Calendars

I love this time of year for all the obvious reasons (joy, peace, Christmas tidings, goodwill, holiday carols, an abundance of sweets, days off of school, after-Christmas sales...)

But this is also the season of "best of" and "worst of" lists - LOVE THEM - and getting new calendars. Yes, plural. Calendars. Love LOVE them. I usually end up with three or four different ones because I can never decide on just one.

Here are just a few calendars that could rock your walls all year long...

2010 Typography Calendar

The Art of...

A Year at the Fair


CamilleBellet

Baby Zoo Animals

Calendar of Silly Holidays

Avie Designs Calendar

What type of calendar do you tend to go with? A traditional hanging wall version? Day by day desk? Perpetual calendar? Or have you given up the paper calendar totally in lieu of your BlackBerry? (NavyGuy...)

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Photo Diary: Thursday

NavyGuy, breakfasting in the early morning, after taking our truck to the car shop. Yes, the donut is pink :)
Puppy preparations are in full swing. NavyGuy's parents sent us a little care package with this fabulous Ikea leash holder.
NavyGuy checking his computer game status the news of the world before heading off for a full day on base.

A balanced lunch is the key to a productive afternoon.

A DIY project in the works.Mom's brilliant suggestion of where - and how - to store a couple of my aprons. Close to the kitchen, but not right out in the main room. And a great use for the key holder that Sister brought me back from her college study abroad in Venezuela.

The remainder of the day mostly revolved around television, and I just didn't have the heart to photograph myself, sprawled across the couch, mindlessly absorbing Glee, How I Met Your Mother, and Top Chef... all as a warm-up for tonight's main event - Jim and Pam's wedding on The Office!!!! So you'll have to just imagine that image... Happy Thursday :)

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Quick and Dirty Wedding Recap...

Woo hoo!!! Our photographer has all of our wedding photos online... so, you know what that means... time to start the wedding weekend recaps! (Cuz it's not like I should be using my time to find a job, work on grad school homework, or clean something...)

To begin, we're going to do a nuts and bolts recap; if you have no desire to suffer through excruciating detail and a million photos over the next few weeks as I relive my our wedding weekend, then this post is for you. It'll hit just the very bare minimum highlights you need to see to get the essence of the day...

I will preface that all of these photos are from Dave Watkins, of Narella Studio in Lake Mills, WI. I will rave about him more in a later post, but seriously - if you are getting married anywhere in the state of Wisconsin, seek this man out. Demand that he clear his schedule and photograph your wedding, because you will NOT be disappointed. If you want more info about him, please check out his website here. He was super accommodating and put together a special site for me to get photos from so I could post them on this blog, and I promised him I'd give him some shout-outs in return :)

And, without further adieu... our wedding day.

The boys arrive (looking like the cast of Ocean's 11).

Grandpa and I start our big entrance.

And the deal, is sealed.

There was cake.

There was dancing. (Rock on ladies!)

There was love.

Can we be done now?

Stay tuned for the in-depth recaps (starting with the debacle at the nail salon) coming soon!

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WeddingBee Love!!!

Yea!!! I uploaded a photo to the WeddingBee gallery, where readers can share their wedding photos, and they picked mine as a Gallery Photo of the Day!!!!

Check it out here - I'm so excited! And even better, it's a photo showing off my super fly bridesmaids :)

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Sneak Peeks!

I'm still working on unpacking and organizing life around here. Marines #1 and 2 trashed the place while we were gone, so along with unpacking, doing laundry, and sorting wedding gifts, I got to clean the kitchen and livingroom. The boys also used push pins to secure blankets as makeshift window treatments in the livingroom, and moved a scary piece of exercise equipment (which seems to resemble some sort of back stretcher?), into the office, blocking the doorway and access to my craft table. They'll be dealt with appropriately tomorrow...

In the mean time, our fabulous photographer Dave posted a few photos from the wedding on his facebook page. Here are a couple of my favorites so far!

All photos from Dave Watkins at Narella Studio.

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DIY Table Numbers

Wedding Madness!!!! I don't know how much time I'm going to have to show off the wedding details before the big day (we're down to less than two weeks - AGHHHH), but I promise anything that doesn't get posted before May 23rd, will simply be fodder for more extensive (and better written) posts after the shindig is over.

I just cannot wait on this project however, so I've put all the wedding tasks aside for the moment to showcase one of my favorite details so far - the table numbers. I know, I know - really minor in the larger scheme of things, but I saw a cool idea on theknot.com almost two years ago, and I was hooked immediately.

The table numbers are basic numbers - 1, 2, 3, 15, and so on. But on each number, there is a photo of myself and one of NavyGuy at the corresponding numerical age. In other words, the peeps who are seated at Table 3, get to view cutey pictures of us at that age! I'm psyched - it was a chance to show off more photos (which everyone loves at a wedding), without going through the technical headache of trying to put together a slide show, etc.

I wanted the table numbers to still compliment our color scheme and the general classy-ness of the tables, so I started with dark brown tents.

The paper is 6"x6". In order to attach the two pieces at the top, I simply made one sheet a smidge longer, so I could fold it underneath and attach it to the other side. (TWP and I worked on this during our "Flip That Room" extravaganza.) We also added a piece of dark brown ribbon on the inside of the tent, so that they wouldn't slide open too far or fall over.

