Wedding Sneak Peek: Invitations

Well, with four months until the day, as of yesterday, I figured it was about time that I start slipping little bits on information about the wedding out to you lovely people! Since we've sent out the invitations already, I figured it would be ok to show them here. I've taken my roommates invitation to show you the work that Derek and I did. Yes, we made them by hand. Crazy? Yes. Beautiful and personal? Yes.

This is the envelope. A lovely shade of purple to go with our colour scheme of lavender, green, brown, and ivory.

The invitation itself was an interesting process of coming to being. We took our idea from two different invitations that we found, and adapted them to be more like us. Here's one of them, found at the website/blog of wedding photographer Jodi Miller. And the second we found on Etsy.

I spent all of my fall break week, as well as some time before and after, creating the invitations. The process consisted of tea-dying the cardstock used for the base of the invitation, stamping the bird stamp onto a separate sheet of cardstock, cutting it out and sticking it onto the original, cutting and tying the ribbons, cutting out the birds and figuring out how to make them pop, etc.

On the inside of the invitation, we glued two envelopes to hold all the pieces of information needed. We also glued little pieces of doilies to make the envelopes look a little bit nicer (behind the invitation you can see a couple flowers - flowers just like those will be included in my wedding bouquet!).

Derek designed a map of the streets in Winnipeg leading to our wedding location (where both the ceremony and the reception will be) and even wrote out a poem to let our guests know all the important information (though, on the back of that particular paper, things were lined out in clearer terms).

 We also included pre-stamped and addressed RSVP cards to simplify the process for people responding (and thus also to hopefully make sure everyone responded by our RSVP date). The last thing to be included in the invitation was a photograph from our FREE engagement photoshoot done by our amazing photographer, Nghia Tran (check out his website here.) So that's it! What do you think? Would you ever consider making all your invitations by hand?

Isn't he the cutest?

No, I'm not talking about Derek, though, of course, I think Derek is quite often absolutely adorable, but I'm talking about this gorgeous owl coin bank that I found at Z Gallerie today while I was browsing on of my (new) favourite online stores. Of course, being the poor college student that I am, right now my dreams of a beautifully decorated house are just dreams, but I love owls... and birds in general. Probably evidenced by the birds that are quickly becoming a theme in mine and Derek's upcoming wedding (four months until on Wednesday, folks!). Anyway, he is adorable, but I don't quite have the money for the $12.98 he costs. Maybe he'll go on sale someday? Til then, I'll keep up my window shopping. It is a fun past-time.

Photo Source: Owl found here!

"I'll be back"... or, rather, I am.

Well, I have returned from the sunny tropics of Paraguay! (And when I say sunny, I mean it - there was only one day where it rained in our entire trip!) Well, to be perfectly honest, I actually got back on Friday, but the past two days have been completely filled up with seeing people, spending time with my roommates and my fiance, and getting my life in some way back to normal.

This is our team at the Itapu falls in Brazil (we went there on a day trip) on one of our last days in the country. Paraguay was quite the experience, though during my three weeks there, I realized how attached I am to Canada. I don't know if I'll be able to ever leave it forever.

Just look at that beautiful red and white flag!

As I was saying, being in Paraguay was intense. We helped out with a VBS run by local missionaries, toured a lot of the mission work that was happening in East Paraguay, helped out at an AIDS centre, lived with the Paraguayan people for a week, and yes. We even went swimming.

Yes, this is part of what we were doing while everyone in Manitoba was freezing (though not freezing as much as normal, I don't think Manitoba reached the +35-40 that we had every day). 

 And yes, I even managed to squish some acting in there - photos above are me helping out with some skits for the VBS. The second picture is of a skit where I end up snapping a mouse trap closed over my fingers. Huzzah. Oh, the things I do for acting... Did I ever mention the story about Alice and Wonderland and my shoulder?

Well, Paraguay, you were nice, sunny, and super, super hot. But I'm home in Canada, and maybe, secretly, enjoying the cold!

Photo source: Canadian flag here.