Things Are HAPPENING!

Woah long lull between blogposts. I apologize to anyone who actually reads this thing.

Alright, so the biggest news of all....

The invites went to print!!


Ahhhhh....there are mixed emotions. Those things are my babies! My blood, my sweat....well you get the idea. Sending them to the printer was a wild mix of relief and scariness all at the same time. I know they're in good hands, but I'm at a point now where I'm so anxious to get them back to see them for myself. And fawn over them. And pet them.    ....anyone who knows me knows I'm not joking.

The other thing that followed this up was the biggo order of envelopes and other paper goodies that go along with the invites. Not a big deal to most, but after eyeing this stuff for literally a year now and finally pulling the trigger, I've suddenly had doubts of "what if I don't like these anymore?" despite the fact that I've ordered paper swatches and samples galore. I know I'll love them, but it's all starting to come together!

Which brings me to our most recent (yet-not-so-recent-anymore-since-I-never-blog) trip up to TC over Memorial Weekend. MAN was that a good weekend! My sister was in town and we took her all over the place to see everything from the rehearsal dinner spot, to the reception site, to the church, to another food tasting (still delicious food, don't you worry), to a couple restaurants that we love up there (Red Ginger for the win!), and even stopped by the hair salon. Yes, we got into that much detail. I felt like a little kid dragging my mom by the wrist around at school being like "Now look at THIS! Now wait, look what we did HERE! Do you like it do you like it??"

Luckily, she ate it all up and was equally (if not more) excitable about the whole situation. We are AMPED! We even fit a little wine tasting up on Old Mission for good measure:

Ahhh... 2 lads :)

The other side effect to our weekend was the realization that we're 3 months away from our wedding. YIKES! We actually have to start making decisions on things, which is a weird concept for us since we've been engaged for almost two years now at this point. Things that people originally were like "Oh you have time to get back to us on that" were now saying to us "So what have you decided on that?"

Oops. Guess this thing is really happening :)

So I have many more updates to share, including my gorgeous shower that happened at the end of May and the fun that's about to happen with invite assembly (including an invite assembly party next weekend - yep, we get kind of crazy around here!). Much, much, MUCH more to come friends!

We're moving!!

The long awaited search for renters has finally come to an end! After some serious failed attempts, no shows, dry spells, and one almost-serious attempt, we found a great couple who is going to be renting from us for the next year! This also means that we need to move out...cuz I don't think they want roommates. :)

Since this all happened last week, that meant that this weekend was devoted to searching for a future home for us. We had talked about possibly buying a few months ago, but with the risk of having two mortgages on the line, we decided to enjoy the flexibility that renting provides. The overall motivation for moving in the first place was to help improve Allen's commute - a 40 mile commute every day has really started to weigh on him. After that, there were a lot of other great reasons that fell into place, so we ended up finding a great place in Farmington Hills for us to rent - smack in the middle of Livonia and Birmingham where we both work.

Needless to say, we're really excited, but of course our moving falls right in the middle of my finals for school (since we don't have enough going on, clearly). We'll be moving in the next few weeks to accommodate our renters. Lucky for me, I have kinda the best fiance ever and he has taken on the bulk of the packing so I can focus and get through the next couple of weeks. Keepin it real crazy around here!

This has also developed into a need to purge a lot of our belongings. We have a TON of stuff, especially since I had my own place before we moved in together. This means we have duplicates of some items, so we've spent most of the past week and this weekend analyzing, piling, sorting, selling, and throwing a lot of stuff out. Most of the throwing out and selling were the result of many conversations like, "Do we really feel like moving that?" (and by we, I mean Allen) with the verdict oftentimes being a big fat NO. The result has been a crazy amount of Craig's Listing (which I hate, because of the sketchiness of many people - but love for the few gems of people that are out there and will actually buy from us). Of course, we want to offer these items to the people we know and love, so if anyone is interested, here are a few of the gems we're selling:

White leather recliner

Glass coffee and end tables (4 total)

Man cave TV

Treadmill

Grill

Patio furniture

We also have our ping pong table, couch and chair, vacuum, camping chairs, universal remote, racquetball sets, and much more! (Yep, totally advertising on the blog, sorry!) If anyone is interested, please let me know! 

