Ch-ch-changes

Hey, it's 10 months until go-time! Thought this would be an appropriate day to give an update after my "time off" for the holiday season. I'm extremely glad that I took some time away from actively trying to get stuff done related to wedding-business and worked on other projects -- finishing NaNoWriMo, moving house, getting used to winter weather driving again (I've slid off the road twice already...), and all that jazz. (I should probably include "playing the heck out of some Cataclysm" in that mix.)
However, I didn't actually put wedding-stuff completely out of mind for the past month. Kind of far from it. I spent a lot of time just mulling ideas over, getting a better sense of what I want to do and what can be done with the funds and time I have, and thinking about the end product. And all that has come down to a lot of changes.
As any goblin in Azeroth will tell you, "time is money, friend." I'm lucky that I have a lot of weeks and months to use for DIY projects before October, but the free time I have day-to-day is pretty hard to come by. I've been trying to evaluate how much product I can get out of the time I have in order to come out with stuff that looks good but hasn't taken up so much time that I'm left stressed to the max. I'm still keeping the picture tree (and I finally know what that kind of tree is called - manzanita!) and the candle centerpieces, since those are the projects that are most important to me. My big decision right now is whether to go with making fabric flowers or not. I mean, look at these beauties:

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Or this one...


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I love the rustic, relaxed, homey look of the felt ones, and Mrs. Locket's lace ones are to die for. If I don't do fabric flowers, I'll most likely be doing something involving a ton of wheat. Like this.



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Actually, it was that picture that changed a lot of the style choices I'd been thinking of. (More on that in a minute.)
I'm probably going to be doing a combination of wheat and felt flower stuff with the reception table centerpieces, too.
Most of my other DIY projects that I had in mind are getting super-simplified. Mallorn-leaf bouts will probably get replaced by simple wheat ones, maybe with a fabric bloom on there, because I forgot how bad I am with Sculpey :P This is also a contributing reason for why the cake topper idea is going away and getting replaced with an already-made piece that isn't technically a cake topper but which J and I both really like (which will probably just stand beside the cake):


"Together" by Susan Lordi (Willow Tree)

I've re-thought my stance on invites. The things are so dang expensive. Actually anything paper in general is so dang expensive - programs, thankyous, everything. That and the flowers are what I'm most up in the air about at the moment. I still like Cards and Pockets, but I've also seen some nice Seal 'N Send invites with detachable RSVPs. Or I could go the totally DIY route and make some like these pretty ones I found instructions on from Michaels:


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Or some of the pro ones from Wedding Paper Divas that I could simplify down to one piece. The more I think about invites, the less I want multiple pieces of paper stuck in them and the more I want to encourage people to use our website. Since we know there'll probably be people who don't get an invite who turn up anyway and know how weddings around here generally work ("Why do I have to send this card back?"), we're just going to do a ton of finger-foods and not have to worry so much about head count. The website has all the info that would go on all the extraneous invite cards.
I also changed my mind a little on the color scheme after taking a better look at the church and the fellowship hall with wedding stuff in mind. The sanctuary has medium-tone wood and burgundy carpet, and the fellowship hall is dusty blue and taupe -- I ended up really liking the way that dusty rose looked with both those sets of colors, so the purple is getting traded out for that color (which should be the same color as the blog background, if it's registering the same way on your browser as it is on mine).
So... I guess that even though I haven't really done anything, I've thought a lot! With the end of the holidays, I'll probably be making some DIY update posts as the ball gets rolling with those projects, and I'll have a better idea of what we're going with.
That's where we stand...