More bridals!

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Bridals

So Bryan and I had a photo shoot just us the Monday before the wedding. I HIGHLY recommend this! It meant on our wedding day we spent an hour taking photos with family and then we were done! We got to leave and go spend TIME with all those wonderful people who came for our wedding. Also, I had time to take a nap. My thing for wedding planning was that anything that can be done before the wedding day DO IT. Doing pictures before made our wedding day that much more relaxed.

Our photography for our bridals was done by Holly Aprecio. You can see more of her work at her blog. I went to High School with Holly. It was fun to see her again and we were VERY pleased with how the pictures turned out.

It’s funny how after a few years in Texas getting married in Seattle felt so exotic. This picture has snowy mountains, evergreen trees, green grass even in the middle of summer, cloudy skies.Everything that screams “Washington!” to me.

Yep. We’re cute!

Now with Bryan’s signature eyebrow lift.

This is Bryan’s favorite. This is surprising because typically he hates any picture where his face is profile. In this case the picture is so great, he doesn’t care!

My favorite. We used a slightly different picture on our thank you postcards (which you should all be getting soon!  I promised!)

Bryan is super proud of this picture because he’s the one who suggested we pose in between these two trees. He likes the symbolism of two family trees coming together. Also, we look awesome.

So I bought my wedding dress because I fell in love with the back of it. Can you blame me? Look at those buttons! The beautiful train! The front of my dress is pretty, but the back is what made me feel like a bride.

Yep. We’re married now. We’re pretty much awesome.

Two Months!

Sorry it’s been so long since we’ve posted. Obviously, June was a very busy month for us. So now that we’ve been married for two months (Two months!). I figure we should try to catch up on some things. hopefully over the next few days I can post our bridal photos, our wedding day, our open houses in Washington and Maryland, and show you all the awesome pictures Bryan took of Alaska while on our cruise! I figure that’s a good way to celebrate our anniversary!

Sam

P.S. so for our anniversary Bryan bought me a book! What a great husband. Even better it was a book that I mentioned that I wanted like three months ago and he ordered it online without telling me. It even arrived on the 16th two months to the day!

San Antonio Open House

So we had our first open house tonight! Many of our friends here in San Antonio came to celebrate our awesomeness with us. Our awesome friend Lawren (who took our engagement photos) was nice enough to document it all for us. Going through the pictures reminds me of all the people I need to thank. First my roommates Andrea and Kali who spent all day cleaning and rearranging furniture!

Delicious food! Chicken and Beef fajitas, Cilantro lime rice, fruit salad, pico de gallo, guacamole, chips, and of course tortillas. It was delicious, and looked pretty too!

Beverage: citrus water, Kali and I did the flower arrangements. Okay Kali did most of them. Thank you Kali!

Another view. Kali also, helped with the decorating. Thanks!

Cake: Chocolate Mousse  and Lemon Meringue layer cakes. I kept telling people I made the Chocolate one and Dani made them Lemon. People are really gullible. Thank you Costco, they were delicious!

The guest book table! Thanks everyone for signing!

Our friend Israel came and grilled everything for us. He came to do just the meat and then at the last second we asked him grilled some onions, peppers, and pineapple too. Thanks for being such a great sport Israel! Also in the picture is our friend Kaine. Bryan did him a favor earlier in the day by giving him a ride, in return he came and helped set up for our open  house – all day! We think we got the better end of that deal. Thanks Kaine.

And here we see Dani in her natural habitat – but seriously, we owe a HUGE thank you to Dani! She made delicious fruit salad, pico de gallo, guacamole, etc. AND she did it in OUR kitchen (our = sam and her roommates) which is far from fully stocked, she had to bring over cutting boards, knives, serving dishes, etc. She also brought over toys for the kids during the reception and other random things we needed like an ironing board and iron. Also, she maintained all the food tables during  the party. Oh, AND she did my hair. THANK YOU DANI!

Here is my niece  Allie and my Nephew James being super cute. Thank you James and Allie for being cute, it really made the party much better!

Bryan and I had very important jobs. We had to show up and be gorgeous. Fortunately we did a really good job! We decided to wear a wedding clothes because what’s the point in having a party celebrating our wedding if people don’t get to tell me how gorgeous I look! Obviously, we’re not superstitious. Bryan totally saw my dress, but he would have seen it anyway when we took Bridal photos the Monday before the wedding. I’m not going to post any super good pictures of my dress though so that those coming to the wedding can get the full effect in person first 🙂

Of course the biggest thank you goes to our lovely guests! Thank you for coming and supporting us. (Also in this picture you get a pretty good shot of my hair, which looks pretty awesome if I my say so myself!)

And more guests! Thank you Guests! We set up the back porch to be a less formal area for people to hang out. Thanks again to the roommates who had to move that ridiculously heavy coach out there. But good times were had by all so it was worth it.

