wedding wednesday: how to decorate your wedding without being there

My biggest concern on our wedding day was how to be in two places at once. As you may remember, we didn’t have access to our venue until 7am the morning of the wedding, and we didn’t have access to the church until 9:30am that morning (and the ceremony started at 3:30p!!) How was I going to decorate both venues AND get ready for you know.. getting married and all? I thought long and hard about all of this and realized that my Type-A personality was going to have to let go of a little control. I assembled a chief team of my favorite organized and decor-savvy friends (who weren’t already in the wedding) and made them my House Party. I chose these five people because I trusted them wholly and knew if something came up their judgement would know what to do. Thank you again Levi, Carissa, Sophie, Bridget, and Dom for all of your hard work :)

While I trusted them completely, some all of my decorations were a little confusing and therefore needed a little explaining. So I wrote a Wedding Day Decoration Instruction Manual. Totally normal right? Inside I broke down the venues starting with the Church followed by the Reception venue. I had previously sorted all of our decorations into numbered bins which were either labeled “Church” or “Reception”. These bins were inventoried so that I knew what exactly was in each bin, and they were delivered to each venue the night before. In my manual, each “area” (like sanctuary, sign-in table, cake table, bar, etc.) had a sheet like this:

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It would list which bin everything is in, what the contents of that bin were, and some bossy instructions explaining where everything goes. And for the more visual people, I drew a little diagram for each area. So for example the church decorations had the following drawings:

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Which translated to:

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The church was easy. There were only two bins of decorations there. The reception venue on the other hand had the other eight bins. (eight!!!) It’s portion of instructions were just like the ones at the church listing out what each “area” required and which bin to find said decorations. Like so:

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Which then translated to this:

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I also included a few general pages for how to assemble several repeated items like our paper flower vases and signage.

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Because the reception also had guest tables which were a whole other mess of things to keep in order. The interior designer in me decided to include a floor plan that had each table labeled by animal and paper flower wreath color. Each table had a bin with a smaller bin inside that was filled with the moss stone place cards of each person sitting at that table and each were labeled by animal. So if someone was supposed to sit at the squirrel table their place card was in the squirrel bin. Makes sense right? Here is that floor plan.

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This page was followed by a detail of each table including where each place card would go. This was a little complicated because we had several vegetarians and children’s meals which meant that their place had to be marked somehow, so rather than color coding the place cards or something, I also gave this floor plan with details of each table to our caterer. They about died out of excitement for how easy I made their job that night :)

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 I included a small photoshopped diagram of how each centerpiece should be setup with the wreathes, cake stands, and ceramic animals. Which I think translated beautifully.

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I also wanted our black napkins to be folded into a bow shape with a gold napkin ring for the knot, so I included this handy little diagram for my house party to use when folding each napkin, along with where to place each place card.

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This was obviously taken before the china arrived.

 Here are a few other special areas and how they translated.

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Some people might look at all of this and think I’m absolutely crazy for going to this much trouble for my wedding decorations. But honestly, I received SO many compliments from my house party, day-of coordinator, caterer, and wedding party on how seamless everything went together. I only had to take a couple of calls while getting ready to answer a few simple questions. My coordinator also snapped a couple of photos of the decorating progress and texted them to me which was so sweet. In my mind it was totally worth it to be at ease that day and not have to think about anything except for marrying my best friend. I was able to enjoy time with my friends and family and that to me was all that mattered.

PS: If you want someone this OCD and detail oriented helping you out on your big day you can totally hire me. I would love to help you :)

DIY prada marfa sign

I’ve always been enchanted by the set designs on Gossip Girl (not that I really loooooved that show.. it was more of a guilty pleasure post college ;) The artwork at the Van der Woodsen penthouse was amazing. My favorite peice was their Prada Marfa sign.

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I love the scale of it, and I especially love the sentiment behind it. I’m sure that none of the cast even knows where Marfa, TX unless they know of the art installation by Elmgreen and Dragset. But Derek and all of his best friends spent his Bachelor weekend camping in Marfa, and we plan to go there for our first anniversary (SO excited!!!)

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I had been wanting some dramatic art for our vastly empty (and tall!!) stairwell, and had planned to order a Prada Marfa canvas, but the size I wanted was $429. Oopsies. No thank you! So I did what any other cheapskate would do, and I made my own.

First I found the largest Prada Marfa sign I could find on Google Images and printed out the letters (about 1 per 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of cardstock)

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I made them grey so that I wouldn’t be wasting as much ink.

Then I cut out each letter with scissors, and for the insides of letters I used an xacto knife. I freehanded my cuts because I use xactos for a living, but you can also use a straight edge to make things a little quicker.

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After all of my letters (and arrow) were cut out I made my canvas. What? I know. I was feeling really cheap, and canvases aren’t 50% off now at Hobby Lobby so I improvised! I laid out four sheets of 30″ x 40″ white foam core and taped them all together with foam tape to create the thickness of a canvas.

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I know the edges are ugly, but I plan to tape them off and paint them black (more on that tomorrow!)

