C + K2 = ∞

The invites, in the process of being cut

There’s definitely a little tension and anxiety raising as we get closer to the big day. We’ve been planning this wedding for over two years now, and as the numbers on the right hand side of the website get smaller, my blood pressure rises. It’s both exciting and nerve-wracking to have it so close.

This weekend, we finished the table cloths! Now we just need to make table runners to go on top of them. :> Chris is going to make some pennants to hang from the rafters of the pavilion, and we’re carefully tweaking the design to make sure it won’t be renaissance-y.

Also this weekend, we finished, assembled and mailed off the invitations! This is a big step, and it feels official now that’s done. We both feel bad for dragging our feet and not being on top of that more, because we had the opportunity for letterpressing them but by the end, budget (with the cat being sick) and time were so tight that we ended up just straight-up printing.

However, everything, from the selection of the paper, to the design, to the printing, to the cutting and assembling was done by us and it was all as custom as it gets. The invitations were a fun project to work on, and made me miss Tiny Prints – just a little bit.

We have two new vendors to announce, our piper and our photographer. However, I’m waiting for emails from both of them with a good photo and what website they’d like me to link to. So stay tuned – it’s always exciting this close to the event.

One day, twenty-something years ago, two 12 year old boys rode a bus to their middle school.  One boy noticed that the other boy had drawn Optimus Prime on one of his schoolbooks and struck up a conversation. The rest is history.  Chris and Bryan have been besties ever since, despite the many changes in their lives.

Bryan married his high school sweetheart Kryis almost 9 years ago, and they have two ADORABLE children, Pryce and Payge.  Bryan teaches high school drama – in fact, he is Kayla’s drama teacher because the world is very small.

In addition, Bryan is a very creative up-and-coming game designer.  His games are available on thegamecrafter.com – My favorites are The Most Toys & Alignment.

In the category of “I’m really fortunate to be surrounded by so many talented people”, I’m excited to say that Kristen and I figured out my wedding hairstyle this weekend.

Kristen has been a professional hair braider for a really long time, I think like 15 years or something. She put herself through college doing this.  She’s one of those super geniuses who can make braids shaped like hearts and do braids with 9 strands.  She’s like a double rainbow.  :>

She’s also one of my closest friends. She has known me for more than 20 years, and so it seemed only fitting that she be the person to do my hair for this important day.  Plus, as you can see, she’s super awesome at it.

I’m very excited that she’s going to be such an important part of the wedding!  And when you’re ready to have your hair braided for an important event, you should give her a call.  

More wedding flower progress!  This weekend there was an impromptu breakfast visit from Chris and Julia Eppstein, and they stayed to help with the wedding crafting.  Chris cut many many circles of fabric, as did Julia, and Julia constructed many lovely peonies.  We went from 0 peonies at the beginning of the day, to 15 at the end!

Since I kind of invented the peony process, I thought I’d share the steps:

1. Cut a bazillion fabric circles.  You should be using synthetic fabrics – which is great for the pocketbook.  Think rayons and taffetas and polyesters. I like sparklies, and it’s easiest to find what I want in the “fancies” section of the fabric store.  Cut the circles in varying sizes, as small as a nickel and as big as a coffee cup.
2. Burn the edges of the circles.  You’ll find that the circles shrink up and kind of make a little cup.  Additionally, the edges darken and look really pretty.
3. Stack 9 circles in varying sizes and colors to get a look you’re happy with
4. Sew them together.
5. Take a little eyelash yarn (I use between 1-2 inches) and sew it into the middle.  It will look like stamens
6. Take some beads or a shiny button, or pretty much anything, and sew that into the middle too, to complete your look.
7. Add a wire stem to the back.

Thank you to the Eppsteins for all your help, and to Michelle Marovich for encouraging me to experiment with this design!

I made the photo, and the subject of the photo.

Anyone who’s met me knows Kayla.  She’s the light of my life, my best friend, my biggest headache, and my one and only daughter.

Kayla is 16 and a half, but wants you to know that she’ll be 17 by the wedding.  We actually scheduled our wedding for the last day in June so it wouldn’t get in the way of her having a great birthday.  😀

Kayla is incredibly creative, a talented illustrator, dancer and makeup artist.  When the wedding happens, she’ll have just ended her Junior year in high school, and when she graduates she hopes to pursue cosmetology and business, at University of Oregon if she can.

When we got engaged, we felt strongly that Kayla should have a big part in the ceremony. After all, Chris is not just marrying me – that’s why the title of this site is C + K2. We talked to her about it, and she really, really wanted to be my Maid of Honor.

Who needs tradition?  This bride’s MOH is her own daughter, and I think that’s just perfect.  

We haven’t printed the invites yet – still working on that.  However, I’m really proud of the artwork for them, so I thought I’d share it with you.  😀

This is the back of our invitations. They’ll be printed on matte cardstock, 4.5 ish by 7 ish inches.

So no kidding, there we were, in a Starbucks in Morgan Hill, for two and a half hours.

Eating cake.

Laurie, our cake designer, is a genius.  She understands cake and sugar and icing and deliciousness and prettiness like nobody’s business.  Like no really, you’re going to love our wedding cake because it’s not only going to look epic, it’s going to taste epic.

Nobody told me what the cake meeting was going to be like.

We met Laurie at a Starbucks halfway between her home and ours.  She had samples of several flavors for us to nosh on, and she even had a wee tiny red velvet cake all decorated with fondant and everything, so we’d know what her fondant tastes like.  Not that we hadn’t already tried it, at two different birthday parties.  We know her work, and we know that we had never even considered using anyone else to make our wedding cake.