All in all, it's going to be a crazy couple of weeks around here, but nothing we can't handle!! I'll for sure post pics of the new place once we get all settled too.

Creative Block

I've been spending the last few weeks starting to work on the creative for our invitations. Here's where I'm at so far:

Haha :)

The problem that I'm running into right now is the same one I've had all along - I have TOO many ideas! I've really been trying to narrow them down, and I know that I have the right "look" at this point for the wedding overall...but where to go from there? Yes there's inspiration boards, etc etc and I have all of that, but pulling all of those into a piece of paper tends to have its difficulties.

This weekend, my mom and I are going to meet with my aunt to discuss flowers - logistics of getting everything up north and cost to do so, overall look of the flowers (some of this is obviously limited by the transport up north, but I know it's all going to look amazing), and really nailing down the details of the day. I have a feeling that this will be a HUGE help in getting an overall picture of the day, especially because I know my mom and aunt will have a lot of great ideas to get everything executed. I just hope that all of those discussions get the creative juices flowing for me afterward!

Adventures in Registering

So I think I mentioned before that Allen and I had been working on our registries for the wedding. I've heard mixed reviews from different couples about their registering experience - some love it, some hate it, most are overwhelmed by it, some knew exactly what they wanted to get going in, and some did it all from home. I think we were a combination of all of those.

Most of our concern lied with the fact that we don't plan on being in our house in the next year or so. We would like to move, but anywhere we move in the short term is going to be a rental - aka, not permanent. So to pick out stuff for our future house together, without knowing what our future house looks like, was a bit challenging and really limited what we registered for. For example, we registered for very generic bathroom hardware in two different schemes since we don't know what a future bathroom could look like for us. Boring? Maybe. Practical? Yes.

I think the unknown made registering a little difficult, but overall we had a really good experience with it. Allen did drag his feet the first time at BB&B, but after he got that scanner in his hand...well...let's just say we ended up with a few gems like this:

Everyone needs a Haier 16-Bottle Wine Cellar, right?

By the way - that's totally staying on the registry. Somehow, now, I can't picture our future married life without it. But we've done other editing (3 sets of plastic containers in multiple sizes? Where would we even put that?) and I think we have narrowed things down to stuff that we know we'll love and use and share with everyone - yes, including the french onion soup crocks. I will totally make people soup in those things, I am so excited.

The other side effect this has brought on now is my stalking our registry. Normally I wouldn't even consider doing this, but I was editing some stuff on our registry when I noticed that items have been purchased for us already! Not only does this make me insanely curious as to who the early bird was that found our registry and purchased, but it has also made me stalk our registry every day to see what else happens on there. Don't lie, every bride does it, but no one talks about it. I'm talking about it, and I can't help it. One of the many perks of being a bride-to-be :)

Cake O'Licious

Sorry for the delay in blogging, but things have been ca-razy around here! A few highlights:

• I'm halfway through my winter semester, which means I almost have only 3 classes to go until my Master's is DONE!
• I started a new job at Universal McCann in Birmingham, and I'm managing In-Market and Search Campaigns now for Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram and Fiat - completely, new, exciting, and awesome (and BUSY!)
• Whittling our way down the to-do list for the wedding! Including, but not limited to, picking out a cake for the wedding!

In looking for cake options, Allen and I have pretty much agreed that we want a small cake - 2 layers at most, with sheet cakes in the back for the caterer to cut up. Allen's mom has graciously volunteered to make our cake (as she's done for the other Mitchell kids and other relatives), so we're really excited to find something cute, yet easy to transport across the state of Michigan (eek).

Even though we're looking at smaller cakes, there were a few crazy-tiered cakes that were pretty fun to look through. These images are all courtesy of Half Baked - The Cake Blog.

Hotel Issues

A little wedding notification:

So for people who are planning on attending our wedding, but more importantly, planning on booking at the Bayshore Resort (the hotel that is within walking distance of our reception), we've run into a bit of a problem. Apparently our families are early bookers, and we've already booked almost 30 rooms through our block. This is awesome, but the problem is that there are other events that have blocked rooms for that weekend at the same hotel, so they are occupying the other available rooms at the hotel. So, there are a couple of options:

1. Try one of our other hotel blocks (see www.allenandkaitlyn.com for details)
2. Wait until the beginning of August when they release the other room blocks to book your room
3. Book an upgraded room now, and then downgrade to a standard room in August when the other rooms are released.

