I like the Sparkle

I have always been attracted to things that have a little sparkle to them. I've never been a big pearl person. I like them, but I like sparkle/bling better. So when it came time to pick the jewlery for my wedding day, naturally I was drawn to the bling and this came as no surprise to those who know me.

Bridesmaid Hot Mama knew exactly what jewlery set I wanted and from where and surprised me with it as a Christmas gift. It is actually a lot more sparkly and beautiful in person than it is in this picture. This picture does not do it justice!

Because I was impressed with the quality, sparkle, and customer service Hot Mama said she received, I decided to order my tiara from the same place. After debating over a few different tiara's I settled on this one. It's cute, it's blingy and it would look good in either an updo or a half-up/half-down look. I wasn't dissapointed when it arrived in the mail. The man snuck a peek at it and liked it too.

I got both of these sparkly beauties at USA Bride and I wasn't dissapointed. In fact, I highly recomend this sight if you're still looking for that special sparkly necklace, tiara, or hair pin. They have a lot of other items too.

AND because I love you guys I'll share my cuopon for Free Shipping & 10% off Your Accessory Order (I think you need to spend a minimum of $100)
Enter Code: SAVE10

Expires: April 30, 2009

Happy Shopping.

We Rock!

I had BIG plans to finish a project I've been working on this weekend. I wanted to share with everyone, but alas, we had company on Saturday and then Sunday something else happened.

Sunday, after our company left, The man and I decided to go into town and take a stroll through Bed, Bath and Beyond (where I was hoping we'd register finally). We got there and began strolling around and I could tell the Man was just not in the mood to register. In fact, I truely believe him when he says he "just doesn't care" about kitchen stuff. He isn't the one cooking on a normal basis, so why would he like kitchen things? He told me he really isn't into registering and I honestly believed him when I saw how A.D.D. he got in the store.

We quickly exited the store without registering for anything, and went nextdoor to Best Buy. This is where we should register! The Man was in his glory here and we ended up leaving with a purchase.... we have joined the ranks of

Guitar Hero. We were going to get RockBand, but they were all sold out of the Rockband for the wii, but they had plenty of Guitar Hero's in store.

And as soon as we got home, we busted it out, and began the madness. I was one with the drums and singing and The Man was one with the guitar. All. Day. Long. we played.

We accomplished nothing except spending some quality time perfecting our band!

I woke up this morning without having finished my craft projects, with a soar throat (from belting out tunes for hours), and with a sore toe (felt like a "stiff toe" which may or may not be from the foot pedal on the drum set).

Have you found a creative way to spend quality time with your man?

Save our Date!

I've seen some amazing Gocco'ed invites, save the dates, cards, ect. from some very crafty people. Although I don't hate the way my Save the dates turned out, I wasn't totally in love with them either. I know I could have done better if I had spent more time on them. It was a decision that was made and after talking to all the hotels in the area, they needed to go out as quickly as possible.

I busted out my Gocco and got ready to start being creative. At this point we didn't have a theme or anything really picked out besides the colors.

The first step in Gocco mass production is burning the screen.

You simply line up your printed out/copied image on the grey sticky pad. The top of the gocco is made of a see through plastic. You can see what the actual image will look like and if it's lined up correctly or not. Move your image around as much as you want, until you get it where you want it and it looks perfect.




Once you have your image lined up, you open the top of the Gocco (it flips up) and insert the blue filter and then the screen on top of the filter.



place 2 bulbs in the housing(the yellow thingy), line up the arrows on the housing with the arrows on the Gocco (orange part) or your housing will get stuck--don't ask how I know this.

Close your eyes, turn your head and push down. The gocco will flash and your image will be burned onto the screen. If you have done it properly, the paper with your printed image will be stuck to the back of the screen. Don't remove this just yet.


Next,pull the top layer up, bust out your ink block (the squishy silver stuff) and block your image off. This helps the ink stay in the area you need it to stay in and the image stamps clearer when you use it.



ink up
peel off the paper, put the screen back into the gocco, place your blank cardstock down and stamp you little heart out.

Sounds a lot more complicated than it is.

I burned two screens to make our save the dates (well, three really, but my image moved and was crooked so it was a wasted screen).

This is the first pass I made for our save the dates


I used a clear embossing powder which I sprinkled on, and the tipped the card to get off the excess, then I used my embossing gun that I bought at AC Moore with a 1/2 off cupon to heat it up. Easy, but time consuming. It raised my image and made it look more professional. I highly recomend embossing if you want a little texture.


