Finding Direction

Folks.  Its wedding week J  We’re four days away.  Which means that I probably won’t be posting much (read: at all) this week.  There seems to be a lot of coordinating to do here at the last minute.  In addition, we’re working hard to finish up all those DIYs and printing lots of paper (you won’t believe how much paper ends up being involved with a wedding).  Maybe if there is time you’ll hear from us once more before the wedding, but if not, have no fear – I promise to return after the honeymoon to fill you in on all the juicy details that I haven’t had a chance to share yet (remember I’m using this as somewhat of a journal too so I’ll want to add the rest for when I’m old and can’t remember what games we played at cocktail hour ‘n such).

This was a big weekend.  We crossed so much off the to do list!  And I got to see all of my bridesmaids (each of whom helped us out with a wedding task at some point during the weekend….thanks ladies!)  While there is lots to show you, I thought I’d come back to the teaser I gave you a few weeks back regarding a special project my Uncle Jim was working on.

A loooong time ago, I found a post of an Ash Lawn wedding on one of the blogs I usually read.  It. Was. Gorgeous.  And as a result, I may or may not have stalked hunted  tracked the bride down to ask her some questions about having a wedding at Ash Lawn.  One of the pieces of advice she gave: ‘Take advantage of Ash Lawn’s space.’  It’s a pretty big plantation with lots of gardens and picturesque locations to host your guests.  I took the advice to heart and plan to send you guys all over that place for different wedding events and activities.  But her advice came with a warning: ‘Make it clear where stuff is…like the bathroom.’  She explained that spreading out and using all of Ash Lawn was awesome, but did mean people were a little turned around.  She mentioned that with several folks, during the only 5 minutes she spent with them, they asked ‘Where is the restroom?’ 

With this in mind and an unending stream of ideas placed in front of me via Pinterest, we jumped on board the wedding band wagon of including signs into our special day décor.  First off, I love the way they look – definitely go with our laid back, outside wedding feel.  But it seemed that they would also serve a good purpose: helping our guests get around the grounds of Ash Lawn.  (an aside: I’ve been amazed at the ups and downs that come with planning a wedding; shocked at the level of incompetence of vendors and thrilled by the generosity of some to do all that they can to make your day special.  Lucky for us, the good and helpful surprises have far outweighed the bad! Not only from our friends and family, but complete strangers as well.  We are so lucky.)  In an introduction to Pinterest for my Aunt, my cousin showed off some of the images I had been pinning to my ‘Wedding (maybe)’ board.  My Aunt took notice of the wedding sign trend that was occurring and ever so kindly offered my Uncle’s services to reproduce the gems I was seeing on the interwebs.

My Uncle is a very talented wood worker.  While I felt a bit guilty about accepting the help, I was giddy at the thought of having the beautiful signs I had always envisioned directing our guests about the wedding.  He assured us it would be no problem and had mock ups (based on my pins!) within a week.  We made some selections and within no time, he delivered the posts and arrows for the seven signs I requested.  (I know…way to take advantage of someone when they offer you help….)  And they look awesome!

This past weekend Kels trucked up from Rich-mund to help us finish them off with some stenciling J  Luckily Saturday included some beautiful weather so we headed out to the circle to write out all the signs.  We needed an arrow for each of the below:





Ceremony

Cocktails (2)

Corn Hole

Kubb

Cheese

Reception

Restrooms (2)

Cows (wouldn’t want you guys to miss out on the cows!)

Chile (you know to help you get your bearings)

Then three larger signs to 1) direct cars at the turn for Ash Lawn 2) send you guys down the right path to the ceremony  and 3) help you find your seat.  We are so happy with how they turned out!  They’re going to look even better once we have them mounted on their posts and sticking in the ground.  Hopefully you guys will take note and use them to help find your way to all sorts of important things (like the cheese table and corn hole sets!).

Bathroom Baskets! - Guest Post

Hi all! BM Jess here, as requested by the bride to give y’all a little insight into some of the details that you’ll see on the day of the wedding :)

A few months ago Audrey reached out for some help with one of those wedding details that you could call a trend if you’d like, but one that’s become more and more popular and shows no sign of disappearing soon for one very specific reason: this one actually makes a lot of sense. I am referring here to Bathroom Baskets, which are exactly what they sound like: baskets placed in the bathroom and filled with various goodies and toiletries for wedding guests to make use of throughout the night.