We have the sales guy working with us to see if he can release any other rooms from the other blocks, but he's apprehensive to do so with the events so far away at this point. We will keep working with him and I will try to keep you posted to make sure that we can get other rooms released.

Sorry for any hassle that this has caused, but I'm really glad that people are so excited and are booking their rooms already! I promise to keep you all posted! Please get a hold of either Allen or myself if you have any questions!

Adventures in Save the Dates

Last weekend, Allen and I were able to finally finish our first crafty wedding project. Success! While it was definitely nice to see it all come together, there were definitely a few bumps in the road. Since I am not even close to an expert when it comes to all things print and crafty, I am happy to share my mishaps with all of you to avoid in the future.

First - the design. As always, never an easy process for me. I started out sketching, mostly trying to work on the "logo" for our wedding. I wanted to have an image that we could carry through all of the pieces of our wedding (with some variations), and finally came up with something that was both typographically and aesthetically pleasing (to me), with about 4 different designs and layouts. Then, I started working with photos that I thought represented the Traverse City area a bit - I wanted people to look at the save the dates and get excited about the possibility of going up north for the wedding. The final product turned out like this:

(Under the 9.10.11 it says "traverse city, mi" and on the back is the hotel and website information)

My mom had seen the photo on one of the sites I had looked at (I used istockphoto.com for this particular photo) and was immediately on board. Once I showed it to Allen, he was in love and instantly wanted a glass of wine. Success! I decided on the square format based on some free leftover envelopes I had from a job at work, and definitely couldn't throw those babies away! They were a clear vellum so the recipient could see the image through the envelope. Love.

However, the full layout of the card was actually on a 5 x 7" card. I did this because I used a site called Vista Print to print the cards. They're one of my favorite sites to use, especially for down and dirty printing - even though their options for specs can be a bit limiting, the printing always turns out really nicely. So when we got them, they looked like this:

(We need a new camera - sorry for the blurriness)

This meant that Allen quickly became my go-to cutter buddy, and he used my paper cutter to cut them down to size. I had this from previous art projects in school, but you can get them for super cheap at Michael's, and they come with different cutters so you can perf, score, etc.

The next step was inserting into the envelopes (an easy while-watching-Jeopardy activity), and then we affixed the return address labels. I purchased a return address stamp from Paper Source to save on cramping and cheesy return labels. I figured that since we'll be sending out a lot of wedding-related mail in the near future it would be worth it. Top that off with a handy $10-off promotion, and I grabbed this guy for $25 worth of hand cramp savers:

You can change out ink colors, and if we ever move, we can replace the plate with a new address

Then we stamped our return address onto some round sticker labels to use as our sealers (saving precious taste buds and preventing tongue paper cuts - always a plus):

Ta da! Love those envelopes.

The final step was addressing these suckers. This is where we had some problems. Again, I used my trusty Paper Source to find some fancy address labels, and ended up finding vellum labels that would allow for the wine image to be seen through the envelope without a chunky label covering everything up. Amazing! This would have all been great, except that the template that I downloaded from PS was incorrect. Twice. I set up my template in InDesign to allow for use of a scripty font that I had used on the invites. Due to the vellum, it was difficult to see on the actual label sheets where the die cut of the label fell. So it wasn't until we were pulling the labels off to affix to the invites that we actually realized that half the labels on each sheet printed off-center or completely off the label.

Epic fail. This would be where I would show you a picture of this monstrosity, but we were so frustrated in trying to re-work them that I never got around to it. After trying to re-layout the labels for the cut off addresses, and after going through way more labels than we had intended, we ended up getting the save the dates out in two batches - first were the ones that were at least still mailable (even if they were off-center), and the second drop was of all the people from the first batch that their labels didn't really meet my standards. The second batch went out about a week later after procuring more labels. So, if you got your save the date late, that's why! And even the second batch still didn't turn out 100% the way I would have preferred. But, it's done, and lesson learned - measure the template yourself, and get labels with a clear die cut so you can see mistakes right away. Done and done for next time. At least it wasn't for the invitations.