My second pass is what I wish I had spent more time on. The words should have been larger, and I wish I had used a cooler font. I was limited at the time with the font thing because we didn't have a working printer, so I printed it off at work, and I didn't want to download a font on my work computer, so I was chained to the ones that came in word 2003.


in retrospect I wish I had done the writing on the bottom in black so it showed up better. I am a little disapointed with my results, but felt like I was on such a time contraint that I really didn't care at that point. I made these before I really realized the potential of what they could have been, but in reality not tooooooo shabby for my first mass production.

The next project will be better, I swear.
I have big plans for the invites.

Did you send out Save the dates? How creative did you get?

The save

Where was I? Oh yes, Track Season in Saratoga Springs and realizing it may possibly be a problem finding hotels for my guests. Not wanting my out of town guests to feel out of place, I wanted to find several hotels that offered blocks for guests, so that they would have a choice of where to stay.

Our obvious first choice would be The Fort William Henry Resort since that is where our wedding and reception are taking place but they wouldn't offer to "block the rooms." They did, however, offer a discount code and "fake hotel block" for our guests. The discount code wasn't very discounted and the room rates were a lot higher than I wanted to ask our guest to pay, plus I wasn't impressed that they wouldn't actually hold the rooms or guarantee rooms for our guests.

Since I wasn't overly impressed with our place, The man, MOH Cooper and I all went up to Lake George one weekend and checked out every hotel up there. We got the same answer at all the hotels: they were more than willing to block rooms for us and all we'd have to do would be to call them back and set it up with the "manager." They even went as far as to show us the rooms and give their rates. After viewing all the rooms and the rates, the Man and I decided on two we really liked.

I called them the next day to set up hotel blocks, like they told me to do, and I was then told that they don't set up blocks and the rates were totally different and they had a 3 night (at least) minimum stay since it was track season.

Track season, track season, track season. That was the answer to them changing their minds. I was annoyed that I had wasted a whole day looking at hotels and was told one thing, when really it wasn't an option. I wish they just hadn't wasted my time.

So I decided rather than chance it or go crazy, we would just use the Fort William Henry fake block because they didn't have a minimum stay since it was for our wedding. The rates were higher than I wanted to find, but I was litterally up a river without a paddle on this one. I decided we needed to send out save the dates really early and include a little note to encourage people to book ahead of time. I was informed back in September, that rooms were booking up for August of 2009 already.

I created my save the dates in Microsoft word and prepared to bust out my Gocco for the first mass produced product since I bought it.



Have you decided to complete a project you had no intention of doing?

So you wanna get married during Track Season?

I talk a lot about track season in my blogs, and I realized that some of you may not know what exactly that is, so I'm going to try to show you.

ahhhh the track, located in Saratoga Springs New York, the bane of my existence...

Track season begins during the last week of July and goes through the first week in September.

When you decide to go to the track, you make a day out of it and plan on spending lots o' money. The track is cool though because you are allowed to bring in your own coolers and chairs and pretty much anything you want as long as it's not glass. Bringing your own cooler with drinks and food will save you a lot of money.

This is an outside view of the track, the front before we go inside. It's so pretty. Once you enter, madness ensues, but out here it's peaceful.

Once inside, you buy a program that includes all of the races for the day.

You decide on which horse you're going to put your money on, and you head up to the window to place your bet.
There is always a huge line, but you suffer through it, place your bet, and then go patiently wait for the race to start.

This is the seating out front. The benches are free seating (you will get so sunburned sitting out here in the hot sun all day) and the building behind that is the "clubhouse" seating. You have to pay to sit in there. There is also seating indoors with TV's set up all over-- however you do not get the same feeling as sitting out front watching it unfold in person. There is seattin out back with large TV's set up all over the place. It's more shaded in the back. You need to get to the track early to get a good seat out back and set up your own chairs to save your spot. Be prepared to be crowded and for people to pretty much sit ontop of you out there.


This picture captures the essence of the busyness of the track. Anywhere you go it usually looks like this:

As soon as the race starts you're standing on the benches screaming for your horse to win and it looks something like this



What does this have to do with weddings? Well, nothing normally, but it does effect my wedding since my wedding falls in the middle of track season. Track season brings in hoards of out of towners and is really great for Saratoga. It brings in a lot of revenue for the year. People come and rent out hotel rooms for months. Prices go up on everything, and for those two months it is torturous to drive anywhere in Saratoga. People who come back every year secure their hotel for the necxt year when they leave.

My biggest concern was securing a hotel block for my out of town guests. My family is basically all located here, but The mans is all coming from out of town, out of state, and will need somewhere to stay.

Despite my first decision to not make "Save the Dates," I quickly changed my mind after trying to unsuccessfully secure hotels for my guests.

Stay tunned for the Save the Date project....