I know all of the girls reading this immediately went “oh my goodness, SUCH a good thing to have” and all of the guys went “huh?”, but let me tell you, with a few minutes of brainstorming you can pretty quickly think of some essentials for both girls and guys that you’d want access to throughout a long night of partying. Audrey, Javier and I thought of an initial list of must-haves, but I first got true inspiration walking into the Mecca of cheap, travel-size toiletries: Dollar Tree. Needless to say, my list of “must-haves” grew very quickly and I soon had an absurd amount of things no wedding guest could possibly live without... After rounding out the purchases with a couple other stores and a trip to Michael’s (for the essential basket component of the bathroom baskets), we ended up with the lovelies you see below. So if you happen to need breath mints, ibuprofen, tissues, hair spray, cough drops, or any number of other essentials, make sure to swing by the bathrooms and see what’s we have :)

While there, you’ll also see the second part of the bathroom decorations – a bathroom poster giving you some details about Audrey’s and Javier’s oh-so-fabulous honeymoon in Chile! A&J thought it would be fun to add a poster with trivia or facts about the two of them to the backs of the stalls in the bathrooms, and this idea evolved over time into giving the guests a glimpse into their trip to Chile. You can see a preview here, but again, make sure you take a minute during your trips to the restroom to read up on some of the sites they’ll be visiting and some Spanish vocab to know!

Not to over share, but I'm a lady that takes a lot of trips to the bathroom (big water drinker).  So this special addition to make our guests feel more comfortable in the facilities was an important one to me.  Jess did such an amazing job with them!  Ladies and gents, I think you'll find just about anything you could possibly need (hygiene wise at least) in these baskets.  They are filled to the brim!  And the Chile fliers are gorgeous and really interesting to read (its nice to have stuff to read in the bathroom...).  Looking forward to my first trip to what will be our homey bathroom at Ash Lawn ;)  Thanks Jess!

Take your seat for the show!

So I might have told you guys (or maybe not, I forget who I tell what to these days…) that instead of using numbers to mark our tables, Javier and I decided a while back to ‘name’ our tables after the plays/musicals we saw during our courtship (since that was what we loved, well love, to do together).  We thought it was another fun detail we could add to the day to make it a little more special; a little more us.  So instead of sitting at ‘Table 8’ our guests would sit at the ‘Design for Living’ table.  Sure, it’s a little more complicated, but also more fun J

This idea started a while back, but took some thought to really flush out, starting with how to display or identify which plays were assigned what tables.  Now, I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a saver.  I still have everything from the first Valentine Javs ever gave me (it was homemade) to the White House Christmas brochure I picked up on one of our first dates.  Believe it or not, we still have a ticket and/or playbill from just about every show we’ve seen together.  I knew these artifacts somehow held the key, but how to display them on our tables so they were easily spotted by our searching guests?  Luckily, I’ve been following a million most of some industry blogs looking for good ideas to incorporate into our day.  Finally, one day, I spotted a look I liked: wine bottles.  We would remove the front cover of all the playbills we had saved and glue them to wine bottles to elegantly display on each table.

attempting to soak bottles (which is all
mom said she did) but man did i struggle

Luckily, Mom and Dad are regulars at a restaurant down the street in Williamsburg.  Their tendency to want to watch baseball when they come in combined with mom’s special drink order (they make a ‘Barb’ martini for her every time) resulted in them getting to know most of the bartenders.  While I’m sure we would have ingested the needed wine to retrieve so many bottles over the course of the year, chances are they would have be different shapes and colors.  Instead, Mom asked her buddy bartenders if they might save their discarded house wine bottles for her to take away when she came in.  We had 30+ bottles in no time!  As if that wasn’t enough, my incredible mother painstakingly undertook the task of scraping all the labels off for me as well.  (I attempted with minimal success.)

Now I had clean and clear wine bottles, a bunch of playbills and a hazy idea.  Javier and I started by narrowing down our plays to just 12 (the number of tables we needed for dinner).  We tried to consider the look of the playbills, significance of the play, theater, or date and our enjoyment of the show to determine what to use.  We ended up with these:

The Alchemist (Felipe acted in this show!)

Avenue Q

Bill Cosby (Kennedy Center performance)

Blackbird (one of our first dates at our neighborhood theater Studio Theatre!)

Chicago

Design for Living

Jersey Boys

Les Miserables

Men Fake Foreplay

Next to Normal (inspiration for our engagement signs!)

The Sound of Music (Wolftrap live performance)

West Side Story (Javs first trip to NYC!)

Then I set to work.  I started by making color copies of our saved playbills.  (You can actually see our finger prints on some of them if you look closely).  Then I trimmed up the copies and Mod Podged them to the wine bottles.  It took a few attempts (luckily I had extra bottles and bills) to figure out the right size, but I was actually really happy with how they turned out J  Super colorful and easy to see! 

