Wedding Recap – programs

I’ll never forgot a wedding program for a wedding I was a bridesmaid for about 12 years ago.  She had included a little blurb about the wedding party.

I loved it for 2 reasons:

1.            It gave everybody something to read while they were waiting for the ceremony.

2.            Sometimes, especially if you are ONLY  friend of the bride or the groom (not both), it help answers questions like, “who are those super attractive people standing up there?!?”

I’m a little embarrassed, but I think I made the program within a month of getting engaged.  It’s like the firs thing I did!  Our wedding party was small, and locked in right away, so that helped.

I had a lot of fun creating it and embarrassing the wedding party at the same time!

It’s just printed on a normal 8.5X11 piece of paper, and folded in half.  I have a color printer, but if you don’t, color copies are pretty darn cheep at FexEx or even a library.  Fancy think paper may have been nice, but who cares?  Ribbon on it would’ve been nice, but why spend the money on something that everybody is just going to spill beer on at the reception and then immediately throw away.

I was pretty proud of the back of the program (the left part below).  I used my limited photoshop skills and a greeting card that I found with Chris’ deceased mom’s handwriting.  Notice the stamp on the postcard is the breast cancer ribbon and the fake postmark says ‘Saturday’.

Wedding Recap – quiz time!

The last wedding I went to, my entire table all made a random bet on what the first ‘group dance’ would be.

About an hour later when the cupid shuffle came on, our entire table went, “heeeeey!” and patted the winner on the back.

That sparked my idea of giving out a ‘quiz’ to everybody at my wedding, just to get them a little more interested.

I’m honestly not sure if anybody cared or if they even participated, but it was a super easy touch that cost pretty much nothing!

Wedding Recap – George O’Leary

Who doesn’t have a cardboard cutout of George O’Leary at their wedding?

Wedding recap – centerpieces!

Back to the theme of “my mom can do anything”, she made the centerpieces.

My original plan was to buy a bunch of flowers at Publix for my bouquet (check!) and more to shove in vases for the table centerpieces.  That’s what you do for a centerpiece right, a pile of flowers?

Then my mom mailed me some of these and said, “want me to make some for favors?”

I thought, “heck no!  I don’t want you to waste all your time on the most awesome centerpieces, I give them to Chris’ guy friends and they just throw it away.”  So I thought of how I could have her ‘help’ … and my centerpieces were born!

Sticks = free
stained glass = free (well, my mom paid for the materials)
jars = free (donations from friend’s weddings) or the $1 store

Basically I think I paid $3 for 3 jars.

I don’t have a very awesome photo. Hopefully some of the professional photos are better. Basically we stuck sticks in a jar, and hung them up.

Done and done!

I say my mom starts selling them on etsy! 🙂

Wedding recap – manly flowers!

Since I struggle with spelling, I’m going to call the boutonniere (sp?) ‘manly flowers’ for this blog post.

Chris didn’t care a bit about the theme or the color scheme of the wedding, so the last thing he cared about was if he was getting a boutonniere.

Since I bought 2 options of flowers at Publix the day of, I had these … poofy things.

Since my mom can pretty much do everything, I knew she could bust out a boutonniere in about 10 minutes.

I think she used thin flower wire and green flower tape. I picked out the tiniest pink flower (to “match” his pink tie) and 2 white buds.  We used leaves from the flowers as well.

Tons of tape later – you’re done!

I had purchased the ‘grape soda’ pin from Downtown Disney (b/c I live 2 miles from there … hence the blog title of “Amber in Florida”) 🙂

The Pixar movie “Up” wasn’t a theme or anything, but my vows involved their ‘Adventure Book’ and the cake topper was a set of Carl and Ellie vinylmation dolls. And Chris actually really likes that movie, so I figured it would be cute.

The pink was MEGA heavy, so the flowers kept falling off, so after about 1 hour into the reception they were toast. But I’m assuming the pre-game photos look pretty darn cute!

Wedding recap – Knightro!

Thank goodness I stalk the Root Photography wedding blog (loyal reader ever since 2007!), because I saw a couple who had the UCF mascot Knightro at their wedding.

I knew I must copy their genius idea.

To make it better … it would be a total surprise.

