Cake Num Num

We finally picked out a cake design! After months of perusing around the interweb I was able to narrow down the selection to a few cakes that my man and I could choose from. He eventually thought that this one was the one that should be our cake:























I did it one better (since I wanted chocolate buttercream frosting) and tweaked it in photoshop to look like this:


























The venue said that they would be able to do this! I was trying to keep things simple and was even a little worried about how complex was too complex but I'm thrilled that we didn't have to go through the whole design selection portion all over again. The majority of the cake will be in buttercream but the blue bands will be in fondant instead of ribbon for cutting purposes and the white scrolls will have a little bit of silver cake dust on the raised parts to add a little *pop* to them.

But the fun didn't stop there. Once we decided on how the cake would look like, we needed to figure out what would go inside. It took a bit of communication with the catering people to find out if they could do this but we'll be having two layers of chocolate cake with peanutbutter buttercream (yum!) and one layer of vanilla cake with raspberry buttercream. I have no idea what this will taste like, since they don't do cake testings there, but I can only hope that it will turn out to be what I'm thinking it will taste like.

Bubbles and Fans

Now that my summer class has finally ended, I have been able to get back to the wedding planning process. There's already a more complicated project going on right now, but I figured that I would knock off one of the easier projects. This time it was the bubbles and fans.

Items:
- Assortment of fans purchased through The Knot
- Bubbles purchased through The Knot
- Ribbons purchased on sale at Michaels
- Flower boxes purchased at Ikea

I started this off by unloading all three 48-count boxes into one of the flower boxes. My fiancee though this looked fine, but I wanted it to look more organized and stay organized when people take out the bubbles. So I took the cardboard spacers that came with the bubbles and used that to keep the bubbles all in place.











Here's a photo of the bubbles in the boxes with the cardboard spacers in place. I wanted to see what this would look like with the fans so I took them out of the boxes and placed them into the other flower boxes I had. My fiancee kept on laughing at me because I would have to put all of the fans back into the boxes afterwords. He just thought it was funny how obsessed I was with seeing everything all together.












This was not the final result, just how everything would looked all spaced out. To spice things up a bit, I purchased some ribbon during an easter clearance sale and used it to decorate the bubbles. Due to poor planning, I only grabbed one roll of brown ribbon and should have probably grabbed two.

The ribbon was cut into 6" lengths and then I tied two pieces around the heart base of the bubbles. Half of the bubbles had one brown and one white ribbon while the other half had two white ribbons.























All together:











But the fun doesn't stop there! Because I had so much ribbon left over I decided that there needed to be more to these boxes. With that, I took a hand punch to the sides and spent time looping the ribbon through the holes to make the sides look fuller.











There were a couple of snaffoos with punching the holes too close together or being a little too rough with cinching down the ribbon which resulted in tearing which resulted in tearing the cardboard. I fixed this situation by using judgment to cover up the tears and came up with a fuller looking result:











This may or may not be the finished project because the boxes don't have a polyurethane coating on them to be water resistant. We may end up staining the wood as well, but we're still pondering if we want to do that. For now, the boxes are (mostly) assembled!

Cake Topper

A few weeks ago I started the search for our cake topper. After perusing Google images, The Knot photos and randomly looking through eBay for whatever was on the market I managed to come across a few that I liked. I ran it by my man and he chose the one that I eventually ended up getting, but I had to do a quick search for the item and found it on Amazon. For anyone who likes this topper, the style is The First Kiss Topper by Wilton.


























*pretty*

Centerpieces - Purchasing

I'm still trying to pull my ideas together but so far I've purchased and received vases & mirrors for about 24 sets of centerpieces via the Trash to Treasure board on the knot. Some of them were broken because UPS is not gentile with packages no matter how well they are packed or if they say fragile or glass on the box, but for the most part I think I got them for quite a deal.

This is what the vases look like and what the original seller did with them:






















What I plan to do is have the same basic setup, but with "floating" candles in all three. After that I'm still debating on what to have under the candle. One idea is to have fake orchids and water floating in the tallest vase (still figuring out how this will work) with the water possibly dyed blue, rice in the medium vase and coffee beans in the smallest vase. I love the floating flowers look but I'm not sure if the other two vase ideas makes the centerpiece look thrown together instead of thought out.

I'm still working on mock-ups at this time and nothing has been finalized as of yet. So far I'm not sure if I'll hang on to the table number idea since the thought of having a seating chart makes me feel like I'm forcing people to sit where I want them to be instead of just letting things happen. Other things to come in due time but for now I'm concentrating on getting those damn invites done.

Viva Las Vegas!