Overall, despite some serious address label frustrations, I am really, really happy with how they turned out. I think they portray the overall tone of the wedding with the bay and the wine (naturally), and I'm proud of the work we put into them together. Hopefully everyone else enjoys them as much as I do!

It's been a busy, busy week!

In the midst of getting over a foot of snow this week, there has been lots and lots of excitement around here!

Exciting event #1: Mel and Scott are engaged!!

Scott was kind enough to include all of us in his big moment by having us appear at the Ren Cen downtown right after he popped the question. While I didn't get their first grand entrance on video, I did manage to score the slow clapped entrance when they came downstairs to meet us:

(Video all thanks to my amazing sister - she got us a Flip video camera for Christmas!)

It was all very exciting. And then things got even MORE exciting when I got a phone call Sunday morning saying....

Exciting event #2: Jill and Michael are engaged!!

As if one amazing engagement wasn't enough, now my best friend in the world calls me and tells me that she is now engaged to the love of her life (who, just happens to be another one of my most favorite people in the world...and Allen's too. There's a bromance involved).

Awwwww, love :)

So it's been a crazy, amazing, really exciting time with everyone! I couldn't be happier for my friends, and it's been fun to be part of all of it. Plus, now I have fellow crafters to help me with my wedding stuff (and I will totally return the favor for you guys too - this crafting bug won't be going away quickly!).

Speaking of the crafting bug...a little sneak peak of our save the dates:

More to come on those once people start receiving them. Needless to say, Allen and I have been extremely productive on this crazy snowed in day of ours. 

Checking off the To-Do's

My my my, it has been a while.

But can I just tell you - we have been so, SO productive!! Through the holidays, the time off of school (which I'm now back into), and everything in between. Productive, productive, productive.

A few highlights of items checked off the to-do lists:

• Bridesmaid Dresses - check! Since we have such big bridal parties, I'm letting my lovely ladies pick their own style of dress. They'll all be from the same manufacturer, the same length, and the same color, but the style is all completely their own. I want my ladies not only to be comfortable in their dresses, but if they feel comfortable they will look even more fabulous than they already are. Plus, I love how everyone is going to look unique. Woo!
• Groomsmen Tuxes - check! We were able to get our account set up with Men's Wearhouse, and all of the men will be looking dapper in their tuxes. The guys have it so easy - they just get measured and it's done.
• MY Dress - check! Yep, you heard right. I have a dress. But that's all you're going to hear about it ;)
• Wedding website - check! I was finally able to take some time and update our wedding website with all of the event, travel, and accommodation information for our guests. Hopefully it's helpful for people, but I definitely enjoyed putting it together. Check it out at: www.allenandkaitlyn.com.
• Registry - check! Well, at least one part of it. We did a partial registry at Bed Bath & Beyond, but will also be hitting up Crate & Barrel in February and possibly Macy's if necessary. At first I wasn't sure how much Allen was going to enjoy registering, but once he got that scanner gun in his hand I think he felt a new sense of power. I think we both got a little scanner-happy at some points (everyone needs a wine refrigerator, right?) so we may be doing some editing once we get our other registries taken care of.
• Wedding bands - check! A super easy night out resulted in us walking out of the mall in under 45 minutes with our wedding bands. I think we both just went in with clear ideas of what we wanted, and it was just quick as can be. We have them at the house, and it's fun for me to just take a quick peak at them whenever :) So fun.
• Honeymoon flights - check! We were able to secure our vacation time for the year, and are now booked for our TWO WEEK honeymoon! We'll be flying into Barcelona, spending a few days there, then fly into Rome, spend a few days there, and then spend the second week touring around Italy. I don't remember ever taking a full two week vacation (at least not since I was much younger), so I am really excited for our adventure!
• Save the Dates - almost check! I've been working on our save the dates for a while now, and after many, many, many drafts, revisions, theme and color changes, format changes, etc. I think we finally got our favorite nailed down. I really, really love them. I'll be sure to post more up once they finally go out, but I'll be releasing the art to the printer this weekend and putting them together in the coming weeks. But MAN! If I was this indecisive and nit-picky over our save the dates, I can't even imagine how I'm going to be on our invites.