The surprise was 50% for Chris and 50% for all his friends. Even though they all graduated 10 years ago, all his college friends are still really, oddly, surprisingly close friends. They still go to most of the football games and talk about UCF like it was yesterday.

Let’s face it, this wedding wasn’t really for me. I didn’t need, or want to be the center of attention (hence my $31 dress). So if all the UCF gang could have the best time ever, then it was worth it for me.

It was so easy. I just filled out this form HERE, an awesome woman from UCF contacted me and it was done! Thankfully she gave “Knightro” my phone number, so we could communicate about the surprise.

My plan:
6:55pm – we cut the cake. I had the DJ make a big deal about cake cutting, so he really got everybody excited and watching us. It was embarrassing b/c cake cutting is so lame, but he was like, “everybody pay attention to this area of the room!!!”

7pm – The song “So put your hands up … and then they stay there … hands up, hands up” comes on. Everybody gets pumped up and hits the dance floor.

7:01pm – Knightro appears!

7:02pm – eveybody is just staring at him. I GOT NO REACTION OUT OF ANYBODY!!!

Everybody was asking me, “who is that?”
me – that’s Knightro
everybody – yeah, but who is it?
me – it’s the real Knightro
everybody – yeah, but who is it?

I think people thought I bought a Knightro outfit at Target or something.

After 2 minutes of shock, people figured out that it was for real, and they all lost their $%^&.

A win for me! 🙂

Wedding Recap – cup cake tower

Awwww man – I’ve been married for 1 month already! And I still have a lot of recaps to go!

I just wanted to show off better photos of the cup cake tower my mom made.

As you can see, it’s just wood cut into circles. My mom wanted to put some ribbon around the edges, but since I didn’t have a “color” and that would’ve cost money, I said ‘forget it’.

The theme of the wedding was “make it look good, but make it look like I didn’t try that hard.” 🙂 Ribbon around the edges would’ve made it look I was trying too hard.

The middle parts are PVC pipe, that we covered up with toilet paper tubes. Leaving that alone would’ve been super ghetto, so I used some wrapping paper that I already had. I’m not happy with the outcome, but nobody’s looking at that anyways.

Here is the first post about the super awesome cupcakes. Aren’t they colorful. My wedding colors were just “colorful”, so it worked.

Wedding Recap – flowers!

I’m thrifty.

I’m guessing if you’ve read my blog before, you probably figured that out.

Because I’m thrifty, and also because I didn’t want to have to worry about MATCHING things like crazy, I had no wedding colors.

I bought my flowers at Publix (a grocery store in Florida) the day before.  Of course, the months before, I would always check out the flowers every time we’d buy groceries and they were amazing!

The day of my wedding … not so much.  There wasn’t much of a selection.  😦

The 2nd Publix we went to, I found these.  Thank goodness!!

I knew I wanted something in the pink family because:
A – flowers are mostly pink, so that’s realistic
B – Chris’s tie was all sorts of pink

I just bundled a bunch together, put a rubber band around them for security, and tied a ribbon around them like 1000 times for extra security!

Boom! They were pretty flimsy (we tossed them right after the wedding), but I think they look pretty sweet!

Wedding Recap – giant Chris heads

What wedding is complete WITH OUT giant Chris heads.

These … I was not expecting.

The Thursday before the wedding was Chris’ tailgate UCF bachelor party.  One of his groomsmen made him a giant (and I mean giant!) head.  Like the ones you always see on ESPN game day, or at college basketball games.

Apparently, when you order a GIANT head online, it comes with many normal sized heads as well.

So we put those around at each table.  People waved them around, people danced with them.  They even showed up in a ton of photo booth photos!

I’m telling you … next time you have a pretty big gathering, google how to order these things. I have no idea how it’s done, but it was genius!

Wedding Recap – ‘missing’ people

I had 3 good friends who couldn’t make it from out of town.

At first I had the idea of putting a special section in the slide show about them, kind-of like the memorial section of the Oscars.

Then I thought that was weird, b/c these three friends are still alive. 🙂

Then I had this idea! I put their name on the seating chart, so make people THINK they were there, but then their photo was just at the table.

My wedding planner was cool enough to set 3 extra place settings for these ‘missing’ people.

I knew that people would take some photos with them and tag them on Facebook. We also took the frames into the photobooth and had some fun.

Hello Brooke from Illinois!

Hello Whit from Alabama!