A while back the fiancee and I had decided that we wanted the ceremony and reception held in Vegas. I had never been to Vegas, but the fiancee had wooed me with tales of the beauty, excitement and what have you of the place and I agreed that we should at least check it out. Our main reasoning for determining that this was the place to hold our wedding was because the majority of our family members (mainly mine) were scattered all over the place, so having the wedding in a place that has the cheapest airfare to travel to from almost anywhere was high on our list. We also wanted to include videostreaming for those who wanted to join but couldn't afford to travel and found that the majority of the venues there offered streaming. So with that being said, we began the research waaaaay back in... May? August? sometime around there.

We started off by looking at a map and writing down names of the hotels/casinos. Then we went on the internet and started crossing off places that were too expensive, far away or just really crappy looking. After all that we still had a list of about 10 or so places that we had an interest in but weren't too sure about. With this list, I had the fiancee e-mail the places before we headed off to check it out during Thanksgiving week just in case they required us to set up a meeting time; almost everyone said to just call the day before.
















The first day we took it easy after a 20+hr drive down from Washington and just walked around aimlessly to get a feel for the place. At first glance all that looks so close, but it's very deceiving; the Eiffel tower is about a 20 min walk away in this picture. Thank goodness for the escalators up to the overpasses or else we would have been extremely exhausted just walking from Excalibur to the Bellagio and back.

Eventually, we got down to business and started looking over the places once more and making more drastic cuts based on what we knew we could spend and what we wanted to get out of the places. This was the hardest part because I just wanted to check out all of them since I had never been to Vegas. Finally, after many hours of going back and forth with the fiancee, we called the Monte Carlo and set up an appointment to meet with their catering coordinator, Traci Shea, mostly because she was the only one who took the time to write us a personalized e-mail.

I was very nervous since this was our first place we checked out and didn't feel like I had all my ducks in a row. Luckily for us, the staff at the Monte Carlo Wedding Chapel have done this song and dance dozens upon dozens of times and had the whole thing down to a science. We walked around, checking out the ceremony site and the reception areas right around the corner asking many questions and posing many hypothetical situations along the way. Both the chapel personnel and Traci were very patient with us and seemed willing to entertain some of our "crazier" ideas as well as joke around with us.
















Afterwords we decided to take some time to mull the whole thing over and decide on if this was the right place for us as well as the package and amenities we would want if we decided on this place. I was a little hesitant because this was the first and only place we had seen and felt like we were settling and hadn't explored our options thoroughly enough. My fiancee on the other hand had decided after seeing some of the reception rooms that this was the place and had passionately tried to convince me until I thought so as well. He wanted to go back as soon as he had won me over, but I wanted to take my time looking around and leave it until the next day so we could iron out all the details when the staff wasn't trying to leave for the day.

The next morning/afternoon we practically ran over there to sign all the paperwork and get everything started. Heather, the chapel coordinator, was extremely helpful and patient while we filled out every form and read every line of all the papers she put in front of us. Traci was also very helpful but unfortunately wasn't able to provide us with a cake testing session since the Monte Carlo exclusively provides all the larger food and drink items (smaller, individually wrapped items for gift boxes are alright) but told us that the buffet carries the same type of cake that would be available for our wedding cake and went down there later to try some with lunch.

With the last of our 't's crossed and 'i's dotted for the ceremony and reception site we felt as if a huge weight had been lifted. We took those good feelings and energy and decided to walk the rest of the interesting part of the strip until our feet were numb from walking. We called our parents soon after getting back to the hotel and had the best night's sleep since we had been down there.

Since we still had the rest of Thanksgiving break down in Vegas we decided to go to the Rio for the Thanksgiving buffet, go to downtown to get our marriage certificate and gamble a little. We found our preferred games in our hotel and after a while I had gambled away all I had planned to lose but since the fiancee was still working on making his pile of money disappear at a Pai Gow table I decided to go up to the room and work on the small bottle of rum that we purchased from a nearby liquor store. When he was done and came up to the room I was in a nicely buzzed state and wanted to go out and do something. Eventually we made our way to a bar nearby the Mandalay Bay casino area called Minus 5 that the both of heard about through a coworker and some other staff at the nearby hotels and casinos. Yes, it was cold in there but everything (except for the floor) was covered in thick ice. They even serve your drinks in glasses made of ice! The night was made even nicer by the bartendresses and camera gal who seemed happy to have us there being socially drunk. Overall the night was nice, the company was nice and the drinks were cold as ice; definitely a place to go back to.


















With all that, we made it home safely on Saturday after surviving and leaving on black Friday and driving 19+hrs straight through to home to collapse on the sumo. Well, that's not entirely true, we did loose the muffler in Salt Lake and Hell's Canyon was a bit tricky with all the frost on the road and the snow on the side but thank goodness for studless snow tires. Next time this will be a bit easier because it will be summer time and we'll be able to take the drive at a more leisurely pace.