Whistle while you work

Or drink some wine, whatever works for you. :)

It was finally the week of our wedding! There was a lot to do and we went to straight to work getting things done! Mr. Castle and I got our marriage license,

I had a hair trial....

... and we started finishing up all our projects! My Matron of honor and I went to Party City and Target to get some goodies for the kids bags. Unfortunately I was a very bad blogger and didn't take any pictures! I do however remember what I put in the bags. Each small orange gift bag contained, a box of animal crackers, a lollipop, a wooly willy, an orange glow stick, a rubber frog, a small pin ball game, bubbles and this:

I love the idea of giving kids coloring books, but I was too nervous to give the kids crayons or markers. One of my young cousins would have ended up drawing on the walls. I found these at Party City and they work just like the title says, you scratch to draw! I did worry a bit about the pointy scratcher but we opened one up and wasn't sharp or dangerous. I got this picture from the little boy I babysit. He kept everything from his bag!

After we finished the kids bags my bridesmaids and I got to work putting labels on all the tic tacs. It takes a lot of concentration and skill to put the labels on straight. We kept laughing as my girls would say, "Oh who's so and so? They got a good one," or "Sorry who ever you are, yours is a little crooked." After we finished putting the labels on we arranged them by table.

You'll notice that our tic tacs are a neon orange color. We ordered them online and instead of the clear box with the orange tic tacs showing through, it was an orange box... it wasn't really what we had in mind, but what can you do? We got over it. 

Once they were arranged we put each tables tic tacs into a zip lock bag with the table number and seating chart.

Lots of work going on in here. In the right corner you can see the orange kids bags!

Finished and ready to go!

Next we went over to my Dad's to put the labels on the wine bottles. Of course we had to open a couple bottles and try our custom wine. :)

We had a pretty good system. Bridesmaids pre-peeled the labels and Mr. Castle and I put them on the bottles. Mr. Castle made a little jig out of orange construction paper so we could make sure the labels were straight.

Mr. Castle concentrating on getting the label straight

I may or may not have sampled a little to much wine...

We really could not have finished everything if wasn't for the help of my amazing bridesmaids and family. We had such a fun week and it was nice to spend so much time with them! 

I was feeling pretty good about how the projects were turning out and how fast we were getting things accomplished. I was starting to get excited! I even got an amazingly perfect fortune in my fortune cookie. 

Yes I will!

Did you have a busy wedding week finishing up projects? Was wine involved???

All Photos are personal

Crafty Castle-in-law

I am very lucky. I have an amazing Mother-in-law. She is one of the nicest people I have ever met. She was so excited about the wedding and was willing to help in any way possible. We took her up on that offer and gave her with a few projects to tackle. Of course everything we gave her was finished and waiting for us when we arrived in California!

 We were greeted by this adorable sign. MIL Castle knows my love for turtles and always includes one for me :)

Their whole house was decorated in "wedding inspired decor." It was so cute. Right away MIL Castle showed us our completed up mailbox. We had done our hand prints the last time we were in Cali and she finished it up by adding our names. 

MIL Castle made it look so much better than Mr. Castle and I ever could! 

(Excuse me looking beat in this photo... we had just arrived after a long stressful flight)

Next MIL Castle took me into her bedroom to show me the sash she was working on for my dress. Let me back up a little and explain. When I found my dress my consultant added a sash and I fell in love with the way it looked. 

 A reminder photo of finding my dress

Unfortunately that sash was $800... yeah it was pretty but not that pretty. MIL Castle came to the rescue and offered to make me a similar sash. I bought a flower for the sash from the etsy seller Silverpencils. It was meant to be a hair flower, but I just asked the seller to add a pin backing instead of a hair comb. MIL Castle had already made the sash and all we had to do was choose the spot for the flower.

I decided I liked the flower in a similar spot as it was on the $800 sash.

A close up. Looks good to me!

My MIL even surprised me with a hidden turtle on the under side of the sash!

My special turtle!

My MIL was so sweet to do these things for us and have them ready right when we arrived! She did an amazing job. I was so excited to wear something she had made on our wedding day. :)

Did your Mother in law help with any special wedding projects?

It's all about the details

Sorry I've been absent for a while. Those thank you notes took longer than I thought! ;) Before I start my official recaps I wanted tell you all about some things I didn't get to blog about before the wedding. I didn't have time to write about them because I was scrambling to finish them!

The weeks leading up to the wedding were crazy. We were constantly working on projects that needed to be finished before we traveled to California. It was a stressful time and some of our projects were not going as smooth as we would have hoped. I have to say our biggest stress was caused by our programs.

Designing them was actually the easy part. I found the template for our programs by googling "Wedding program template."On the results list is a link that says, "[doc] Free wedding program template." Clicking on it automatically downloads a template for Word which looks like this:

Personal Screenshot of template

We changed it around a bit to fit with our ceremony. We could have created our own program from scratch but it was sooo helpful having the template and just plugging in our information. After I filled it in Mr. Castle took over making it look pretty in photoshop. He used the same fonts that are featured on all our our details; the table numbers, escorts cards, favor labels, etc. He added a photo from our engagement pictures and created us a beautiful program!

Personal images 

When it came to printing we thought we'd save some money and print them ourselves at home. We printed them on some card stock that I had bought on sale from Michaels. We started printing them and ran into an annoying problem. For some reason our printer was using color ink even though the programs should have only required black ink. We tried to change the settings, we searched online for an answer and for the life of us we couldn't figure out why our printer was being so stupid! Also it was taking about three minutes to print one page... We used up two cartridges of colored ink and then decided to give up. At that point we had printed the inside of all the programs and had about 50 more of the cover to print. I took the unfinished ones to office depot, something we should have done in the first place, and they printed the rest in 10 minutes. Lesson learned, some things are best left to professionals. 

We did have some luck with our other DIY home printing projects. Before printing the programs and wasting all that ink, we printed out escort cards! Designed of course by Mr Castle. 

Keeping with our "theater" theme. Our Escort cards were our guests "ticket" to find their seat.

Next we printed our custom wine bottle favor labels. Mr. Castle designed a separate label for white and red with a cute quote to go along with each. We bought full sheet label paper and printed six labels per sheet. I cut them all to size with my fancy paper trimmer. We put a label on a tester bottle to see how they looked. 

It's hard to read, but it says, "A bottle of red for joining us as we wed!"

The white reads, "A bottle of white for joining us on our big night."

And finally one of my favorite details: Our place cards. Early on I had the idea to incorporate orange tic tacs into our wedding. Not only are they the best flavor, in my opinion, I also loved the pop of orange they would bring. We decided to make our own labels and use them as place cards. Once again Mr. Castle went to work creating a layout and then filing in each of our guests name. We make a good team. I come up with the idea and he executes the project! 

We made a test label with our cats name :) The label reads, "Orange you happy for Sharon & Jeff?"

The date on the top

A cute poem on the back reads, "Shake these mints for marital bliss & keep on shaking until they kiss!"

All of these projects took a lot of time, which is why I never wrote about them until now! We designed, printed and cut all the labels in New York and that was only the first faze of these projects. We still had to add the labels to the wine and tic tacs which were waiting for us in California. We packed up our labels, programs and other wedding projects and got ready to head to west!

A failed stowaway attempt. Our boys were not happy that they couldn't come to the wedding. 

Did you have to wait to finish a project until you were at your wedding location? Anyone else have any printing fiascos?
All Photos are personal