Mint

As I read through each of your comments about my “news,” I was overwhelmed by your kindness and by how insanely talented you guys are! Some of you are frequent commenters, and I know your beautiful blogs & work well. Others are new to me. I’m just showing one photo each from a few different commenters, but please follow the links in this post to see tons more talent, and click through the comment links on my last post, too. So much to be inspired by! Above is work by Ivana of Love Ardently.

This is an invitation from Libby Cole, who must be a Durhamite like me! Libby has done work for Duke and a new local restaurant, Dos Perros.

Jennifer Mao is an all-around talented woman from Seattle. This photograph, from her series “With or Without You” makes me smile.

Kate Miss is a designer working in NYC who does branding, books, illustration, packaging, photography, websites, and more.

This beautiful invitation was designed by Kate Arends from Minneapolis.

Great mix & match stationery from Avie.

Beautifully designed & printed invitations by Jonna Isaac.

and many more… go check each other out.

Thank you so much for all of your support! Your emails and comments have been so encouraging and helpful for me the past few days. I’m uplugging for a bit but I’m excited about returning to Mint on Tueday.

After making so many inspiration boards for our wedding (many of which I couldn’t share here because I did such a bad job remembering where I found the photos!), I thought I might as well make a couple out of our own wedding photos. I’m not quite sure why I wanted to do this, other than it was really kind of fun. And since inspiration boards were where the wedding planning all started, it seemed fitting that that’s how I should end it, too.

It is a little bittersweet to be done with our wedding planning. Despite all the tears (oh yes, there were tears) it was a lot of fun and was the biggest project we’ve pulled off yet!

As soon as I finish writing it, I’m going to have a “wedding graduate” post for A Practical Wedding. If there were two things that were most important about our wedding planning, it was that we only spent time and money on things we enjoyed, and practicality was a major priority. I’ll leave it at that for now, and I’ll let you know when my “two cents” are up on APW.

Have a great weekend!

[photos all taken by either harry taylor, amy jones, or myself]

Wedding quick links:

• Save the dates

• Invitations

• Rehearsal dinner invitations

• Bridal shower invitations

• Programs & direction cards

• Guest book

• Pew Cards (and here)

• Birdseed bags (with template)

• Flowers

• Dress, jewelry & veil

• Getting organized (with download)

• Paper & printing

• Tearing paper & gocco tips

• Our photographer

• All wedding posts

a few recent favorites, from a few favorite blogs:

via apartment therapy

photo by lara rossignol via sfgirlbybay

photo by kerstin reilemann, via decor8

photo by wai lin tse via design sponge

photo from Marie Claire Maison via the Style Files

photo by wai lin tse

via luphia loves

photo by mark lund via mustard and sage

I’ll be getting more wedding inspiration and ideas right up until the day of, I know it. Yesterday I caught up on what seemed like 200 posts I’ve missed from Style Me Pretty, and I loved these double silhouettes (maybe a last minute addition for our rehearsal dinner invites?) and this veil shot by A Bryan Photo, which I kind of want to stage because my veil is the best. The Best. Oh I am excited.

I’m taking tomorrow off from blogging, and heading back to my hometown to work on wedding stuff. I’ll be bringing this collage along with me to share my ideas with our vendors – some of whom are friends of my family (lucky us!).

Our reception location is sort of open-air (although covered) and on the beach, so I like the idea of laid back, organic floral arrangements. I also want to bring in some patterns (maybe in the wedding programs) and since there is a long wooden walkway down to the beach I’d love to set up luminaries. Although I originally wanted to do many normal-sized cakes on cake stands instead of a big wedding cake, the size of our wedding and expense of all those cake stands started to add up. Instead, we’re going to have a simple cake like the one above.

Both the bridesmaids and groomsmen will wear gray, with light blue or pale aqua ties for the guys (we’ve found some great deals on suits at Target). The flower girls will wear a pale aqua too, and the ring bearers will be in khaki pants, white shirts, and blue ties – simple and easy. And I hope some of the ladies will be in yellow shoes!

[Unfortunately I've lost track of the source for the top left photo (any help here would be appreciated!) The bouquet and table are from Mary Beth and Otis' beautiful wedding, via Snippet and Ink, and photographed by Studio Nouveau. I found the cake on The Knot, and the photograph is by Union Photography. The save the date is our own, the gray dress and yellow shoes are J.Crew, and the aqua earrings and dress are from Anthropologie. (I altered the color of the dress in photoshop to fit my color scheme). The suit is from Banana Republic, the hair flower is from Muscari, and the luminaries were photographed by Betty Schlueter.]