Something You MIGHT Not Think About...

All right. I’ve never tried to deny that I might be just a LITTLE bit, just the teeny-weeny-est little bit, obsessive. Or Type A personality – whatever you want to call it. I don’t deny it, instead I wear it proudly like a badge of honor. Yes, I’m obsessive over the tiniest of details that most people will NEVER even notice…but it makes ME feel better. And let’s be honest…isn’t it all about me? It’s my big day after all…if it makes me feel better to do things a certain way, even though it’s more difficult to do them that way, isn’t it ok?

Well, keeping in mind that it’s ALSO Mr. CC’s big day too…he plays a major role as well. (slap my hand for going off and forgetting that there are TWO people getting married in October…)

Anyway, back to my obsessive tendencies. I think that I threw Mr. CC for a loop the other day when I casually happened to mention that I had found some really cool stamp options for us to use on our STDs and wedding invitations. I didn’t really expect that he would comment, but as always, he keeps me on my toes, and caught my brief mention of stamp options and drug me back to that comment. I was already on to the next thing that happened in my day…The conversation went something like this:

“What do you mean stamps?”

“You know, stamps. For the Save the Dates. There were some really cool ones that I’m thinking about using – if I can find them. If not, I can always order them online.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You mean that we have to have special STAMPS?”

I have to be honest here and admit that I really didn’t get why this was a shock to him. OF COURSE there are special stamps! You don’t just want to use regular-jane-doe-everyday-use stamps for your wedding stationary! Oh, the horrors!

After he finished laughing at me with me, he quickly got on the special stamp train, especially since there’s no outrageous extra cost to getting these stamps. Other than a little frustration to finding them at your local postal store. Check out the options that I found. Aren’t they cool?

So cute for weddings...

For the Walt Disney lover inside us all...

Woudln't these be perfect for a destination wedding somewhere tropical?

My sentiments exactly...CELEBRATE!

Very pretty.

What wedding invitation wouldn’t be “dressed up” a little bit with these?
Now, I’ll admit to having a few scruples in this Cotton Candy head of mine. I saved the best for last. I had already seen these stamps when Mr. CC mentioned them, and I sort of figured that these would be a shoe in choice for him. What are they you ask?
I’ll show you…
Yep, Purple Heart stamps. These were PERFECT for our Save the Dates. As soon as I saw them, I thought about how neat it would be to use them. You see, Mr. CCC is a Marine, and he actually was awarded a Purple Heart for his service/sacrifice for our great country. He will tell you that it was no big deal, that he was just doing “his job,” but to me, a Purple Heart is a really big deal. He has it on our desk shelf, along with other pictures from his service that he’s proud to show off, and he also carried Purple Heart plates on his truck. So what better way to “dress” our STDs than with something that honors the veterans that we know and love? There’s nothing more perfect in my mind.

Then came the problem of finding them. I guess that I was mistaken in thinking that purchasing these stamps would be a simple matter of stopping at my local USPS office to pick them up. Mr. CC asked that I get a few extra for him to keep, so I was looking to buy 4 sheets of stamps from the post office. Unfortunately, after standing in line for well over 20 minutes, I got up the counter to discover that they were all out of the Purple Heart stamps at that particular location.

Yep, 20 minutes…

So I was a little smarter than the USPS…I went home and got online to their store, which can be found here and bought the stamps online. It seems a little odd to do things that way, but I got the exact ones that I wanted to get, I didn’t have to wait in any other lines just to find out that they didn’t have them, and I only had to pay $1 for the processing/shipping. Easy, breezy. That’s Miss CC’s style!

So there you have it. We picked out our stamps for our STDs that mean something to us personally, and I feel (obsess much, I know) that they dress up the envelope a bit and make it more special. As soon as the stamps come in and the STDs go out in the mail, I promise that I’ll show off my finished STDs….obsessive me just wants to wait until they’re actually in the mail before showing them off on my blog!

Did you choose special stamps for your STDs/invitations too? Did you have to jump through hoops to find them, or was it relatively easy?

Obesess much?

I saw the coolest picture on wedding bee a few weeks ago. This bride had made tissue paper pomanders to spruce up the décor at her wedding several months before I started reading Wedding Bee, and was asking what to do with wedding stuff like that after the wedding. In her post, she included pics of the pomanders, and I fell in love with them. And I don’t mean just a little bit, but the whole way off the deep end.

For about a week all that I could think about were those pomanders and how to make them and what I would make them out of, how I would hang them, how they would look at my venue, what colors of tissue paper that I would use…are you getting the point that I was a LITTLE obsessed? Or maybe you would (correctly) say that I was obsessed MUCH? Yeah, I admit it. I’m proud of it even.

It’s really all that I could think of. I had thought of using colored Japanese lanterns, but the thought of trying to match paper lanterns to the colors in my head, much less that meant that I would have to CHOOSE colors…it was just too much. But flower pomanders were gorgeous, and when hung from above, I could not tell in the picture that these were not real flowers.
I started pricing flowers online that week too, so this could have been some of the obsession factor!

Anyway, once I showed the picture to a few different people and made up my mind that I would have something like that at my ceremony site, I set about finding out how to make them. I re-read the post that had started it all, and I followed her links to her other posts about constructing the pomanders. Then I also went searching on the internet and found several tutorials, even a few video tutorials on utube.com that helped. Martha Stewart (god love her) also had several methods to use and tips to try. After compiling them all, it was really bugging me one night as I was lying in bed about how real they would look. And if they didn’t look all that real, then would they look more real from further away, as in once they were hung high and all?

I got a little obsessed about it, and decided that I would make one right then and there. No matter that I was beat-assed tired. No matter that Mr. CC thought that I should just lay down and relax. No matter that I couldn’t find ONE SINGLE PIECE of tissue paper during my crazy 15 minute search of our closet. Didn’t matter that I didn’t actually HAVE any of those fuzzy pipe thingys that you use in arts and crafts as a kid. I would make do.

And I did. Make do, that is. I ended up making a glittered (yep, you read that right) tissue paper flower while in bed that night. I used a piece of a scrunchy Christmas bow to tie it off in place of the fuzzy thingy, and yes, white tissue paper with multi-colored glitter flakes was the ONLY piece of tissue paper that I could find. But it was all worth it when I saw the end result…

It was NOT beautiful.

But that was ok, because I could see enough to know that it was not pretty because of the glitter paper. And the poor folding job of mine. I could see past all of that to know that with the right paper and a little more trial and error on my part, I could make these look like flowers from afar. I could see it clearly in my mind how it would look at our ceremony site and I was hooked.

Has anyone else ever gotten an idea in their head and you’re just not sure that you can make it work for what you’re wanting to do? And then when all of the pieces come together and it work out, it’s just almost magical? That’s what these tissue paper flowers are like to me. They are magical. They are magical not because they’re so great, but they offered me a cheap (if a little labor intensive) project that can replace a very expensive piece of my budget. And they follow the theme that I’m working for – simple, elegant and romantic. They give me flowers without costing what flowers cost. I L-O-V-E them!

I am expecting the paper lanterns in the mail today. Once I can see how it’s all going to come together, I will do a post on the whole project step-by-step. Just in case anyone else out there is as crazy as I am! And then, you can love them just as much as I do! Well, maybe not THAT much…