It's been really great and a huge relief getting a lot of these items taken care of. I'm so excited to keep getting things checked off!

Thank you, Madame Secretary

Feel free to disagree with me, and I welcome any discussion, but Secretary Clinton's words in this article (which, is a great article and you should read it if you're interested) definitely hit home for me:


"Just as I was very proud to say the obvious more than 15 years ago in Beijing - that human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights - well, let me say today that human rights are gay rights, and gay rights are human rights, once and for all."


I hate to do this, because I know that many people have different views than I do on touchy subjects like this one, but it's one that I happen to feel particularly strong about. I am not a Democrat, but I am not a Republican either. And I know that Secretary Clinton does not agree with gay marriage (only civil unions, according to this article), but it is a step in the right direction. She is helping to make strides for protection of human rights against violence and discrimination for everyone, which is also admirable. There is definitely a little bit of hope in this article. Now I will rarely ever bring up political opinions on this forum, but I strongly believe that if I am so lucky as to be able to marry, commit, and have spousal rights with the love of my life, that everyone should have that right. That is all :)

Stocking Lurve

This past weekend when Allen and I were decorating our Christmas tree, I realized one very important detail was missing - we don't have stockings!! (well, we do, but they're tiny ones that serve as ornaments on our tree) Seeing that this was a clear oversight on our part, I decided to start a search to find ours. While I haven't officially decided, I did find quite a few that I love - pretty much all from Etsy (best site ever).  Here are a few of my favorites:

dorahdesigns - candy stripe with vintage buttons

ChristmasIsLove - vintage Hoffman flower pattern stockings

Habitationinc - burlap elf stocking

thevillagegiraffe - sheet music paper stocking

ChristmasIsLove - Red and green antique quilt stocking

Moire Accessories - vintage christmas stocking

It's stuff like this that gets me in the holiday spirit :) Falalalalala! 

House trouble and scammers

As some of you may know, Allen and I have been playing around with the idea of buying a new house these past few months. There are a few reasons for this, including practical things like low interest rates, preferable things like a shorter commute for him (he drives 40 miles to work everyday - ugh), and other nice to have things like more space, bigger kitchen, etc etc. However, since we are incredibly under on our house right now like most people are, we are looking into the option of renting our house out instead of selling right away so we don't have to cut a huge check.

All good in theory, until last week. We had posted our house on zillow.com and got a message that someone was interested in setting up a walk-through! So we're all excited, and I call the woman last week hoping to schedule it up. She answers, and proceeds to tell me how she has been hunting around on other sites like Craig's List, and actually had found something in Southfield that she really liked (I know, I was wondering the same thing you probably are - why on earth is she telling me this?!). Well apparently, the guy who was renting out the Southfield house told her that it wasn't for rent anymore, but that he had another house available to rent while he was on a missionary in Africa. The address he gave her? OUR ADDRESS. This guy had apparently seen that our house was for rent on Zillow, or had just randomly picked an address, and it happened to be ours!! He let her know that since he was "out of the country" that she could just go to our house and look in the windows and if she liked the house, he told her that if she sent him a $600 security deposit with the first month's rent of $800 that he would mail her the keys.

*#$*)!&^@%#$)*(&$#)(*@#$&#$)(*!&$]

So this woman was kind enough to forward me all of his emails so we could properly file a consumer fraud report, file a report with Craig's List, and file a police report. Also, I flagged his ad on Craig's List so hopefully no one else gets scammed by this.

But there is a bigger question out there: Who the hell do these people think they are?! I mean really. REALLY?! Sending someone to trespass on another person's property? Scamming people out of money when the economy is hard enough as it is? Those people are the scum of the earth.

Needless to say, I was in a bit of a rage over this. The woman agreed to still come see our house this past weekend (especially now that she knew we weren't in Africa), so we were at least excited about that prospect. Allen and I woke up at 6:30 am Saturday and spent about 6 hours cleaning our house from top to bottom. So we were prepped, ready, and excited for this woman to come over so we could make a smashing impression on her....and she never showed.

Sigh.

