The Balboa Inn

On January 17, 2009, after months of planning and nearly SIX years of dating, my husband and I arrived at the Balboa Inn in Newport Beach, CA to get married.

Table Numbers.

I made the table numbers, Mike’s aunt Georgia made the centerpieces and arranged the flowers for us.

Centerpieces.

Funny story: my hair and makeup artist bailed on me the day of my wedding, so we had to go to a nearby salon. They were so nice to us, I’ll never forget how wonderful they were.

Getting ready.

My mother in law hated my shoes, but I loved my “something(s) blue!”

My blue flats. I'm ready to party!

My mom putting on my veil.

I LOVED my birdcage veil.

Mike and I decided to take pictures before the ceremony, so here he is “seeing me for the first time.”

I believe he said, 'Oh, wow.'

We went and took pictures on the beach…

That bald head just catches all the sunlight.

And then walked back to get married.

One of my favorite pictures of the day.

My bridesmaids from left to right: good friends Amber and Vanessa and my sister and matron of honor, Teresa.

My father and I.

Getting ready to walk down the aisle.

Mike standing up with his groomsmen, from left to right: Best Man and brother Greg, good friends Jason and Nick.

Taking our vows… we laughed a lot during our ceremony, we were just SO HAPPY! Also, Mike’s grandfather married us.

Clearly we aren't taking this seriously enough.

Our first kiss as a married couple.

You may kiss the bride!

We’re married!

Woo!!

And we lived happily ever after.

There are a LOT more pictures, but I thought I would end it here (we did have a reception!) You can view all of them on my Flickr, or here’s a set of some of my favorites.

I figured that with a wedding scrapbook, I and whomever else was looking at it would get tired of traditional wedding themed pages pretty quick, so I tried to switch up the page themes whenever I could. We had some pictures of the hotel the wedding was at, so I included that on a beach themed page since our wedding was at the beach. I ripped some tan and blue paper to simulate sand and ocean, and decorated with some beach and ocean stickers.

Left Page: I saved some of the paper that I had left over from making my invitations, so I could incorporate it into the scrapbook I knew I would be making. The paper on the journaling is the same paper, arranged in the same way as it was on the invites.
Right Page: My mom helped cut the pictures so that the center one would be framed by the others. It took a bit of expertise, so it’s good that she was there to help.

I wasn’t a big fan of quote stickers before I made the Left page, but once I read that quote I figured it fit perfectly with the pictures I had planned for that page. It reads: “My best and chosen friend, companion, guide, to walk through life, linked hand in hand, two equal loving friends true husband and wife.” I loved how this layout matches even though the two pages are not mirror images of each other.

This layout is a LOT more ambitious than I ever would have attempted myself, but my mom wanted to try it out since I have a LOT of ribbon left over from the wedding, and this page could use it. The elegant feel fit in well with the pictures of the pastor praying and the Best Man reading our selected passages, and I used some religious stickers to highlight that.

Borders aren’t just for the left and right sides of the pages! They can be used to outline titles, which is what I did here. I love the balance of this page, and the colors are beautiful, too. I also tried to steer clear of my wedding’s color scheme as much as I could, a scrapbook full of pool colored pages would start to blur together after a while!

Happy scrapbooking! This album is not even close to being done yet, so keep checking back for more ideas. Be sure to leave any questions in the comments!

(click for bigger pictures)

This page looks really nice, but all I did was crop the photos and tape down the paper and the letters. The letters were cut using a Cricut. Amazing what beautiful paper can do for a page!

I took this layout from one of the Creative Memories idea books my mom had, and added some of my own flair. This page is one of my favorites.

Another layout from Creative Memories. I especially love the stickers on this one!

A fiesta themed page from Creative Memories for our Mexican food rehearsal dinner at El Torito!

So there are some of my favorite pages so far… hopefully soon I can catch up with Daynah!

Everyone I’ve talked to is amazed that I’m making my invitations myself, but really I’ve found it’s not that hard. But then again, I already enjoy crafting and art projects, so this isn’t much of a leap for me. I’m going back this weekend to grab the rest of the envelopes for the invites. Once I’m done with them, I can post a tutorial if someone is interested.

