You may not live in Los Angeles, but I’m sure you’ve seen your share of “Team Aniston/Jolie; Paris/Nicole; Nick/Jessica” shirts to last a lifetime. Well, if that’s the case, then please close your eyes and try your best to skip over my post for the rest of the day!

Long, long ago… back in those early days of the wedding plans, Mr. Lemon passed someone wearing one of these TEAM shirts and wished aloud for own versions of them for the wedding party. So… skip forward to last week and add some stencils, white paint and some spiffy shirts from Jiffyshirts and his wish was granted and taken to Las Vegas and Palm Springs for the weekend.

  
My shirts: Navy American Apparel (#2102) jersey shirts ($5.50 each after discount)
His shirts: Bright Orange (yes… it was by request) Hanes Beefy T’s ($3.80 each after discount)

My girls loved them… and pledged to wear them around representing TEAM LEmon all around town. I’m sure there was a big grumble when Mr. Lemon revealed his trademark ORANGE shirts, but heck, all guys need an extra gym shirt and it got a nice laugh too. They were more than willing to wear them to the rehearsal… especially since we’ve got a 3-hour break between our rehearsal and dinner that night. Could make for some fun photos!

As for the “how-to” for this project, I went back to my stencil-making ways and did the same thing for these t-shirts that I did for my other bridesmaid shirts. This stencil took a bit more time to cut out, but other than that, the process was just as easy! Only one more fabric printing task left (the OOT bags) and I can pack away my X-Acto knife and stencil materials for another day.

It must be the first day of summer… because it just took me an extra 20 minutes in the shower to shave my legs to prepare for short shorts and bikinis. Yes, being tall in the summertime takes on an extra burden of surface area maintenance in lotion, sunscreen, shaving (omg… I waxed my legs once and all the woman could say was, “Wow…your legs so long this take way too much time. You must hurt bad”) and pain from sunburns. But it’s all for a good cause because in about 20 minutes I’m being whisked away to a secret and undisclosed location for a bachelorette weekend of relaxation and fun with a few of my BMs.
Mr. Lemon left for his scandalous joint b-party affair (one of his GM will be getting married next weekend… and their guest list of college friends was pretty similar) in Vegas yesterday, so we’ll both be ready to relax next week in order to gear up for the last 30 days of preparation.
My bags are packed with: 1 jeans “going-out”fit, 1 fancy “going-out”fit, 2 bikinis (oh no!), athletic clothes and shoes (um… please no jogging sessions on my vacation?!?!), clothes for 90 degree weather, nice shoes, flip flops and my sunglasses. Oh… and the requisite bridal party t-shirts that I made!! Mr. Lemon’s crew even has their own set… and I’ll share photographic evidence when I return next week! Enjoy the long weekend everyone!!!

If I told you that we booked our ceremony musicians only 7 weeks before the big day, would you call me a slacker? Well…. so be it!   It was one of those things that got swept to the side early on in the process, and we just kept pushing it off until the last minute. We could never get a confirmation as to whether or not the organ in the chapel was really in a good working condition, or if the grand piano would be around during the summer (school ends in June… so who knows?), and we waited around for answers instead of just moving ahead. In the end, we decided that the organ must be bad if no one knows of the last time it was used, and that if we banked on the piano being there and it magically disappeared, then we’d be stuck with a keyboard and we didn’t want that! Classic wedding panic set in and I went to work trying to find something that would work and wouldn’t break our non-existent musical budget.
I must admit that my main criteria was “pretty music” (sounds very much like my flowers, eh?) so I tried to figure out what that actually meant. In the end, I realized that minus a full orchestra or quartet, my preference went to a classical guitar and flute duo. Somehow I could just hear the echo in the chapel, and I got the magical little flutter in my heart when I listened to their wedding demo in front of Mr. Lemon. Thanks again to craigslist, we were able to book them for 90 minutes for $400. I thought it was a reasonable rate until I discovered that the flutist (also a sax player) charges $300/hour just for his services if you book him through the local talent agency. Well that made me smile just a little bit more!
Now it’s time to choose the songs for the ceremony… and hopefully we won’t be slackers on this task!
Does anyone have any suggestions for wonderful music for a guitar/flute duo?

