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

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

Wine 101

Last Friday night Mr. Castle was finally able to give me my Valentines day gift! His gift to me was a wine 101 class. He thought it would be good preparation for our honeymoon in Italy and Paris, where we will surely be drinking plenty of wine! We decided to schedule it a couple weeks before our wedding, figuring it would be a nice break from all the projects we would be working on. It turned out to be a great choice because after our crazy week we needed to have an evening out!

I wanted to share some of the small tidbits of information I learned from our wine 101 class. I really don't know much about wine, other than I enjoy drinking it. I'm terrible when it come to purchasing a bottle of wine though, and that's were this class really helped. We tried twelve different wines during our two hour class, and yes by the end we were a little tipsy. Trying such a wide variety of wine introduced me to some new kinds I really enjoyed. As for those I didn't enjoy, I at least learned to appreciate their unique flavor.

Ready for wine class!

Mr. Castle trying a nice Sauvignon Blanc

One thing I learned, which may totally be common knowledge but I had no idea, was that the different kinds of wine refer to the grape it was made from. I was unaware that Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Merlot, to name a few, were types of grapes. Our tasting was done in pairs and both wines were made from the same type of grape. He explained how the region the grape was grown and the way the wine was produced affected the flavor. I don't know if it was just the California girl in me, but I tended to prefer the California/West coast wines over the European ones. I was glad to at least gain this small bit of knowledge for the next time I go to pick out a bottle of wine for a party.

We were also taught how to properly taste wine. Our teacher was really great because he was obviously very passionate about wine, but not in a pretentious way. He kept emphasizing the fact that wine is subjective and everyone tastes things differently He explained that the first thing to do when tasting wine is to swirl the glass to give it some oxygen.  

Swirling my wine

Next you sniff the wine to take in the scent. After you get a good nose full of the scent, you take a large sip and slurp in it your mouth to get the full taste. I was not very good at the slurping part... He said if slurping is not your thing to at least keep it in your mouth for a bit to take in all the flavor of the wine. 

Another great part of our tasting was the cheese that was paired with our wine! 

It was so nice to have a fun night out during all the wedding craziness. I highly recommend planning something for you and your love to do a couple weeks before the wedding. It's nice to do something that takes your mind off the wedding for a couple hours. 

Now it may seen like this has nothing to do with our wedding, but in a way it does. My Dad decided to take over the task of wedding favors. A good friend of his works at a winery in central California and gave us a great deal on wine bottles to give as favors to all our guests! We will have both a red and white wine for our guests to choose from. We even made our own wine labels for each bottle, more on that later. :) With our new found knowledge and appreciation for wine I can't wait to try our "custom blend."And I hope our guests enjoy it as well!

What about you, are you a wine lover? What is your favorite kind? Perhaps I'll give it a try!
*All photos are personal