DIY Life

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I covered the very beginning of my recent 'race' to prepare and execute the perfect wedding in just five weeks. My wife and I ended up pulling everything off, much to the delight of our guests and ourselves. Our honeymoon included some much-needed relaxation time for seven days, but before we get ahead of ourselves, there are more -- much more -- basics to be covered. Well, basics may be a misnomer of sorts, as hardly anything in the preparation of a wedding could be described as 'basic.'

Starting off where I left off last week, our invitations went off within three days of ordering them, which ended up being perfectly timed. Alas, we gave our guests about four weeks notice of our wedding, which seemed an appropriate amount of time. Nobody -- at the time -- knew that we'd just began preparations for the wedding a few days earlier, but we weren't about to spill the beans just yet.

The next step in planning our wedding was squaring away the tuxedo rentals. With eight men to get measured and lined up, we headed to Tuxedo Junction at a location near our area. The tuxes were reserved on the day we ordered our invitations, so now was the time to notify all seven guys that they would have to drag, push and pull themselves to the tuxedo rental location to have measurements and show sizes taken.On my master planning spreadsheet, I setup a tab for Tuxedo rentals and installed weekly reminders in my Google Calendar to remind me to keep on top of ensuring all the guys had all the measurements taken at least a week before the wedding. With that done, we both moved on. Next up: flower and color selections for all the wedding garb, plus the ordering of wedding cake toppers and coming up with an idea for table favors for the reception attendees.

Being the online shoppers we are, we were able to find chrome/mirrored cake toppers pretty easily. We chose the initials of our first names and a larger initial for my last name instead of the usual bride and groom topper and ordered it. And yes, I am leading you up the primrose path now, so here is an image of how these toppers turned out:


Next up was the difficult decision on what kind of wedding reception table favors we thought would remind the audience of our special day. We opted initially for heart-shaped cookie cutters, but not those flimsy tin ones. We found the perfect size (a tad under three inches) and found the ones we wanted made out of stainless steel. Once they were ordered online, we checked off that tick mark on the planning spreadsheet. But, the project was not over yet -- we had to find a way to represent our wedding on the table favors.

Solution? Locating linen-type business cards with no-perf edges and printing a "wedding sugar cookie" recipe on one side and "Truly Cut Out for Each Other" on the other side. Aww, isn't that precious? Once we decided on a heart graphic for the middle of the table favor card attachment, I printed 150 cards out on my color laser printer, and my wife found the perfect color of ribbon to tie the cards to the cookie cutters. The ribbon was one of the wedding colors she had picked out, which was a hotter-than-hot pink. This leads me into some of my wife's duties going on while I was busy printing the cards and getting them ready to be attached.

She was set on her favorite colors (see a picture of her bouquet at the start of the post), and now it was her job to pick out the actual kind of flowers she wanted as well as how they were to be arranged in her bouquet. I could not have done a better job myself (actually, I would have done a lousy job), but the colors she picked out were just beautiful. Now that the 'colors' were chosen, ribbons, table napkins and various accents started coming together and we initially began to visualize the wedding day together. Progress was definitely being made, and it had been less than a week since I proposed. Gotta move fast, and fast we moved.

I'll end this week's edition by saying that my now-wife -- Marci, for those paying attention -- was busting at the seams to pick out a wedding dress now that the groom and wedding party tuxedos had been chosen and ordered. Her best friend had looked at many dresses when she had been married years earlier and had ended up purchasing the first dress she tried on. As it ended up, so did she. I didn't get to see it until the day we were married, but I must say she has excellent taste. Classic, elegant and flowing are the three words I would use to describe her dress. Just stunning.

As I move on next week, I'll take you through setting up our wedding website (which I was under pressure to complete since it was printed on an insert in the wedding invitations) along with the four-hour process to create our wedding registries at Dillard's and Target. Additionally, we had to ask several friends and family to be involved with the wedding and choose a wedding program design so that it could be created and worked on. Did I mention finding a place for the wedding rehearsal dinner as well? In other words, we didn't stop to breathe a bit as the preparations carried forward. Amazingly, things keep falling into place at every turn, which was probably a combination of luck, crunch-time planning and operational efficiency not seen since...well, you get the picture.

Until next week, then.