A few months back, I stumbled upon a great idea for our out-of-town guests that we could include in our little gift bags. Essentially, you address a postcard to yourself, stamp it, put it in an OOT bag and ask your guests to send them back to you with memories of their trip scribbled on the back! (These “postcards from paradise” are a popular wedding staple on the Destination Weddings message board on TheKnot)

(images courtesy of knottie zoegirltx2)

I really enjoyed the idea, but I decided I would only add it to the list of projects if I could bargain it down to Starbucks prices. Then, I could magically skip a day of coffee guzzling and feel no guilt whatsoever… and thanks to VistaPrint and some imagintion, I did just that! I ordered 100 standard size postcards for the grand total of $5.24! Ok…so maybe that’s a frap & scone, but still a good deal! Everything about the postcard was free, except for the shipping (sign up and register for one of their webinars for links to the best deals that really are completely free!).

I decided to make a fun postcard that our guests could not only send back to us, but also send on to others or keep as a little memento… and after searching through hundreds and hundreds of images, I think I found the right one:

The front:
(a Polaroid image of Asilomar beach I found on Flickr.com with text added in Illustrator)

The back:
(Self-Addressed with proper credit given to the photographer in the middle of the card)

They turned out really well, but I did have a bit of a “brain fart” when I decided to print all of the postcards with our address on them. I think I’ll just resolve the issue by putting a white label on top and not thinking about it…  oh well! Each guest will get two of these in their OOT bag…. and hopefully our mailbox will be overflowing with memories when we return from our honeymoon!

Q: What is Gocco??
A: “Though small in size and low priced, Riso’s Print Gocco Kit is no toy.

ways will out-perform your local printer.”

The Print Gocco is essentially a mini printing press that is capable of printing whatever you can imagine if you can create it and make a B&W photocopy of it.

Q: How does the whole thing work?
A: There are lots of wonderful tutorials about Gocco on the internet (just google “gocco and tutorial”), but I’ll try to demystify the process for you here. So, as I said before, it’s a printing press. It’s not as cool as a letter press or some super high-tech fancy printers, but since it only requires batteries and it fits on a small sidetable, I’m going to say it beats its counterparts in a few ways.

The process is simple.

1. DESIGN
You’d like to print “something” – a design, a body of text, a  wedding invitation, etc. That “something” needs to be capable of fitting within the gocco screen parameters and can either be photocopied or drawn with a carbon-based writing instrument. So if you design it on the computer all you simply do is print it out and make a photocopy of it.

(Image from WarmNFuzzy)

2. BURN
The gocco unit BURNS the image that you’ve drawn/copied into a screen using 2 flash bulbs. You place a blank screen in the unit and place the design you want to burn (remember step 1?) on the bed. Then, with the flash bulb unit in place, you click and it’ll smell like you’re burning the house down. No worries…. the image you created has now been burned into the screen and you’re ready to start printing!!!

(Images from TheSmallObject)

3. INK UP! All you do is ink up the screen, put it back in the gocco unit. This is extremely easy if you’ve only got one color on your screen… but if you’ve got 2 or more, you just need to put down some foam walls to keep your ink from running away.

(Image from WarmNFuzzy)

4. PRINT AWAY!!! 
Simply place the screen back in the machine, and put the material you’d like to print on underneath… and “stamp” your design! It’s really that simple!

Q: OK….so what can I actually DO with this expensive little contraption?
A: Let your imagination run wild and raft to your heart’s delight! Here are some examples of gocco creations just for wedding purposes :




(all images found on flickr using the search “gocco wedding”)

Q: OK, I want one.. how much is this little habit going to cost me?
A: Kits are usually sold upwards of $130. The screens run about $12/5 pack and the bulbs are another $12/10 pack, leaving the simple cost of burning one screen at around $2-3. Inks are anywhere from $2-4/each, and you usually only have to ink a screen once completely for every 50 prints. 

Q: Umm… and I would find one of these things where?
A: EBay is your best friend right now for the actual machine housing. For supplies,  try www.savegocco.com for multiple sites that sell supplies online.

Q: Is it worth the investment?
A: I think the best way to answer this question is to gauge how much you’ve used other craft gadgets that you have, and possibly the amount of correspondence you normally send in the mail. If you’re spending money buying notecards and stationary for yourself or others, than this is worth its weight in gold. Otherwise, it might be a pricey gadget.