The List

Most debates occur over the list of invitees to the wedding. The man and I pretty much have had our list completed since, well, last October. Yeah, that's right. I had to bug him and bug him and bug him for the addresses on his side of the family, and then finally ask him mother for it since he wasn't producing it for me. But she sent it to me and I entered it, along with the names of people I was inviting, into an excel workbook.


I Love excel.

I figured our list making was over. Done. Complete.

I was wrong.

This past weekend, I decided to install my new printer on our computer. I should preface this by saying, if I haven't already said so, that I am electronically challenged. And what I mean by that is, everything electrical I touch, breaks. Yeah, you probably see where I'm going here now.

So there I am installing my new printer on the computer and after it had completed, it's not reading the usb cable so it's not reading the printer. I decide that if I restart the computer it should pick it up. So I restarted the computer, not thinking anything was wrong.

The computer shut down, but would not re-load. It would not start up. I have absolutely no IDEA what happened to it because it's less than 1 year old and shouldn't be having problems, but that's what happened.

After I played with it FOREVER trying to figure out the problem, the Man decided to use his windows recovery disk to fix the problem. And it did, somewhat. However, the problem lies in where I saved our list. I had saved it, along with some mock up invites and table numbers I was working on, on the C drive. Since we had to use the recovery disks the C drive was wiped out.

Disastrous! All is gone. The computer still isn't working correctly. Last night I tried to install excel again, and it wouldn't read the disk. I think we are going to have to have it looked at.

Have you experienced any disastrous setbacks along the way and how did you overcome your obstacles?

The Baker Jackpot

This past Saturday morning I met with our baker.


If you've been following my posts, you know I wasn't *quite* sure what I wanted (even after already meeting with another baker). In leu of making a decision, I decided to bring my top 3 cake photo's with me and see if Jeremy, my baker, and I could come up with a cake plan.

I needed some helpers and brought my mama and MOH Cooper with me for support and boy was I glad Cooper was there. She was fabulous (as usual) and super helpful since she's been through the wedding process before. Jeremy loved her so much, he almost offered her a job there... almost.


Jeremy was very friendly and brought out a book of his fantastic work for me to look through. Which was a bad idea. Bad, Jeremy, bad. You only confuse me more with your masterful skills. I liked his work a lot better than baker No. 1's and he was a lot more personable, plus my nut allergy problem didn't seem to phase him, as in, he was more than willing to work with it.

I showed Jeremy my 3 top cakes and he looked at me and said, "well, we have three very different cakes here. The only thing I can see that's similar is the fact that they are all white"

Seriously? I thought there were some similarities, but I'm no cake baker, so I guess my pictures were just like me- all over the place.

I picked out some qualities that I wanted my cake to have such as: round, tiered, textured looking (like the first photo), and butterfly's.

Jeremy said he had just what I was looking for. He went in the back and returned with this:

can I just say, I love the butterfly cascade. LOVE. I liked it before as well, but figured since the first baker I went to was going to charge me per butterfly, that it was out of our budget and should be out of my mind... but Jeremy, Jeremy said he could do whatever I wanted and he does not charge per decoration.

Now, the butterflys will be a little labor intesive but he said the fee would be minimal if any, and definatly not per butterfly.

The cake is going to be textured somewhat like picture no. 1, only all the way around each layer and white with the pink butterfly cascade(no flowers like in the picture above). We have a monogrammed initial I created for the topper. I think it'll look fabulous.

but what about the taste?

Well, you are not going to believe this, but Jeremy not only make beautiful cakes, but they taste like heaven. He baked me some samples to try, and I was expecting to try them in store. However, he baked me a small cake. My own little cake to bring home, which was perfect because now The Man (who was working) could taste the cake too.

The man preferred the more plain flavors of vanilla and chocolate (he wanted marble to begin with) and I fell in love with the raspberry cake. Mama and MOH Cooper favored the raspberry cake too. Want more fabulousness? the raspberry cake is PINK. How fun to cut into a white cake and have pink inside.

Ultimately our cake is going to be 4 tiers, so I figured we can do two raspberry tiers and two marble. The man seconds the decision.

Each tier of cake is consisting of 4 layers of cake and 3 layers of filling. We have yet to decide on the filing flavors... that's just too much to ask of me for one day.

Jeremy doesn't take deposits but holds the date for you, and you do not have to pay until AFTER the event and if it isn't the way you imagined it would be, then he doesn't require payment at all. He is THAT good that he pretty much can guarantee that your cake will be fabulous, or you don't have to pay him.

I feel like we hit the baker jackpot! Anyone else feel really excited to be working with a certain venor of theirs?