So we start by nomming slices of the wee red velvet, and she looks through my pinterest.  We talked about all the cakes Chris and I had pinned, and what we liked about them.  As we talked, Laurie gave us advice about what works and doesn’t, what’s easy, what’s unwise for a wedding outdoors in the middle of summer, and etc.  That woman knows EVERYTHING there is to know about cake.

And you could see a design coming together in her mind.  It was a beautiful thing to watch an artist work.  😀  At the end, she came up with a sketch for a four tiered cake that will feed 120 people.  Or maybe it’ll feed a bunch of people and she’s going to have what she calls a kitchen cake for the rest.  There will be black forest, sticky toffee, and carrot cake flavors.  And the icing filling OMG is so delicious.  She’s going to incorporate both of our plaids, and possibly the custom knot I designed for our invitations.  She’s even working flowers, heather and thistle into the design.

I cannot tell you how strongly I recommend Laurie.  I’ve tasted her cake, I’ve seen her work, and now I’ve seen her working process – and she is just amazing.

As things get closer (tick tick tick) and stuff starts falling into place, it feels like the workload is heating up.  Chris and I have been spending lots of weekend time working on the wedding crafts and this weekend, we had help from wonderful people.  I really love my friends.

Saturday, Julia and Chris Eppstein came over.  Julia helped me cutting tablecloths, and she made a galaxy of  origami paper stars while her Chris cut circles out of fabric, burned the edges of those circles, and cracked wise about a wealth of topics.  Julia also helped me cut and curl paper rose petals.  We started the day with 0 paper roses, and ended with 9!  it was great spending time with them and we were so productive – I loved it!

Sunday, Michael and Kitty Anderson came over.  Michael folded another galaxy of paper pentagons, and provided them to Kitty, Chris and me for puffing.  He hasn’t got anything resembling fingernails, you see, and puffing requires fingernails.  😀  Kitty cut tons of rose petals and even helped make the paper roses!

Chris helped me finish cutting all the tablecloths, and then finished up putting the new straps on his kilt.  He is going to look SO dapper.

At the end of the day, Kitty and Michael took home paper strips for making stars, sheets of paper for rose petal cutting, and pieces of fabric for circle cutting.  Julia asked for full sheets of paper, so she can churn out a small universe of stars.  BTW, in case you guys are wondering, Julia is both the person who taught me to make stars, and the one who suggested putting them in the vases for the flowers, instead of water.  She is awesome.

After the weekend’s productivity, our total project achievements are:

• Finished kilt
• All tablecloths washed, ironed, and cut.  2 fully finished.
• 15 paper roses
• 50% increase in origami star galaxy size
• hundreds of cut and burned circles for making peonies with
• Fully designed wedding invitations

25 feet of wrinkly cotton duck, waiiting to be ironed

In keeping with our rustic location and rustic styling (and our low budget and our disdain for the standard wedding trappings), most everything for the wedding is being made by Chris and I.  As the date looms nears, we’re really ramping up our crafting.

First of all, having your reception in a park means you’re seating everyone at picnic tables.  Picnic tables tend to be dirty and splinter-y, so we’re putting table cloths over them, and we’re also making table runners.  Originally, we had planned on using muslin for the table cloths, but Theaterworks (where Chris works) very kindly gave us about 250 yards of cotton duck (a thin canvas) for free!  You can’t beat free.

The tablecloth making process involves cutting it down into 6 foot by 25 foot chunks, so that I can get it into the washing machine, then washing and drying it because it hung as a wall in a warehouse for like 10 years.  Then, once it’s clean I stretch it out on our living room floor and iron it – all 6 feet by 25 feet of it.  That takes an hour, by the way.  Once it’s ironed, we put our template on top of it, cut the final size and shape for the tablecloth (20 feet by 4 feet) and then I go serge it.

Favor bags – the emerald green side.

Of course, I completely burned out one serger and am struggling to get another to work right.  You know, because nothing can ever be THAT simple.

We’ve got all the rough cuts done and about half of them are washed and cut down to tablecloth size.  Well be using the remnants from all this fabric for pennants and other things – nothing goes to waste in our household!

While I was ironing tablecloths ad nauseum, Chris also took every single one of the favor bags we bought and stamped green celtic knot hearts on one side, and blue celtic knot hearts on the other side.  They turned out so pretty!  He did the whole task, while also stopping to help me lay out the templates and cut the final tablecloths.  He’s such a pro.  😀

So far this has been both our biggest art project ever, and the longest.  We are learning that we work really well together – even when we’re both feeling overwhelmed and tired and wanting to give up.  I’m really lucky to have a partner who has so many skills and is so willing to have fun producing with me.  😀

Nothing like plaid hightops to make your day

The title of this post is a direct ripoff and homage to the ever-fabulous Krista, who will hopefully be joining us at the wedding.  She’s got a thing for shoes, and she has fantastic taste in shoes.

Obviously, this post is about shoes.  Specifically, my (Krys’s) shoes for the wedding.

This was the subject of much discussion between Chris and I.  Traditionally, a bride would wear these fancy slinky heels with bling and feathers and spikes and shiny satin.  Maybe not all on the same pair of shoes, but you know.  However, I’m a bit taller than Chris, and I prefer not to wear heels at our wedding.  Plus, it’s outdoors in a park on uneven ground and nothing ruins a wedding like a broken ankle.  So it was always flats in my mind.

Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, totally copying me

Chris and I are not terribly traditional people.  We loved the idea of me wearing this super-fancy dress with hightops underneath, and it turns out that’s quite popular these days.  You heard it here first, I’m a trendsetter.  (not)

I have to say, this is the funnest thing about the wedding planning so far.  I love that Chris was so supportive of me wearing TENNIES on our big day.  He’s definitely meant for me.  <3