Yesterday I went to the Los Angeles Flower District to look at flowers for the wedding with Mike’s mom and aunt. His aunt does really beautiful arrangements for all of the family’s events. I decided on a white scheme filled with tulips, hydrangeas, freesia, lilies, roses, chrysanthemum, eucalyptus and a couple of greeneries I don’t know the name of. We bought some of each and made arrangements when we got home, and they were so beautiful! I’m really excited. My sister has already booked the place for my bridal shower, and this week I’m making reservations for my bachelorette party! Next weekend I’m going dress shopping, which I’m not looking forward to. x.x Wish me luck! Only 209 days to go!

On Mother’s Day, the sibs and I went over to my mom and dad’s house for breakfast. I was dogsitting Chico at the time for Mike’s mom and dad, so I brought him, and Chris brought Lizzy over. After breakfast my dad let Lizzy and Chico out in the backyard to go potty. Chico darted for the bushes and emerged with a field mouse in his mouth. Before my dad could stop him, he ran inside the house and dropped the mouse at my feet. It was still alive and ran under the couch. Pandemonium ensues. We try to get the mouse out from under the couch, but to no avail. He has made his home under there. Eventually we send Chico in to try and scare the guy out, so we can throw him back in the backyard, but instead he catches the guy again and breaks his neck, and leaves him on the carpet and prances away proudly.

Happy mother’s day!

Emo Chico

Lizzy looks very apprehensive about Chico.

Awww.

Maz came over last night and helped us take pictures for our save the date postcards. Here are the results:

The plates have “Save the date January 17, 2009″ on them written in chocolate syrup. That was my original idea, hehe.

This is the one I ended up using.

After the inside ones, we went outside and took some pictures.

This one is trippy lol.

I really liked the outside ones, and I think I may still find a way to use those. Thanks to Maz for taking such awesome pictures.

I found this article When Brides Don’t Squeal Enough today and I couldn’t agree more. When I was first engaged I was definitely not super excited about it. Mostly I was overwhelmed, anxious and scared. Everyone around me began asking if we’ve set a date yet (within days of the engagement!), what the theme would be, where we would have it, etc. Honestly I hated (and sometimes still do) talking about the impending wedding. It’s such a daunting task, sometimes it feels like it’s looming on the horizon like a thunderstorm rather than one of “the best days of my life.” I seriously felt like something was wrong with me because I wasn’t elated about the wedding. I know now that it’s just part of my personality; I hate being the center of attention, I hate huge parties, and that’s essentially what a wedding is. Unfortunately, it’s extremely important to my fiance to have his (large) family at his wedding, so this is something we’re going to have to get through. But at least we’ll be doing it together.

I have been blogging, just not here as much. I have a feeling that eventually I may abandon this domain (though I love it!) in the future for livejournal. Although it’s not as customizeable (for me) the community feeling is great and I also like the privacy I can get there.

And I can’t believe it’s already time for me to renew my domain! 2 years this has been my home… I need to do that soon.

Later!

Here is a profile view… TONS of curls.

You can see my makeup here, too. I also had some poofy kind of hair going in the front. Jessica Alba’s 2006 VMA Red Carpet look was my inspiration.

CURLS.

So that was Saturday. It was really fun, but also really hot and exhausting. I’m just glad it’s over The next day Mike and I spent time with his family, since they’re all from out of town. On Sunday night my neice, Amber had a baby! His name is Gregory Charles, he’s 5 lbs 1 oz and 16 inches long. He’s a tiny little thing, but the doctors think he’ll be OK. Then on Monday Mike had to work, but I went to ANIME EXPO with Vanessa, Maz and his girlfriend, Amber. Ahhh! Unfortunately, I’m not as into manga and anime and I used to be when I first started going, but I still really look forward to AX every year. This was my 6th year going (since 2001! I haven’t missed a year) and while we were there we got to meet some people from a (now defunt) forum that Vanessa and I used to frequent back in 2001-2002. We’ve all kept in touch and to finally meet them after all this time was amazing. Shout out to Jake, Ryan, Ricky (who likes to be called Cid ), and Ian! Then that night Mike, Vanessa and I went and saw The Devil Wears Prada. It was good!
Then on Tuesday I cleaned my room and burned off some creative energy:

I recovered my bulletin board that I did in 6th grade. The tacs aren’t sticking in too well, but the anime/Disney pins at the bottom are doing just fine. I should have put less stars on the ribbons up top. There’s no room to stick anything in underneath the ribbon now x.x;; After Mike got off of work we went to his parents house and watched Last Holiday and fireworks. The movie was better. xD
Anyway, time for work, ttyl