Since the playbills only took up 2/3 of the bottle, I started to wonder what do to with the other side.  I had picked up some chalkboard paint on one of my bazillion trips to Michael’s, figuring I’d use it for some wedding project or another.  I decided to tape off a rectangle and paint the other side of the bottle with chalkboard paint, just to see how it looked. 

I’m a food person.  (I think we’ve talked about this.)  And love when I see menus displayed or available at the weddings I attend.  Its fun to see the fancy description of what you’re about to eat.  It always gets me pumped (not that I needed much help) for dinner.  I knew I wanted our guests to know the menu for our family style dinner at our wedding too, but had been debating how to display it?  A big board on an easel outside of the pavilion? Print individual menu cards for each place? Or maybe a couple per table?  In the end, my wine bottles gave me the answer.  I could use the chalkboard side of each bottle to write out our dinner menu to display on each table!

Two birds. One stone.

Next project will be escort cards tickets, for our guests to pick up to learn their table number show!

Making it Official

We’ve had two big accomplishments recently that make me feel like we’re officially getting married.  It wasn’t getting back RSVPs, giving our final head count to the caterer or even picking up my wedding dress (which I did today!).  No, the first accomplishment was far less glamorous than any of that.  It involved me pre make up and wet headed at our local courthouse.  That’s right folks, Javier and I officially have our marriage license J

It seems silly, but that little piece of paper is really what makes the difference.  It’s what legally allows me to check that ‘Married’ box on all future forms (whoop, whoop!).  It is what both the state and federal governments will use to give me that tax break I’m so looking forward to ;)  It means something.  Its why folks that have live together for years, still want to get married.  It means being legally bound to someone (how crazy and yet awesome does that sound?).  If it didn’t mean anything, why would so many Americans be fighting for the right to get it, no matter who they want to marry (Go Freedom to Marry!).  And so many Americans fighting against it?  It’s just a piece of paper, but it’s what means I’ll be Miss Audrey Staples one day and Mrs. Audrey Cabezas another.  (Actually, there is a whole lot more paper work for that one to be official, but you get the idea).  We’ve got the paper in hand so that come October 13^th its real. It won’t be just pretty outfits and good food, but a real, substantial line that we cross.  One that has consequences and acknowledgements.  That just makes it so cool to me.

I sound all excited and whimsical now, but I was mostly annoyed with VA and the courthouse prior to receiving said piece of paper.  In VA, both parties must be present to obtain a marriage license (really VA?  You need us both?  Don’t you know we’re busy planning a wedding and probably can’t find 15 mins where we are both available and able to be inside the courthouse at the same time?).  I kid, but it was difficult finding a time that we could both go, but last Thursday we were there just past 8am (3^rd couple in line) to obtain our license.  After a brief dispute between the two of us and an ancient computer, we oathed that our names and social security numbers were our own and received that piece of paper J  YAY  (There are no adorable pictures of us holding the licenses in or outside of the courthouse because 1) we could not bring our phones inside and therefore left them in the car and 2) didn’t I mention it was pre make up and wet headed?)

The other big accomplishment that makes we think we’re official (and not just planning this mythical party for no tangible reason) was the purchase and retrieval of our wedding rings J  I’ve been surprised to learn as our friends start to get married that wedding rings aren’t a given for everyone.  Lots of ladies keep their engagement rings only as a symbol of their marriage and anti-jewelry guys sometimes don’t opt for the wedding band.  Since both my parents wore a ring (and all the movies seem to teach us that ring = married) I’ve always thought that we would both wear wedding rings after the big day.  I was relieved to learn that Javs felt the same way (he must have been watching the same movies).  So on one of our last visits to Tiny Jewel Box (where Javs got my engagement ring) Javier did some trying on of their rings.  It was…painful to watch.  Not because he didn’t’ know what he wanted…he figured that out pretty quick: simple white gold band.  But because he near panicked every time he attempted to remove one of the rings he was trying on.  The poor sales clerk had to try to relax my ever reddening fiancé so that he could remove their (what was I’m sure, very pricey) ring from his finger.  But they always managed to slip it off.  He’s the same way at home whenever he tries his ring on except I fall more into the panic than the clerk did and end up being no help.  We’re hoping that its just that he isn’t used to wearing a ring on his left hand (but there may be some re-sizing in our future…).

