Our Wedding
Flip It and Rehearse It
Remember that Missy Elliot song? Love it.
Hey do you also remember that we’re celebrating our wedding week with a slew of themed posts all about our nuptials – two years later? This morning’s post is all about our rehearsal dinner. Which took place at Chad’s Aunt and Uncle’s home in the hill country outside of Austin, Texas.
Our rehearsal dinner enjoyed perfect weather, which is a heck of a lot better than we can say for our wedding day. We know rain is good luck but what about hail and tornado sirens? For an outdoor ceremony?
We had a lot of friends and family coming in from out-of-town – including all of my peeps from Alabama. Yes, I say peeps. Because of the distance we were sure to invite all of said peeps to the rehearsal dinner for some real Texas BBQ and even a Texas country band.
Feeding about a hundred folks in the back yard wasn’t an easy task and one that we never could have pulled off with great friends and family to help us - because it was pulled off on a budget fo’ sho’. Okay, I get it, enough with the Missy Elliot right?
Here’s the run down.
Chad’s parents graciously paid about five hundo to rent a tent, tables, chairs and linens. This was an amazing price for a rentals budget, which we scored from Musical Chairs in Austin.
Chad’s cousins were saints on the big day and set everything up for us, including hanging the family’s icicle lights from the inside of the tent via extension cord from the house. Nice ambiance right? And F-R-E-E.
To feed everyone we hit up the hook-up we had with a good friend who manages a Rudy’s BBQ in Austin. I can’t remember the total cost but it was mere dollars per person to feed our hungry mob. Plus Chad’s family pulled out a random snow cone machine halfway through the night. Who knew?
Oh, and my slick hubby-to-be somehow got all our beer for free from a hook-up at Real Ale. More pennies saved.
This is one of my favorite photos of the night. Chad saw that I had not eaten a bite because I was too busy running my yap all night (my words not his), so he brought me a little BBQ sandwich/taco… right when the toasting started. I don’t even remember if I ate the thing, but this picture just reminds me of his thoughtfulness, even on a crazy night. And then our attempt to hide it.
After toasts came the band. The story of our awesome band is one of our favorites to tell about planning our rehearsal dinner. We scored a six person band, a really good band at that, for $300. If you don’t know much about bands that’s pretty insane, let us just say.
How did it all go down? Well, we hired a wedding planner just for the big day (more on Wendy to come, she was wonderful though) and through a string of emails one day, we asked her if she knew any great low-key bands that might play our rehearsal dinner. Her neighbor was looking to get into the event business, after hanging around the Austin bar scene for a while so she suggested we give him a call. Boy are we glad we did. Billy told us that we were his first referral from a real event planner and they were so excited to gain referrals that he’d play it for $300. The whole band.
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
Harmonica.
Look ‘em up.
The remainder of the night was filled with lots of DIY and personal touches. We cut out our own Mexican inspired wedding banners as a tribute to our honeymoon location (we didn’t really just come to Durham) after discovering they were not so cheap ordering custom versions online. Stay tuned, there is a how-to for that project coming this week too!
Our decorations consisted of boots we purchased from Goodwill filled with grocery store bouquets and small framed signs naming each table after a Texas dance hall. We printed the signs ourselves and used frames that a friend gave us after his wedding the previous year.
We used a guitar that we had lying around the house as our guest book, asking guests to sign it with either a black or gold Sharpee marker.
For favors we ordered koozies from Custom Ink for about $1.00 a piece with free shipping. We designed the logo ourselves, completely from scratch in Microsoft Word. Not too shabby eh?
No. You’re not seeing things. There was something camouflage involved in our wedding.
I’m from Alabama people! It’s what we do!
In all seriousness when we decided koozies were in order for the rehearsal, Chad requested camo. It was one of the only things he asked for during the entire planning process so I chose not to stand in his way. We still have a million of them leftover, two years later. For real. If you want one email us, we’ll mail you one just to get them out of the house.
For attire we both wore clothes we already had, I actually wore my mother’s wedding dress from the 70′s. This was one of our favorite details about the entire weekend.
And last but not least, how did everyone know about the party? Our DIY invitation.
We search online quite a bit and were looking for an old country music poster type feel – very Hatch Show Print. These were pricey for a couple who is always on a budget, so we got our creative juices flowing and made a little Word Document template of an invitation, printed them on brown paper cardstock and mailed them in clear vellum envelopes. Easy peasy.
If you notice a few blanks in the photo above it’s because we photo-shopped out Chad’s parents’ phone number and e-mail address as well as Chad’s Aunt and Uncle’s address. We trust you guys of course but aren’t sure the fam wants their personal info plastered online – even to upstanding readers like ours.
So that’s it in a nutshell. In a 1060 word nutshell. More than you ever wanted to know about our rehearsal dinner.
Psst! If you want to jack our invitation, the file can be found right here.