If you’ve ever made a canvas before then you can skip this part, but for everyone else I just brushed on a coat of gesso using heavy nasty brushstrokes to create a canvas-y texture using the crappiest of crappy brushes (highly recommended for the canvas-ification process).

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Then I dry brushed in the opposite direction creating a sort of cross-hatch texture (like a canvas). It’s hard to see the texture in these photos but its a very subtle cross-hatch, and looks very canvas-like in person.

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Once the gesso dried I arranged my letters using a T-square to keep my rows straight and scotch tape to hold my letters in place for tracing.

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Using a pencil I carefully traced around each letter. Hint: I had placed the scotch tape only on the straight sides of each letter so that I could easily fill in that gap once the tape was removed.

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Once all of my tracing was complete, I began to carefully paint each letter using black acrylic paint.  I used two different sized brushes for this part. A 1/2″ brush for filling in and a 1/8″ brush for the edges and small details.

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You can sort of see here that some of the edges aren’t perfectly sharp (like the arrow) so after my paint had dried I went back over each detail with a black sharpie to make everything perfect.

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Okay so please ignore that disgusting sheer green drapery panel that was left by the previous tenant. Why is it still there? Probably because I completely forget about it until I’m leaving the house everyday ha! It’s coming down tonight I promise!

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I just love how it turned out! The whole project only took me about 2.5 hours and was completely free because I already had all of the supplies. Tonight I plan to tape off the edges of the foam core and paint them black to create a nice detail around the border. What do you guys think?

60 years of marcus lee

This past weekend we went up to visit my parents to celebrate my birthday, Mother’s Day, and my dad’s 60th birthday. (60!!) So everyone (except for my dad) knew about the birthday gift I had been cooking up (AKA slaving over for months), and I couldn’t wait to show him. I wanted to really commemorate the past 60 years of his life and since he has always loved photography, I made him a little photo book through Pinhole Press. I sneakily took a bunch of old photos from him when I was up there  to visit around the beginning of the year, which if you know him at all you know how organized he is so taking these without him noticing was a feat in itself.

When I finally gave it to him we all watched as he flipped through it reminiscing over each photo. When he finished he told me it was the best gift he had ever received. Here are a few of my favorite pages.

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photo 2 (1)

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photo 1 (3) photo 5
photo 2 (2) photo 3 (2) photo 4 (1)
photo 5 (1) photo 5 (2) The book I chose was 8″ x 10″ hardback book that was hand-bound and wrapped in red linen cloth, and held 98 photos. I was  I was a little nervous about the quality of the book because I’ve been disappointed in the past by other photo books I’ve made from other companies, but I heard really great things about Pinhole Press, and when I received it I was totally blown away. I wish these photos really captured the quality and tooth of the paper. Simply perfect. I truly think this will be something we will all look back at over time and our children will get to enjoy one day. I think this is just such a wonderful keepsake, and I plan to make one with all of our wedding photos soon. Happy Birthday Daddy :)

friday finds: puppy necessities

This weekend we’re heading up to north Texas to visit my parents for my birthday, my dad’s 60th birthday, and mother’s day (all rolled into one weekend!) This is also Geoffrey’s first official road trip (6 hours!!), so we’re a little nervous/excited about it all. After packing up all of our things this morning (and his) I realized that in just these past few weeks, we have accumulated a lot of stuff for our little boy. Here are some of our (his) favorite items.

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1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

Clearly there is a striped obsession happening, but I mean it’s me. Are we really surprised? Please don’t think we really bought a $50 dog bowl for little Geoffrey. I actually scored a pair of these at HomeGoods a few weeks ago for $15! And you can also get a zillion of those pooper scooper bags at HomeGoods for like $2. They have amazingly cheap pet stuff! We found that carrot at Petsmart a couple weeks ago. It was his very first toy and he is OBSESSED with it. I can’t find it on their website, but they definitely still have them in store. In fact my parents’ cherubs each got one as well. So random! But then when I googled it, apparently it was Bolt’s favorite toy too! I totally forgot about that. And Geoffrey sort of looks like Bolt. It was meant to be :) Oh and he LOVES tennis balls. He tries to bring all three of them back to me at once, so one is in his mouth and he’s kicking (and tripping) the other two back to me. Favorite.

I’m sure you’re probably looking at that car seat and thinking. Really? But it’s purely for safety reasons. Heaven forbid we get in a wreck, we don’t want our little boy flying through the windshield or getting beat up by an air bag, so when we travel we have in hooked in in the back seat with his blanket and some toys and he just lays down and sleeps, which makes us feel more at ease for such a log trip.

What are your favorite puppy items that we should know about? I feel like everyone and their mom has that little hedgehog toy.

larger than life art

Now that things are finally starting to come  along in our home. (Walls have been painted, furniture has been arranged, etc.) We have a pile of art just begging to be hung. However, we have a LOT of wall space to cover, and I’ve been really wanting to make something pretty substantial. Here are some oversized pieces that I’ve been eyeing lately for a little inspiration.aaviaaa1

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Aren’t these ideas lovely? I just love the impact they create in a space. I have a couple of large blank canvases I plan to attack this week, so hopefully I’ll have something to share with you guys soon. I think our dining room walls will be the first to conquer :)

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