Q: What is so hard about all of this?
A: If you’re doing one print screen… not too much. But when you’re doing multiple screens, the registration process gets a little tricky and you need to be on your toes in order to do your best. You also need to have the vision and knowing how to use Photoshop layers will help in that area as well.

Q: What’s the coolest thing that you’ve done with your gocco?
A: Metallics and pastels! You can’t print them at home any other way….. and I adore making myself and friends stationary.

Any other questions? Add them to the comments and I’ll answer them next week!   Get excited!

3 Silly Similarities:

1. We’ve both been asked “is it really hot in there?”


2. Our parents share the same anniversary date: July 4.  
(Don’t worry… red/white/blue dresses weren’t involved in their nuptuals)

3. We both busted (and needed surgery on) our left knee playing non-contact sports…. basketball for me and Ultimate for him.

3 Devious Differences

1. He’s REALLY good at video games, and I just try REALLY hard not to suck.

2. He’s a morning person…. I’m not.

3. He has insane cravings for spicy Korean tofu soup….  which is a problem since they don’t seem to respond when I ask for Korean soup minus anything spicy or any sign of tofu.

I just got one of those super fun emails that you have wedding nightmares about…
“I just wanted to let you know that Mr. X will no longer be your event coordinator and instead he will be replaced by Ms. Y.”
Yup, we’re 50 days away and we get to do all of our final negotiations with someone I’ll meet only a week before the wedding. Now this wouldn’t normally scatter the false sense of calm I’m trying to maintain, but Ms. Y happens to not only be preceded by Mr. X but also Ms. A & B! That’s FOUR wedding coordinator that we’ve been assigned over 15 months. See, I told you it was super fun!
Luckily my mom worked the local grapevine to discover that this new manager is an experienced replacement from another local hotel, and that she’s allegedly very nice and great at what she does. Ok… phew… worries semi-eliminated…. but it still doesn’t eliminate the annoyance of having to explain myself to yet another new person and beg them for the little adjustments that we want for our reception. Who knows… maybe this will actually turn out to be a good price negotiating tool before the final contract is written in blood?
Has anyone else been through the wedding coordinator wringer and lived to tell about it?

Mr. Lemon and I have a quirky sense of consumerism… and we really should just start a business where we get paid to try out new products since we pretty much do so on a regular basis. Our favorite “fun” purchase to make seems to be new beverages… so I ran with that idea and planned on giving out some sort of soda for our rehearsal dinner favors. I really liked the idea of the MyJones sodas, but Mr. Lemon didn’t like the idea of having just one photo, so we improvised and bought normal Jones soda and did it on our own:

This is the commemorative WB bottle
(That’s a picture of my MOH and I at the NCAA West Regionals)

The plan is to have half of the bottles with our new last name and half with my current last name (since it IS kind of the last night I’ll have the name). Then 30 different photos of us on each bottle… which should be enough variety to talk about around the dinner table! The only catch is that I’ve been forbidden from using the cream soda flavor… since one exploded in Mr. Lemon’s super clean car in the Disneyland parking garage a few weeks ago. He’s leaning toward Fufuberry instead.

I got confirmation this weekend that everyone on the East coast has received their packages in the mail… so without further adieu I get to share my GIGANTIC wedding project with you… MY INVITATIONS!

Front cover of fabric pocketfold – gold embroidery thread on gold fabric

Full view of pocketfold – 4″x6″ in size

My solution to the lack of an inner envelope! (And it still fit in an A-9 envelope!)


Blue fabric interior with pocketfold on the right side.
View of contents inside – Invite on the left (secured with glue dots) and inserts on the right.

Close-up of the invitation. This was printed using two gocco screens (one for the design and one for the text)

Close-up of insert titles. All printed with on my gocco in light gold ink.

Front of the directions insert. Text was printed on a laser printer.

Back of directions insert. Map was printed with a laser printer as well.

Reception insert – laser printed.

RSVP Insert – laser printed.

RSVP Envelope – printed with my gocco.

Accomodations Insert -  laser printed.

Close-up of the embroidery.

And to preface any questions: they are completely homemade, they did
take a lot of time and effort, they weighed 4 oz (pricey for USPS but
worth it) and they cost around $2 each to make including both
envelopes. I’ll have a complete write-up on the cost breakdown later
this week along with some helpful gocco tips!