(Don't you love my professionally edited photo to show you where the ribbon goes?)

I printed all of the photos I wanted to use in black and white (it took days to go through the boxes of photos that both my and NavyGuy's mom have saved since our childhood... and even longer to estimate our ages in many of the photos!). Color photos would also work fine, but I wanted them to look a little more subdued. The photos were cropped to 5"x3.5". I printed the actual table numeral on cream paper, and opted to make all of the layouts the same, regardless of whether the photo was horizontal or vertical. The cream paper was trimmed to 5.5" square, and the photo was layered on top.

Here you can see a variety of the first step before we attached everything to the brown table tent. (Yes, that's obviously me in the photos - and yes, I really was that cute. God only knows what's happened since then.)
And here's toddler NavyGuy!

We attached all of the cream papers to the brown tents, and boom! Table numbers that will hopefully help our guests find their seats, and entertain them while they're there. I do pity the poor folks that have to sit at tables 9 through 14...

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E-Pics

We're famous! Check this out.

Let me know which ones are your favorites (and feel free to view the full selection here).

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Strike a Pose (and Stop Chatting)

NavyGuy and I have countless admirable skills. The list could go on for days. Taking nice photos however, - individually or together - would not make that list. I tend to either blink or produce attractive faces such as this:

NavyGuy, unless he's being poked in the side or tickled, reverts to a mixture of distaste, stoicism, or sheer irritation at the photography process a'la...

I'll spare you the painful photos of the two of us together; the long-standing joke between us is that we have no tangible evidence of our relationship because we have so few decent photos. With that background, you can understand my obsession with making sure we have a plethora of outstanding wedding photographs.

So, as part of our wedding photography package, we nabbed an engagement photo session. Not only was I thrilled to have more frame-worthy shots of us, but I was anxious to meet our photographer before the big day. After having witnessed firsthand the headaches that Sister went through with her photographers on the day of the wedding (which can only be blamed on their lack of listening to what she had requested), I wanted to make sure that NavyGuy and I "clicked" with our picture-taker (whoa, totally just caught the pun, luv it). Would we be comfortable enough in front of him to act lovey? Or would it be awkward and feel staged?

What a relief when approximately four snaps into our session, I knew my gut had been right about this guy. Dave Watkins, our photographer of Narella Studio, rocks. He's young, he's fun, he gives directions, but not too many, he lets you play in front of the camera and captures the moments between the couple without being intrusive, and the three of us hit it off. I feel 100% confident that our session is going to yield some beautiful photos of NavyGuy and I - beautiful because Dave chose only flattering lighting they'll show the real us and how happy we make each other.

We began our photos in the Capital building in downtown Madison, then ventured down some side streets to Monona Terrace. Dave claimed we were naturals in front of the camera! (And to think I doubted my modeling potential.) Apparently our only downfall is that we talk too much! (Shocking.) The photos should be up sometime by the end of January (Dave and his wife just had their first baby - a little girl - so he's a bit pressed for time), and I'll be sure to share once they're available. Mostly I'm just glad the day went smoothly and we enjoyed ourselves (and that I was able to cover up the enormous blemish under my right eye with superstrength concealer - don't get me started about that drama - god bless photoshop).

I also have to give a big shout out to NavyGuy. He hates getting his photograph taken, and didn't admit to me until the shoot was over that it had been the thing he was most nervous about while home for the holidays! You could have never known, based on how calm and cool he was during the photos. Makes me remember the lengths to which this guy will go to make me happy :)

Since I don't have our photos yet to share, I figured I better find some pretty pics for you all to look at! Check out this collection of the Best Wedding Photos of 2008 at JuneBug weddings, and stay tuned for more wedding appointment recaps from the holidays. (They're seriously taking longer to write than expected, but I know some of you out there are wedding-obsessed, so I WILL get to them.)

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Photography Magic

I wanted to show off a couple of the photographs that NavyGuy took on our wilderness adventure yesterday. He has a fairly fancy camera and has been playing around with an editing process called HDR (High Dynamic Range Imaging). HDR is basically a technique that combines the best lit parts of the same photo, to produce a more true to life image. In order to do this, you have to take three photos of the same shot, each with a specific different light exposure (clearly, I'm not a photographer, so I apologize for the less than technical explanation). For instance, here are the original photographs NavyGuy took of a view from Mt. Erie.


You can see in the photos that each looks different; parts of each photo are darker and lighter. Regardless of which picture you look at, none of them show what NavyGuy and I were really seeing as we stood on top of the mountaing - HDR is way to alleviate that. Check out the photograph once the HDR technique has been applied and the best pieces of each photo have been compiled.Awesome, right? (By clicking on the photo, you should be able to open up a larger image.) In this photo, all of the shadows that showed up in the original images have been omitted, and you can see almost exactly what NavyGuy and I saw :) I included two other HDR photos from yesterday as well:
This is a photo of cliffs in Puget Sound. (If the photo hadn't been HDR'ed either the sky or the water would be significantly darker and less clear.)

Here's a view of the forest atop Mt. Erie.

Any votes on which photo we should turn into a large poster for above our bedroom fireplace?

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