We're both trying not to be too disappointed about things, since the house really needed a good cleaning (clearly since it took a long time), and we were still able to get our Christmas tree up and everything. I think that if the woman had at least shown up and decided that she didn't like the house that we would have felt better that we had at least gotten someone to come see it. Hopefully we start to get a few more prospects after the holidays so we can really get to the good stuff - finding the house of our dreams!

A Very Happy Birthday

Wishing a happy, happy birthday to the love of my life today!

We celebrated this weekend by going up to Traverse City, and then playing hookie from work today and relaxing around the house. While we did manage to get quite a bit of wedding planning done up in Traverse City (secured our DJ, taste testing for caterer, meeting with the priest, putting in a bunch of deposits), we definitely managed to balance work with play. We hit up one of our new favorite restaurants up there - Red Ginger. And when I say that it was the best sushi I think I've ever had, that is quite an understatement. We were ready to lick our plates! I can't wait to go back again :)

It was a very productive and fun weekend for both of us. It definitely solidified why we're having our wedding up there - the entire Traverse City area is so fantastic, clean, filled with happy and kind people, and a ton of amazing food and wine! I am so excited for even more trips up there, but more importantly, I can't wait to marry this guy :) Happy birthday baby!

Bouquet Bliss

A few (out of MANY) of the gorgeous bridal bouquets I've been seeing online lately. All of these are courtesy of Karen Tran Florals:

Say "eh" to the dress

For most girls starting their wedding planning, finding and buying their wedding dress is one of their favorite and most exciting parts of the process. For me...not so much.

To put some context around this...I'm not really a shopper. Never have been. I go to the store for what I need, I leave with what I went in for. I don't browse, I hate having to dig through racks, and I hate shopping without knowing exactly what I went to the store for. More importantly, I hate dress shopping. In going shopping for dresses for other special occassions (proms, homecoming, friend's weddings, etc), I always felt a ton of pressure going shopping for a dress.

Now, imagine having to shop for THE dress. Yeeeeeeeeeeesh.

I've seriously been putting this off for a good 14 months now. I went once with my mom and sister and pretty much felt uncomfortable the entire time. One good thing came out of the trip - I realized (as most of you may know), I am not a poofy dress kind of girl. So at least that part is narrowed down.

Luckily, I've gotten to the point now where at least I'm looking at dresses online and getting ideas of ones I like. This is progress. Most people have told me that the dress style they originally went in looking for was not the one they ended up with. Honestly, I don't really know that I have a specific "style," (other than not poofy) I just want to look good and feel comfortable. So, the search continues.

It's almost hereeeeeeeee!

 

It is time.

Ah the rivalry. Which, let's be honest, wasn't much of a rivalry until U of M went 0-2 against MSU the past two years. Now all of a sudden we have the blue team all in a frenzy over who's going to win, and I have not seen such trash talk between alumni of the two schools since...well I can't even remember.

Regardless of where your allegiance lies, it's going to be a great game. Both undefeated (but let's be honest, MSU's victories are a little more substantial than UM's), both have a score to settle or maintain, and both have a lot of pride on the line. I'm all decked out at work, managed to decorate a few UM fans cubes and offices in Sparty gear (hilarious), and am maintaining my end of the trast talk. I am crazy excited :) And also slightly nervous since I have some lunch bets on the line...

LOL!

GO GREEN!

GO WHITE!

Italy, here we come!!

Part of our honeymoon is booked!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! Here's a look at where we'll be staying:

 
How did this happen, you ask? Well, Allen's parents were so, so generous and gave us their week-long timeshare to use for our honeymoon! Since it's a floating timeshare, we could go anywhere we wanted, so we decided to take advantage of the opportunity and go one place we have always wanted to see.

The timeshare is located in a village called Loro Ciufueno, which is in the Tuscan region (yessss) and about a 45 minute train ride outside of Florence and Pisa. Perfect opportunity for some day trips! Since we are delaying our honeymoon by about a month after the wedding (this particular location wasn't available before then), we are also planning on flying in a few days early to see a few other areas of the country. We definitely would like to go to Rome, and wherever else we can fit in including lots of food, wine, sight seeing....and more wine and food ;)

Yay! So, so, SO excited!