Last time I talked about bridesmaid dresses, I was still waiting on one lovely lady, Miss Holly, to pick out her dress. She did that this past weekend, and here's her dress!



This dress is totally cute, and Holly seems to like it! Now, there are a few things you need to know about Holly. She doesn't wear pink, and she doesn't wear dresses. However, she loves me more than her pride, and has agreed to wear a pink dress for me! Isn't she awesome?

Another thing that I have promised updates for is our website. I showed you a picture of it as we were designing it, and promised I'd post a link once it was online. Here it is! daveandrachel2010.com

Let me know what you think! I think there's still one or two pages in progress, so if there is Latin gibberish, or information looks silly and/or incomplete, it's probably not done yet.

Finally, I'd like to show you our invitations! I've been working on them for a really long time, and I'm really happy with the result! We sent them into the printer early last week, and should be getting them back in a month or so.

This is the invitation:
It will be printed in a #10 size, which is the size of a standard business envelope! Totally nontraditional, funky, and fun! It will be flat printed on white linen-texture paper.

Here's the RSVP:

It will be printed in A1 size, (basically tiny enough to fit in the business envelope), also flat printed on linen textured paper. I'm super excited to get them back!

I'm thinking about adding thank you cards on to our order, because it won't cost any more than buying generic, mass-produced thank you cards to have them custom printed, and I could get them to match the rest of our stationary!

I'm so excited to see everything coming together!

About the time I decided to design my own invitations, the creative bug bit me. This is weird because I've never been a very creative person. I love to make things, but mostly I like to follow patterns (this is why I'm still scratching my head over my decision to get a graphic design minor. It just doesn't fit).

Anyway, when I realized that I could have complete control over my invitations if I designed them myself, I got pretty excited. I'm a little bit of a type-A personality, and having control over something like my invitations makes me feel more secure. And, designing my own invitations made me want to use this new-found talent and design everything. And I mean everything. At some point through this whole wedding planning process I have considered how I can personalize or unify almost every part of the wedding. Thankfully, besides the stationary, the only one I've stuck with personally designing is our website.

Every wedding web site worth its salt offers brides a free personalized wedding web site. This is a place for the bride and groom to post information and directions for the guests, as well as provide an alternate way to RSVP, and acts as a socially acceptable way to get registry information out there. I've signed up for multiple wedding sites, and looked into every personal web site availiable, always looking for one that would let me put my own design or template into it. None of them let me.

Normal girls would take this as a sign, pick a pretty pink-flowered pre-made template, and get on with her life.

Normal girls would do that. I have never been a normal girl. So I didn't do this. Want to know what I did instead?

Yeah, I know you do. You can't resist my strangeness.

I talked to my loving fiance about this dilemma. I told him how I wanted a site that was just so "us," and one didn't exist out there. About how everyone had a web site, and we weren't going to be any different, but how I wanted our web site to be a first glimpse for our guests into our wedding day, and some pre-made pink-flowered template with someone else's loving phrase scrawled across the top wouldn't cut it.

Yeah, I know. That's low.

Anyway, the past two weeks we've been designing and building our very own personalized wedding web site. A wed site, if you will (hehe...sometimes I make myself laugh. I understand if I didn't make you laugh. It really wasn't that funny). Now, it's almost done, and we're almost ready to put it on the web!

I'll give you a sneak peek:


This is just the designing part...my part. Dave is using his mad skills to turn it into a web site instead of a static image. But it was super fun do design! I did the whole thing in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

So now it's almost done, and we'll put it up as soon as we can decide on a domain name! Dave basically gave me the job of picking one, and I don't know what to use! So, I'd love your help. We've thought about using stephenswedding.com, which would work. Or we could do something like daveandrachel.com. Or even wearesomuchinloveitspilledoverandmadeawebsite.com. Perhaps picnicwithteawhodoesthat.com.

See why I need your help? It's pretty bad. So give me your ideas, if they're better than mine (is it possible to be worse than mine?) maybe we'll use them!

Then I'll definently give you all a link here when it goes up! There's some super cool content on there! I'm just so excited to show it off!