicious, I will definitely not be too busy to eat on my wedding day….you can be sure of that!  I’ve been asked a lot lately about how the planning is going, so I’m gonna share a few things with you, ok?  Ok.

Our wedding website is up and we JUST updated quite a bit of info for our guests.  You can view it by clicking the link below.  Stop by and sign our guestbook!

http://www.theknot.com/ourwedding/MelissaMunding&BrandenWinter

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here’s our save the date.  I’m so proud of it.  Designed it myself.  Just little old me with my newly acquired photoshop skillz.  I’m still madly in love with it and now I’m starting to feel the pressure a little bit about designing our invitations!  I’ve got to top this somehow!  Sure, most likely nobody cares but me, but still!  I care and I’m a perfectionist and you can all hold me to the high standard to which I hold myself.

For anyone interested, here are the techy details on how I did it:  I used a personal photo of Branden’s parents’ house where the wedding will be held and used the “stamp” function in photoshop to make it look more like a drawing than a photo.  Then I changed the color to go with our palette.  The trees in the background are a photoshop brush that I found and again I just selected the color.  I created the funky red middle piece on a separate document using the fonts and a brush for the frame and then used the lasso tool to cut it out.  I dragged that onto my main project.  The rest is pretty much trial & error with the correct fonts.  I tried a lot before I decided on these.  I wanted fun & romantic with a little bit of art & whimsy.  I don’t know, maybe that’s a bit ambitious, but that was the goal.  Then, I uploaded the finished product to Zazzle’s postcard template and viola.  When the printed product was shipped to me I used a scrapbooking paper punch to round the corners, which made my palms sore for days, but in the end it was worth the little extra touch, in my opinion.  The whole thing was really quite inexpensive and I love them!

Back to the important stuff.  Here are our colors!  I simply could not just choose one or two.  It’s not in my nature to have a true favorite color.  I never want to leave out all the other fabulous colors that so often come in handy to make my photos & paintings sing.  I LOVE color.  I’m not afraid of it, in fact, I can’t get enough.  So, how’s this for a wedding palette?  Aqua, Pinks & Peaches, with a touch of Red.  And grey as our neutral, wherever it’s needed.  I’m happy.  It’s not something I’ve seen much of and I really like that.

It’s been so much fun to finally start honing in and planning some details.  We’re planning on a super awesome candy buffet in lieu of boring old favors and I found a local company that makes amazingly pretty, all natural lollipops in colors that are sheer perfection.  They’re called Hammond’s Candies and the people there are just wonderful to work with.  I can’t say enough good things about ‘em.  I discovered them at a local Whole Foods (Irvine) and went searching.  Here’s just a little sample of what we’ll have for our guests.  Aren’t they pretty!  They even come in really yummy sounding flavors.  Apple, Very Berry and Cherry…and they’re perfectly coordinated with my color palette and they have this pretty sheen to them.  Who knew wedding planning would be this fun!

The vision I have in my head kind of makes me sad that I won’t be the one lugging around a camera on my big day.  With the amount of time spent planning all of this, there’s a part of me that really wants to take pictures of all of it.  But, and this is a big BUT, I have a FABULOUS photographer lined up and I’m way excited about her.  She’s fantastically talented and quirky and just plain fun to be around.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with her and I just know she’s the perfect person to capture my wedding day.  We went to high school together and miraculously reconnected on Facebook just as I was getting into photography.  I love her aesthetic…modern with clean lines in her photos and a love for all things vintage.  We share a lot of the same inspiration and I love bouncing ideas off of her.  She gets me : )  She’s not only talented and sweet, but she’s been so helpful in getting my own business off the ground.  The more time I spend with her, the happier I am that we’ve become friends.  Love you Amanda!  Check her out:

Amanda Patrice

Ok folks, it’s after 3am which means I’m done blogging for the evening…or morning I guess.  I hope you’ve enjoyed a little peek into my world.  I vowed awhile back that I wouldn’t make this a full on wedding blog because I think there are plenty of those out there doing a wonderful job already.  But I just can’t resist sharing my thoughts and plans from time to time.  Next up is dress shopping.  Dun dun dun!  I’ve been putting it off, but I’m feeling ready and excited to go shop ’til I drop!