Just in case you were wondering, I’m still SUPER tired. I’m leaving in the morning for a show but I got everything done so I could reward myself with a little bloggy-blogging. It’s been another insane week…but I squeezed in a lot of wedding stuff and got by with a little help from my friends!

(Thank me later for that one.)

On Wednesday, I lured Jammer and Sissy over to my house with desperate cries of “MY WEDDING IS 45 DAYS AWAY” …and that didn’t work so then I sent them this picture:

And they came running.

Before I go any further, I am tagging this post a “USEFUL POST” because I will give you useful information and not just pictures of my face or internet memes.

So. A while ago I decided that on each of the tables I wanted a bottle of wine with a label on it. Not a table number, per say, but just a bottle with a personal label or message or something on it. If you haven’t been to Wedding Chicks yet, you really need to. Even if you’re not getting married– there are some ridiculously good ideas on that site that will come in handy any time you want to show off in front of your friends. They have a few templates for monograms and I found one that was perfect for our wedding. I would love to tell you that I put a lot of work into it… but I didn’t.

I simply downloaded the PDF file and messed with it on paint.

#notapro.jpg

But it totally worked! If you haven’t seen it yet, look HERE.

I decided that I would use these as labels for the wine on each table. We are doing our own alcohol (beer and wine, you lushes) so I decided to only label the bottles that will be seen instead of all 7,000,000 million of them. I looked around for a well reviewed, tried and true recipe for getting the original labels off of the bottles and found THIS one. Off to work I went.

The directions said to let the labels soak in a bathtub overnight with a cup (or…ahem…five) of Oxi-Clean. I went to Harris Teeter, got mad at how expensive Oxi-Clean was and got their knock off kind:

And filled my bathtub with luke warm water. (I was afraid of running warm water and doing something weird to the wine itself.)

The next direction said to let those puppies soak overnight (Atleast eight hours.) So I did.

(***Aren’t you proud of how clean my bathtub is?!***)

So cut to eight (maybe eleven) hours later. I’ve bribed the girls over to my house and we are drinking cocktails and talking about wedding stuff and I decide it’s time to remove the labels. I am under the impression that they will slide away gracefully, leaving me to simply dry off the bottles and do what I want with them. That’s not the way it works.

I don’t have any pictures of this part of the process, but basically I spent the next hour or so scraping off the labels with a fingernail and then taking my “ewwie” toothbrush (“ewwie” means ‘Don’t put this in your mouth I scrub the grout with it’ just so you know) and scrubbing the remaining goo off. Eventually everything came off but it left a weird ring of white along the top of the bottles that really bugs me. I can’t seem to get it off! Nothing is wrong with the wine itself or the bottle for that matter– but cosmetically it irks me.

Or it did. Because LOOK AT HOW GREAT THE LABELS CAME OUT:

Aren’t those bitchin’!? Don’t get on my case about my whack cutting job on the bottom of that left bottle. It’s unique and beautiful and I had never used fancy scissors before.

Here’s another picture:

If you look way close you can see the white line at the top of the bottles that I’m talking about. I might give it a swipe with “goo gone” to see what happens***…but otherwise I LOVE them. Not too serious, not too cutesy. I think I drove Jammer and Sissy crazy by going on and on about how proud I was of my accomplishments.

And that wasn’t all we got done. I’ve posted little snippets of these, but Jammer finished the final version of the bridesmaids’ hair accessories!

Sissy gave me a quick updo so we could see what they looked like and they are BEEEEAAAUTTTIIIFFUUULLL:

Right?! ACK! I wish the camera did them justice. Under the warm lights at Saint Thomas they are going to be fantastic.

AND AND AND! I found this tutorial for doily lanterns and my sissy got inspired and decided to take a stab at it. I found a really neat set of doilies for next to nothing on Etsy and let my sissy have her way with them:

And-this-is-what-she-came-up-with-are-you-kidding-me.

Seriously. Is that not totally beautiful? Way more intricate than the tutorial and hung upside down like that it looks like a blooming rose or a lotus flower or something RAD!

So we got tons more done than I thought we would and I decided to call it a night when I started looking at all of our crafts and getting really weepy like a big girl. It’s happening. It’s coming together. It’s forty five days away.

What do you think?!

…We love you but we’re going to sleep now.

***PS: Goo gone worked like a charm on the wine bottles. Problem solved. Now I love everything with all of my heart.

***PPS: I’ve had a few questions about our labels so let me elaborate. I sent our weddingchicks.com made monogram to kinkos online, (as a .pdf file so that it would print clearly) and then the sweet boys over at kinkos printed them on label paper. I cut them with ‘fiskar edging scissors’ and then applied them to the bottles of red wine. We are currently only doing red bottles because they don’t need to be chilled and I’m not sure how the labels will hold up against water. I’ll do a tutorial on the white wine bottle labels soon!

Now can I go to sleep?!