Besides Nathan’s super manly day, his trip to Iowa, and our camping trip, we’ve pretty much spent the Fall busy finishing up our Masters degrees. (Which we did finish! Yay!) So we were really excited when our photographer sent us the rest of our wedding photos, giving us a chance to think back on the day and procrastinate writing our theses. We’ll post some of the wedding photos later, but for now we wanted to share how we designed our own invitations.

One of the parts of the wedding that we wanted to keep personal and do ourselves was the invitations. We had already designed our own Save the Date postcards, which featured a silhouette of the two of us sitting under a huge tree. The silhouette was adapted from one of our favorite photos from a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains in 2009.

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For the invitations we wanted something pretty simple but still personal and adapted from our own photographs. After sifting through a bunch of invitations online, we decided to make a series of three different designs, one for each of our colors (blue, green, yellow). We decided to go with a national park theme, so we selected three photographs that we thought were distinctive and which would fit nicely at the bottom of a page.

Once the photos were selected, Nathan modified the images to be more like a graphic/sketch. First they were transferred to grayscale, then posterized, then further simplified so that only a few shades of color were needed.

Yosemite New Years 2011 – used for the RSVP card

We decided that the designs would be printed on pastel paper in blue, green, or yellow so we selected the colors of the design to be darker, but match the tone and hue of the paper.

Final touch was writing the text and selecting fonts!

Grand Tetons (where we got engaged) for the invitation

We used one design for the invitation, one for the RSVP card, and one for the Family Dinner invitation. We also used the same designs for the wedding day – as menus, place cards, and table numbers.

Grand Canyon for the Family Dinner Menu (Photo by Tom Alphin)

Table Numbers – Photos by Phoebe Joy

We doubt that many people knew that the designs were derived from our own photos, but we were just glad to remember a few of our favorite trips on our wedding day.

Last week our awesome florist Tweeny of the Flower Lab did a trial centerpiece for us and it looked beautiful, just what we had described to her!

We won’t show the whole arrangement so wedding guests reading this won’t know exactly what they will look like, but here is a tease…

Footnote: I was just browsing through Tweeny’s blog and I discovered that she actually has done wedding flowers for Hollywood stars! Well, at least she did the flowers for to Senta Moses. Don’t judge me for recognizing Senta from the ABC Family show “Greek”. She was also in Home Alone. So yeah, our florist is actually a florist for the stars!!!

We spent part of the July 4th weekend finishing up working on wedding planning.  We decided to go to our local park for a change of scenery as we wrote our wedding ceremony.

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I am easily distracted and start taking photos of Katharine working

This is the face I get when she realizes she’s doing all the work

By Katharine

Recently we’ve been posting a lot about our Zion trip, but one of the reasons the posts have been rather infrequent is that we’ve actually been doing a lot of work for the wedding. Now that there are officially less than 3 months left, we have to wonder: (1) where did the time go? and (2) how can we get it all done??

Luckily our school semester has finally ended, so that should reduce some stress and free up some more evenings and weekend time.  And we now have a list of all the must-do’s on a white board in our living room to make us feel guilty if we procrastinate too much.

But we really have made some progress. Over the past few months we checked a lot off the list:

– Reception food tasting (yum!)

– Rehearsal dinner location and menu is set

– Picked a hotel for out of town guests

– Designed and mailed save-the-dates

– Made a wedding website for guests

– Registered for a lot of items (which was actually more stressful than I thought it would be, and we still aren’t completely done!)

– Had engagement photos taken

– Flowers and decor research – still working with a florist

– Met with and selected a DJ

– Planned and booked the majority of our honeymoon in Alaska

– Nathan picked a tux and got fitted

– Designed our invitations and printed some proofs (more on that later)

– Selected a couple special songs for the reception

And for some of the above, we have family and friends to thank for their help and support.

But as you can imagine, there is still sooo much to do and so many decisions to be made. Everything seems to require research, discussion, more research, budget calculations, more discussion, and finally a decision.

But we’re learning about ourselves along the way and we know it will all be worth it in the end. Still, I’m very glad there is a final deadline for all of this because it truly could be a never-ending project!

Linda and I showing off our hard work – we did some centerpiece trials with Nathan’s parents

We celebrated Easter Sunday by heading to Charmlee Wilderness Park with our photographer, Phoebe of Phoebe Joy Photography, to take our engagement photos. I can’t believe it’s already been 3 weeks since then, and we haven’t managed to post them on our website!

The weather didn’t exactly cooperate so it was cloudy and really cold, but we (and Phoebe!) toughed it out and still had fun. We started with some camping/hiking themed photos.

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Then we did some more formal ones in the meadow.

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We ended the evening with a few artistic inspirations from Phoebe.

There are a few more photos on Phoebe’s blog, but we will also go through the raw photos at some point and try to post some more later.

We have to thank Phoebe for the beautiful photos – we can’t wait to see how she captures our wedding!