MRS. Ticket Reporting for Duty

The name's Ticket. MRS. Ticket.

I'm back!!! The wedding was amazing and wonderful and well I would be lying if I said it was perfect, because nothing in life is every completely perfect. But it was certainly one of the best days of my life (the day Mr. Ticket proposed is still high on my list, as is just about every day of our honeymoon). Luckily I was pretty much the only one to notice the hiccups we did encounter and for the most part I managed to just go with the flow and let everything roll off my back.

The family drama llama managed to keep its cool (hallelujah!) and everything turned out even better than I had imagined. After dreaming everything up in my head for so long, I started to freak out the week before the wedding as to how it would all actually pan out. Well there was no need for worry, between the team of expert vendors, AMAZING family members and a truly spectacular bee (looking at you Mrs. Parasol) the wedding went off without a hitch and looked incredible.

Our photographers won't have pictures back to us for a while and sadly we haven't even gotten a teaser from them. But I do have plenty of family pictures and some photo booth shots floating around, so here's a couple to tide you over till then.

A newly minted Mr. and MRS. Ticket walking down the aisle.

Photo Courtesy Auntie Ticket

 Photo Courtesy our DIY Photo Booth

Can't wait to share all the wonderful details and moments from the wedding with you all! 

A Touch of Geek Goes a Long Way

In one of my early posts I mentioned that Mr. Ticket and I met playing World of Warcraft. For those of you that need a refresher... I alluded to the fact that there would be at least one treasure commemorating this little detail of how our love story began and it's finally here! Seriously I'm just beyond stoked. I'm sure that this will seem cheesy to some of you, heck Mr. Ticket kind of laughed at me a little when I showed it to him but I love it!

I showed you a while back that our kids buckets will include VIP tags with a semi-disneyfied drawing of Mr. Ticket and I, in keeping with the theme of drawn Tickets I sought out the assistance of friends. Well... brother-in-law of a friend... whatever he's awesome. So without further ado...

WOW Versions of Mr. and Miss Ticket by Michael Rodriguez

Yeah those are totally our WOW characters drawn in WOW wedding attire sitting on a WOW beach (I believe it's supposed to be just outside of Rachet). I'm sorry but that's just freaking epic. Seriously Mr. Ticket's toon is spot on, from the awful beard to the crazy muscles. My toon's face looks a touch perturbed (which I actually find hilarious), but her hair and body are perfect. So this little beauty will be sitting on our guest book table in all it's gamer glory.

Did you decide to add an element of how you met in your wedding? Did your SO laugh at your epic ideas like mine?!

Procrastination Lesson Learned

I would like to give a fair warning out to brides nearing their wedding day. It's easy to put things off and plan to do them later. To assume that if it comes down to it and you run out of time you can always throw money at the problem and let someone else do things for you. I am here to tell you that I learned a difficult lesson recently.

Attempting to throw money at a problem does not always work!

I had originally planned to design guest book pages myself, then print them out and leave them on a table with place cards for people to fill out. However I have been unable to replicate the awesomness that other people seem so talented for creating. After enough fail attempts I started avoiding guest books in general.

Image via Weddingbee / Posted by michellybelly124

Honestly I think I avoided working on a guest book so well and for so long I actually just forgot about it... So when I finally remembered and we were so close to the wedding I decided that throwing money at the issue would be my best solution. I was so sad when I received a reply back from a very talented Etsy seller that she would be unable to complete an order for me in time for the wedding (this was approximately 2.5 weeks prior to the date). Epic fail procrastination on my part!

Amazeballs am I right?! (Image via Etsy/ Sold by CottageCreekArts)

This is one of those trees that you have guests finger print and sign, honestly I think this one is too pretty to even let guests near... I actually asked the seller about a different one (I still secretly hope I can convince Mr. Ticket that we need to buy this one just to frame and put on a wall in our home) since this one was significantly larger than what we needed. Well fail me for not getting on that band wagon soon enough!

So now I'm back to the drawing board on the guest book issue. I seriously HATE the plain jane books where people sign their names and that's it (no offense Jane). No time to order a beautiful photo book of our engagement shots for people to sign either. So I need your help hive. I'm too tired to attempt to make this decision and Mr. Ticket doesn't really care. So what do you think I should do?