Photos 2-7 and 14 (basically the good ones): Sarah Snider Photography
24 Months
That’s how long we’ve been married, as of today. That’s right, it’s our second anniversary!
In many ways it feels as if we’ve been married much longer and in other ways it feels as if our wedding was just yesterday. It’s a good balance. Although, while dining on some fish tacos at Fullsteam last night a friend did point out that “two just feels good, you know, one is kinda iffy, like is this gonna work? two just feels good.”
We never felt like the first year was iffy, but we see what she means. Two does feel good.
Photos: Caleb Chancey for A Bryan Photo.
We’re in the celebratory mood, so we may have to revel in our anniversary all week long with a few more wedding-themed posts. Stayed tuned for more.
Martha Strikes Again
As soon as I move on from her show, her website or her magazine and decide that I can indeed live without her in my day – Martha Stewart comes out with something awesome. Like her adorable pet collection featured in a post of yore, and now this super crafty furniture collection. I could definitely blog from here.
P.S. Want to re-live our five seconds of Martha Stewart fame? Check out our proposal story featured on Martha Stewart Weddings here, and our blog post about it – also from yore. I’m still wearing that perma-smile.
Photo: Home Decorators
Keeping It Interesting
A few months ago we added a little honeymoon art to our home office by framing a photo of the Puerto Escondido beach to hang on the wall. Don’t remember that post? Check it out here.
Well, after walking by the frame every morning – it hangs right outside our bedroom door – we’ve decided to jazz it up a bit. Using an IKEA RIBBA frame, gave us the option of using a shadowbox style insert which will push the photo back into the frame about an inch.
Looked good. To make it a bit more eye-catching though we also added a couple of coats of Glidden’s Gentle Tide paint – the same color used in our newly painted kitchen.
Speaking of that newly-painted kitchen, you’ll notice a little teaser in the background. More pics to come soon. We promise.
A New Place for Pints
Don’t worry Shawn – we’re not dreaming of ending our weekly ritual of pint night at Tyler’s. We’re only referring to the new home for our pint glass collection – for which you are partly responsible.
You guys might remember from checking out this post, that we relocated our once dish-cabinet from the kitchen to the living room in order to make room for our new desk and chair. But we haven’t shown you any pics of where the cabinet ended up until now.
We love our rustic little cabinet, which is really an old pie safe that Amy’s mom gave her to help stock one of her first apartments. It used to be unfinished pine and have little wooden hearts attached to the wire windows. Amy’s mom ripped the hearts off (sounds harsh we know…) and gave it a nice coat of stain so that we can enjoy the awesome cabinet that we have today.
The items we’ve placed on top are basically just things that we love. The framings are: a Big Bend, Texas poster, a Ray Lamontagne concert poster, the photo strip from our wedding photo booth – that you also see every time you check out the bloggity blog, and a picture of all the guys holding their letters on med school match day.
We just balanced the white frames on each side and also added touches of green with a candle and some tree trimmings. The shell was picked up on a recent trip to Virginia Beach. We had everything on hand meaning zero dollars were spent which always looks good to us.
Psst! Our Durham Magazine weekly blog feature is up today, they’re chatting up our White-d Elephant Christmas Party. Enjoy reliving the experience here.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
In keeping with this morning’s theme of giving away some free holiday cards we thought we’d post about our own, which were not freebies.
One of our favorite holiday rituals is choosing “the card.” We know it’s a bit silly in this digital age to print and snail mail holiday greetings – but we love the tradition and spirit of staying in touch by taking the time to buy stamps and address envelopes. This year was no exception, and we even got a friend in on the action (check out this post for a flashback).
These cards are much more colorful and quirky than last year’s, which was a flagrant self-celebration of our marriage and my refusal to give up “bride” status, a la Monica Geller.
This year’s card was ready-made by Tiny Prints, check out their banner on the right for some awesome holiday steals and deals by the way. All we had to do was drop in the photo. Their website makes it super-easy to see exactly what your card will look like before you order. Major plus.
Last year’s card took more time and definite tweaking on our part. We ordered them from Vistaprint, as 4″x8″ glossy business products and added our own photos and text designs. Well worth the hour or two to create, and they were actually remarkably cheap this way. If you’re looking to do the same and need some help, give us a shout.
What do we do with all our friend’s photo cards after the season has passed? We gather them all up and mount them in our holiday card album.
It’s a lot of fun to pull out each year and look at photos of our friends and family – a holiday blast from the past.
In case you’re interested in making your own, ours is just a standard 12″ x 12″ photo album from Michael’s. We switched out the white pages for black cardstock, since so many holiday cards are bright, this really helps them pop. Our album’s cover photo was taken at our wedding reception of the twinkle lights around Laguna Gloria for a Christmas-y vibe that’s still entirely personal.
So what do you guys think? Are we the only ones out there that still go through the Christmas card rigmarole? Does anyone out there know what rigmarole actually means? We promise we’re done with writing about Christmas cards… for now.