We got pricing for both our rings at TJB thinking it would be special for both of us to have our rings come from the shop.  Unfortunately, they were both going to be expensive L  I had always known I didn’t want diamonds in my wedding band, but wanted some etching on a white gold band to match my engagement ring.  The designer of my ring did make a matching wedding ring that I was incredibly tempted to get (it’d match so perfectly!).  We tried to do some shopping around (particularly for Varna wedding bands) but quickly learned that if we wanted my band to match my engagement ring we’d have to pay for it.  In the end I got convinced (and I’m happy I did!) to get the expensive Varna wedding band from TJB.  It is so beautiful and matches so well I can hardly stand it (and by that I mean I don’t want to take it off when I’m parading around at home in it).  For Javier’s ring, on the other hand, we opted for a cheaper online version.  We ordered from Brilliant Earth, in part because of their awesome reviews, but also because of their ethical practices.  Javier ended up being super happy with the ring (although he thinks it s a bit on the light side.  Why he wants a ring that’s sure to drive him to the bottom of the ocean should he overboard, I’ll never know, but he claims he likes the feel of a heavier ring).  Now we both have them in hand and ready to go, it’s a whole nother level of real.  Looking forward to next weekend when I can wear mine around for good! 

Something borrowed...

Well I've been away for a week and owe my readers an update. While I wish my absence could be explained with a long list of to-dos I've been busy crossing off, that just isn't true.

My Grandma passed away last Sunday. I know I shared with you that her decline had been much quicker than expected so she would not be attending the wedding. New information and circumstances brought to light early last weekend confirmed that her time left on this earth was very short. So we brought her to my parents house in Williamsburg to spend time with family in her last days.  My aunts, uncles, cousins, grandma's great-grand children and her sister all occupied the house for the weekend. We sat around her eating (mostly grandma's kolache) and talking. It was a very special few days for me and absolutely wonderful to spend that time together. My Grandma passed surrounded by her four loving children in the afternoon on Sunday September 23rd. It was actually a wedding vendor that wrote this to me but I think it sums up the potency of that moment for me. 

     Often we are brought into the world surrounded by those we love but many do not have the

     opportunity have that same love surrounding them as their journey comes to a close

Last week brought more baking and time spent with family. I think everyone is doing very well and feels a sense of relief that Helen's suffering is over.

It seems like the reality of the world often infringes on our most intimate moments, cutting them short and forcing emotions to be subdued for the sake of the next event or to-do. Last week brought a unique opportunity to come together and share as a family, but this weekend brought back the reality that our wedding is two weeks away. While thoughts of my grandma are still on my mind, we did start returning to wedding tasks over the weekend.  I'll share some accomplishments later this week, but thought this post seemed like the perfect time to share with you my 'something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue' (as promised).

us with our hankies

Something old.

This past Christmas my grandma gifted each of the women in our family with a handkerchief. They each belonged to my grandma's mother (my great grandmother) who came to the US from the Czech republic. In addition to being a very special family heirloom, the hankie will accompany me on my wedding day as my special something old. (let's hope I don't have to use it too much.)

Something new.

I have many new items that I'll be wearing on the big day :). But think the biggest (and most obvious) will be my dress. (I had my final fitting on Saturday. It looks great!  Very excited!)

Nana's brooch

Something borrowed.

I have to start by telling you my 'borrowed' idea was eagerly stolen borrowed from my wise, elder sister. As I mentioned, we have been incredibly lucky to always have our Grandma and Nana close by. These two (combined with my mother and sister) are the strongest women I know.  I have been so lucky to have them as role models and supports throughout my life. As Kelsey did on her wedding day, I'll be wearing something borrowed from each of them on my big day. I'll be wearing Kelsey's pearl earrings, my Grandma's pearl bracelet and my Nana's purple brooch (her signature color) on my bouquet.

picture of Kelsey wearing Grandma's
bracelet on her wedding day

While I haven't discussed it much here, Javier and I will be having a private ceremony at the UVA chapel early in the day on the 13th to take our Catholic sacramental marriage vows.   I am so lucky that my mom agreed to let me alter her own wedding dress to wear at this ceremony. I always loved her dress and am so happy that I'll be married while wearing it.

I love the idea of carrying a piece of each of these ladies with me on such a special day.

Something blue.

I haven't showed you guys yet, but I found some awesome shoes for the big day. I'm calling then my UVA shoes because they not only have the perfect fall orange, but some.....you guessed it BLUE to peak out from under my dress. I love them and felt relieved when I realized I'd found something blue for the big day.

I'm really happy with each of my 'something's   As I said before, we only kept traditions that felt important to us. I don't think I believe in 'luck' but I like that some of these important items will be with me during our special day.