A. Suck it up and design guest book pages like I originally planned.

B. Just blow up one of our engagement pictures, have it matted and let people sign that.

C. Forgo the guest book altogether since we are have an Anniversary Box anyways.

D. None of the above. Because you have an epic suggestion you are about to share with me below.

Oh and please learn from my mistakes! Do not put things off unless you are willing to do the work yourself RIGHT before your wedding. I also had to institute a new rule for myself... no more Etsy until after the wedding. It feels harsh sometimes, but I know it's the right thing to do.

Family Drama Llama

Let's be real for a moment here. Family drama exists and more often than not it rears it's ugly head around family functions... like a wedding. A wedding you may just have happened to spend the last 11+ months planning. A wedding you may or may not have just spent thousands of dollars on. A wedding you possibly want to be one of the happiest days of your life and the last thing on EARTH you want to deal with is FAMILY DRAMA!

My own personal little ball of family drama decided to drop yesterday afternoon. A certain someone was recently...indisposed, but found themselves released from prior constraints yesterday and has announced they will be attending my wedding...yay? Now in the interest of full disclosure I did in fact send this person an invitation (ONLY at the vehement request of my dearly beloved aunt), however when I sent this invitation there was NO question in my mind as to this person actually attending. As far as I was concerned Unicorns would be making a flight to Pluto the once epic planet and CNN would be airing the live coverage prior to this person actually coming to the wedding.

Well Unicorns... your big day is here! 

Horrible Paint Art by Miss Ticket

After an evening of contemplation... and maybe a little bit of wine. I've decided to just not worry about it. Honestly I've got enough stuff on my hands to deal with that constantly worrying over one individual's potential actions on our special day is not worth the effort. Believe me... in that one evening I managed to come up with dozens of potential awful scenarios, but fact of the matter is it's out of my hands. Whereas the matter of final payments, tip envelopes, transportation and a must take shots list for our photographers are very real, very immediate concerns that I do in fact NEED to be worrying about.

Now I may have given up worrying in the sense that I'm not allowing myself to replay horrible scenarios in my head of what MIGHT happen, but lets not pretend here. I'm crossing every bodily appendage and praying like there's no tomorrow that everything goes smoothly with this situation. Has family drama popped up in close proximity to your wedding plans? How did you handle it?

Productivity is the Current Spice of My Life

I would like to take a moment to share the awesomness that was a productive Tuesday with you all. Lately with a still over flowing to do list, it isn't often I feel very accomplished. But yesterday gave me a little glimmer of hope.

Mr. Ticket and I finished our final pre-marriage counseling session (the week before our wedding, talk about cutting it close lol)  and with our marriage license in hand we are so ready for next week! Mr. Ticket tried on his suit and officially learned how to tie a tie (side note: my man looks GOOD in a suit), everything fit pretty well so back to the hanger with no worries hooray! Then a few little last minute projects;

Programs

I've known for a while that I wanted to have programs, but I just kept putting it off because I didn't know exactly what I wanted to put in them. Well spring forward to now with the wedding next week and no one else offering to design the darn things for me, I sat my butt down and started/finished them.

I was inspired by the fan concept, our wedding day is looking to be in the low-mid 80s (fingers crossed) which is suitable weather in the shade but a fan and a water bottle would certainly improve things for our guests.

Image via Weddingbee/ Posted by Sievequeen

How adorable and simple is this concept? Get all the information you need and cool yourself down a touch. But then there was still the issue of exactly what to put on said fan...

Remember when Mrs. Giraffe first posted her Wedding Crush? Well I do. Let me tell you Mrs. Giraffe was not the only one crushing on that wedding! The colors! The Disney! The details! Love, love, LOVE! You might even notice another detail later in our wedding photos that was inspired by this wedding crush. But for now I'll share with you the details pertinent to our programs.

 Image via Weddingbee/ Posted by Mrs. Giraffe/ Photographed by Colin Lyons

I loved the bridal party page so much! I am simply not talented enough to pull this off. I tried to replicate it and it just was not happening at all. But the more I thought about this the more I wanted to do something with pictures. For the most part Mr. Ticket's family has never met mine (with the exception of our parents) and vice verse obviously. I have some family coming to the wedding that hasn't even met Mr. Ticket yet, let alone his family. I thought it would be nice to include pictures of the bridal party along with names to help people out. And thus our programs were born...

