the cowgirl boots delima...

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So my dear friends (& bridesmaids) Jamie and Jessica prompted me with an interesting idea...cowboy boots for the bridemaids. I have been struggling with bridemaids shoes, for I am not a "shoe person"... but this idea is intriguing...what do you think?! Of course adorable pictures, but we aren't cowboy-cowgirl people. It does go very well with our theme... married in a corral, hay bales to sit on, pastures/trees/mountains, rugged idaho.... i love it. Plus the nighttime could get a little cooler, and if not...they could change into flip flops at the reception?! So one more delima-what do the guys wear? I originally wanted white jack purcells....any ideas out there?! And who doesn't look good in cowboy boots anyways? Super flattering and I've always wanted an excuse to purchase some- that hopefully won't make me taller than Matt-that would be quite unacceptable to me.

...the invitations...

Well here they are...our pride and joy...we are so pleased with the way these turned out. We spent about nothing... the cost of: 2 yards of my favorite amy butler fabric, some green thread for sewing three of the layers of invitation together, some fun swiss dot paper in green and turquoise, kraft brown paper and envelopes, vintage stamps, twine, white linen card stock, and ink for our printer at home. It was fun, we made 80 invitations which was a pretty reasonable number. Matt helped with cutting each piece of fabric to size, starching them, stamping each envelope and RSVP postcard, the layout/wording, assembly...and LOTS of love and encouragement. 

It was a blast to come up with something unique and it felt like us and the wedding weekend we would be having. We found a picture online of a pine tree we loved and tweaked it to be our own and made a "matt tree" and a "lindsey tree" and then chose some fonts that were whimsical and rustic to us. Then I wanted to have the front backed by amy butler fabric. I fell in love with these fabrics and her use of turquoise and green- it felt like the summer wedding feeling I want...and I love fabric and sewing- so voila! In our wedding invite it goes!!

Our wedding will be informal, but nice. So we had to work hard to convey that in our wording on the invitation. We are getting married in a corral, having a BBQ with ribs, handmade cotton wedding dress, and without any words of god in the ceremony- just the love of our friends and family to unify us... so... we wanted to make sure everyone came prepared for what they were going to experience. 

We chose to splurge with vintage stamps. This is getting popular- I saw it popping up in some wedding blogs that I love and we decided to go for it. In town there was an antique store that carried a bunch of vintage un-used stamps that we could choose from. It took us three hours to find green, turquoise, brown, and yellow stamps that would add up to 61 cents...but we did it, and we are so pleased with the way it looked. We also wanted to use 29 cent LOVE stamps for the RSVP postcards. We have a little vintage flair in our wedding, we love it...and we are doing our wedding ourselves-just like back in our parent's day...so it works. 

We have loved the feedback from our friends and family. And we didn't realize that getting the RSVP postcards back in the mail would be so much fun. Everyday we run out to our mailbox hoping for another one...we just can't wait to see all of our very special people in June to help us celebrate something soo incredibly special to us....our wedding.

cake trials...

As you may or may not know we are doing literally every part of our wedding.  This includes the wedding cake. We stumbled upon cooking light's cupcake recipe for coconut cake (coconut inside the cake- not outside, like usual) and lime frosting. Its super tasty...so we thought this would be fantastic for a summer wedding cake. 

So here was attempt #1-

...needless to say we were freaking out. Who wants to eat cake like THAT?! It actually was quite good tasting, but not only is it hideous but what you can't tell from the picture is that the lime juice curdled the frosting.... sweet huh?! Yeah, thats what acid in limes does to buttercream frosting. So we had a little hiccup in our plans. We tried again with some tweeked recipes, now with cream cheese frosting- which tastes great with lime, it doesn't curdle miraculously but it won't hold up in the heat too well...so we bring the cake out at the very last minute...thats ok with us.

Attempt #2-

...better- right?! This was only one layer of cake, we will be putting about 3 stacked on top of each other to make a taller cake.And then put some little pine tree branches around the cake for decorations. The frosting also has little green specks of lime zest (our colors are turquoise and green...fyi).We found four of these fabulous cake stands at Costco...small and large turquoise cake stands that we plan to have a small cake w/ our ceramic bird toppers, then the other cake stands will have lots of cute cupcakes on them with amy butler fabric ties on toothpicks...

the invites are out!!

Well... it was a lot of super fun work...but they are on their way...we can't wait to show you our process!!