And finally, my favorite picture of the night and one of my favorites of Bryan ever! Here he is graciously saying goodbye to one of our esteemed guests. Thanks for the great pictures Lawren! So glad you were there to capture these great moments.

So that was the open house. Thanks again everyone, we had such a fantastic time! One down two more to come 🙂

Sam

 

Bridal Shower Video

Fun times.  Enjoy………. 🙂

 

One month to Zero Day

Our impending marriage is but one complete month distant from today, the sixteenth day of May in the year of our Lord two thousand and twelve.  Those brave enough to travel across thick and thin, over rivers, through woods and to the temple located in the greater Seattle Washington area will have the distinct pleasure of seeing the holy matrimony of two souls already so desperately twitterpated there is little hope for life for either of them.

All family and friends up to the challenge are heartily encouraged to attend.  This site shall be your dossier for all information you stand in need of.  If there be any among you wishing to learn more of our predicament, pray post comments that we may learn of it and remedy even the smallest of your whims.

Again, please come or we shall have prepared this valiant gathering in vain.

Much merriment shall be had.

Yours truly,

The Groom

ps, Sam I love you …please forgive that I did not review this post with you even though you are currently sitting next to me.  Also, here is a picture of how much you love me for good measure:

This is mostly for my mommy…

Sam here. So my mom is an artist. She makes things beautiful. She really wants to make my open house beautiful and keeps asking me what I want and to please send pictures so she can visualize. I kept telling her I would email them to her, but I can’t quite get my email to format it the way that I want it to. I’m sure Bryan could figure it out for me, but it’s late and he’s not here, and I really need to get this info to my mom. Typically I object to putting too much of the wedding planning up on the blog because I feel like that spoils the surprise, but oh well, I guess it’s a fun glimpse. But from here on out, I’m addressing my mother and trying to answer her pretty specific questions.

General wedding look: Vintage romantic (romantic stylistically, not mushy hearts stuff) This was a good examples I found.

I like this wedding because it’s vintage (which to me mostly means it has old stuff) but it’s still elegant. It has a clear color palette, but nothing looks matchy-matchy. Also, while each table setting has similar elements none of them look exactly the same. Here are some more pictures of this wedding.

I love the flowers in the silver tea kettle. Birdcages are old (vintage!) and have cool texture to them. Again each table setting has similar elements (flowers, books, vases, old  stuff like birdcages and teapots) but each one looks different.

close up of the books.

 

Okay, while that wedding is nice, obviously I don’t want mine to look exactly like it. I just thought it demonstrated vintage romantic well. I want to use a variety of things, mixing them together. Here are some of the things.

FLOWERS

As long as they are they fit the color palette I am cool with whatever kind. Variety is good, They can be traditional flower arrangements.

cool floating flowers

This seems to be very in right now and I generally avoid fads but I like this one. Lots of little vases with flowers.

BLUE GLASS

We own lots of this stuff. Shouldn’t be hard to locate 🙂 Using the blue vases or blue for flower arrangements might be cool too.

SILVER DISHES

Mixed in with the blue these pop and look gorgeous! We don’t need a ton of it, just a few key pieces. Even simple serving spoons work,

CHINA

I know this type of China has a name. Don’t know what it is. I think this stuff mixed in would also look cool. Like the silver we don’t need a lot just a few fun pieces. We could borrow or find them at good will.

It doesn’t even have to be dishes per se.

I think the black looks just as nice. (maybe better to keep the blue from overwhelming?)

GLASS VASES

The cut glass has a nice vintage look. Regular noncut vases are also GREAT! mostly I just like that each vase is unique.

METALS

Is this called wrought iron? Whatever it’s called it’s awesome. I think it adds great texture.

I think I mostly love lanterns for the awesome metal on them. These are gorgeous. They look great bunched together and separately. I LOVE this picture.

OTHER TEXTURES

Not really certain how we would use it. But I think paper is such a great texture, it’s so easy to look vintage (just stick it in the oven for a few minutes :), and music seems very apropos for me and Bryan. This is one of the reasons I like the BOOKS in the pictures in the first wedding.

BASKET

  Why not! Great texture, easy to obtain, lots of variety available, looks old.

 

So obviously this is a lot of stuff and we won’t use all of it at every table, there wouldn’t be rooms for the guests! But just some ideas. The only real MUST HAVES are the BLUE GLASS and the SILVER that’s been in my head for years. The blue is pretty well represented we work in the yellow and red with the flowers etc.

I have no objections to using multiple shades of the colors, we just have to be careful not to go too pastel or too primary colors.

Hope this was helpful mom.

love you,

Sam

Engagement Photos :)

Here are some of our engagement photos that our friend Lawren took for us.  We had a lot of fun taking them, and hope you enjoy them too!

And there’s more where that came from! We may post others at another time.

June 16th, save the date!

We’ll be adding more information to this site as we make plans and preparations.  Suffice it to say that we are both super excited and happy to share this new chapter in our lives with you all.

And again, remember to save the date… June 16th! 🙂