I'll admit they aren't the beautious, amazing, fantastical programs I imagined when we first started planning the wedding. But I've got to admit, the closer we get to the wedding, the more relaxed and less perfectionista I become in regards to wedding projects. If it gets done at all, I'm a happy camper.

So we used 2 different pictures in the final version, but since I have yet to find my good camera a screenshot is the best way to show you how the programs turned out. I would like to add I was incredibly proud of myself for figuring out how to use watermark in Microsoft Word and using our silhouettes in the backdrop.

That's both sides of the fan, our entire beautiful bridal party and all the pertinent information we want to share with our guests (sorry for the LAME cell phone camera picture). I thought about adding more information about our ceremony, but honestly our goal was to keep it relatively short. We aren't doing any readings or special songs. The only thing we really added to our officiant's suggested ceremony was a sand ceremony.

Card Box

One other little gem to share with you from our productive Tuesday, like a couple of bee's before me I fell for the mailbox card box inspired by the movie Up. Honestly after seeing how AMAZING Mrs. Lioness' and Mrs. Snowcone's turned out how could I not want one?! This project took us maybe 20 minutes (mostly because I wiped off and rewrote our names on there like 5 times, because I hate my hand writing. It was fun and I LOVE how it turned out!

*All personal photos unless otherwise noted.

Have you had any particularly productive days recently? Were you really excited at how a simple project turned out?

Bowl + Plate + Miss Ticket's Sad Handwriting = Semi-DIY Cake Stand Results!

Remember back when I mentioned painting our cake stand? Well I did get it back eventually and here's the proof!

Side view

Except instead of blurriness it says 'The Mr. Ticket's Last Name'

Sorry for the lame blurring

I still don't love my hand writing, but I'm really happy with how it turned out, considering it's just a plate glued to a bowl. This isn't the only stand we will be having for the wedding. I decided I didn't want just a boring table of platters for the cookie table, I want dimension. So with that in mind I scoured the local thrift shops and bought up their cheap candle holders and some plastic plates from Target like Ms. Ferris Wheel and went to work!

We started with a pile of black plastic plates and these,

Not gonna lie, I was a little sad to paint the silver ones they were pretty. Then they morphed into...

Then we glued the plates onto the painted candle sticks and they came out looking like this,

We have 6 total, I'm quite pleased with how they came out considering they were about $2.50 each. We have lots of matching plates and some matching platters to go with them. Our cookie table numbers are exploding too (which is awesome) so I'm glad we bought so many plates!

All personal photos.

Did you take on any painting projects? Were you pleased with how they turned out?

Flower Baby's Fly Ride

So there is one project that I alluded to and I've been stupidly excited about. It involves our Flower Baby, in case you forgot how cute she is here's a brief reminder.

Seeing as how she will only be 14 months old for our wedding and she's still a touch wobbly when she walks long distances we wanted to give her some help getting down the aisle. So we bought this...

But red isn't exactly one of our wedding colors, and it was a little worn down. We bought it through a craigslist ad for $50, and it goes for roughly $102 new on Amazon. So we got to work (and by we I really mean Daddy and Mama Ticket because honestly they did the bulk of this project while listening to me bark out orders, they are AWESOME). First they stripped the wagon down and Daddy Ticket sanded and varathaned the wood. Then we sent the bucket to the powder coater. Let me just tell you how insanely excited I was to find he had the PERFECT shade of pink. The first time I went down to his shop to find out if he could do it they had a good orange, but no pink. The day I went to drop off the bucket they showed me a new spread of colors and I about did a happy dance on the spot!

When we got the bucket back, Daddy Ticket spray painted the rest of the metal parts that needed a touch up and painted the little red caps on the wheels then he put everything back together. Meanwhile Mama Ticket graciously took the fabric I bought and turned it into a giant pillow for FB to sit on. Now the wagon's better than new!

Then one Saturday when Sister Ticket came over to help bake cookies we decided to let FB take it out for a test drive.

I think she likes it! I can't wait to see this little one in action going down the aisle. Pictures will be EPIC!

*All Personal Pictures

Are you providing your flower girls/ring bearers with transportation down the aisle? Did you find any good deals from Craigslist or yard sales and bring them back to life?