It's my lucky day!!

What a fun and incredibly lucky day! I just learned that I won two giveaways today!

First is a very pretty hairpiece from Flourish by Lillie given away by our fantastic photographer Abbey Hepner.

Check it out here! So pretty with the feathers and the lovely small vintagey broach...plus just a touch of veiling in the center. Mmm... I'm not sure what I'm doing with my hair on my wedding day, but if I don't work the hairpiece into the wedding, then perhaps I'll use it for the engagement photos. I'm not sure, but either way it's so pretty!

Amazingly I also won Amy Atlas' giveaway for the cutest Williams Sonoma gingerbread house bunt pan. How cute is this!?:


I'm ridiculously excited to have my name on Amy Atlas' blog since she's my "job hero" (lawyer turned dessert stylist - I mean really, that's amazing!) and I have a big fat crush on her.

Also, on the job hero front, if I could make a job from wrapping people's gifts for them, I would. Then I'd be my own job hero. (?) I finally have all my Christmas gifts wrapped and ribboned and fancied up. Here are some of the prettier ones:




I'm madly in love with the red and turquoise combination, if you couldn't tell. Also, that little squirrel atop a present all wrapped in woodsy pinecone paper is adorable!


And sometimes when you keep your hot glue gun on the table so it's handy, and you can't figure out how to attach a giant sparkly star, you just glue it right onto the present. :)

I'm certain there are times when I actually spend more on the wrapping than on the gift, but it's how I show my love. :)

I have a tree!

Ok, so it's not *my* tree, but I store my uncle's fake Christmas tree in my basement. We've had some rains in Seattle. Like, a lot of rain. So, I put on some rain boots and waded (is that a word?) around in the 6 inches of water in my basement to save what I could. Not that there's much to save - most everything's up on blocks down there because it floods every year, but not to this degree. Long story short, the fake Christmas tree had to come upstairs. My uncle got a real tree this year = I get to have a tree my last year as a bachelorette (or something.) So here's my "bachelorette tree."


As you can see in the following very helpfully labeled photo (taken without flash so you can see the pretty glowy), the cat approves:

Oh Christmas...

Every year I think I'm very organized and "ready" for Christmas. Every year I'm wrong, even when I'm more prepared than the year before. It's some kind of horrible unsolveable riddle. However, this will likely be the last year that I go so crazy at Christmas since, gah, I'll be married next Christmas and there will be other people living with me and they may not appreciate my 2am baking projects.

I'm buried in work, presents, baking, etc. so I probably won't post for a week or so, but I promise I have a good Christmas post coming up! Until then, isn't my cat cute!? Yes, I know, this has nothing to do with anything, but she is pretty, so she fits into the "theme."


She loves it when I'm sick and I hang out on the couch all day in the red down blankie.

Oh, here she is under the tree a few years ago. (I refuse verify if I use post-its to label my gifts instead of actual gift tags. Maybe I do, or maybe that one just happened to land on that present there. I will say that gift tags sometimes mess with my wrapping mo-jo, and I usually know which gift is which based on the ridiculous amount of time I spent wrapping it. In fact, without being able to read the post-its, I remember whose presents those were from 2 years ago. Yes, I'm nuts.)


I won't tell you how many pictures I have of Raya...you may never think of me the same again.

More Bands.

In the last post I told ya'll that we have a band (YAY!). So, in this post I thought I'd talk about wedding bands.

I bought Chris' wedding band on Sunday! Take *that* to-do list. He chose a white gold wedding band from the jeweler where he got my engagement ring. It's perfectly simple. However, I'm still not sure if I want a wedding band. I think it will distract from the gorgeousness that is my ring already, so perhaps I'll do a right hand ring, or none at all...I'm still debating. (Ah, indecision!) I do like that we are using our local West Seattle jewelers, though. It's nice to support local businesses.

Also, look what I made:


I found the tutorial on ruffledblog. Love it! (Usually my china cabinet is full of pretty stuff, but we still haven't finished the floor baseboards behind it, so it sits sad and almost empty. It's pretty ugly (sorry grandma), so I think it misses its pretty things.)

I have to make pretty presents for people and approximately 80 dozen cookies, so I may not post for a while. Heck, I may not sleep for a while...

Hip Hip Hooray!

We have a band!! Great wedding dance bands are crazy expensive. Like break-the-wedding-budget-in-half expensive. I mean, like my-eyes-just-popped-out-of-my-head-and-I-wanna-cry expensive. You get the point. But, I'm insanely lucky and I have some of the awesomest friends ever. (Yes, I'm aware that's not a word.) My ridiculously fantastically amazing friend Dara has agreed to sing at my wedding! Hooray! Here she is with her band in Las Vegas called HNLV:



It would be waaaay too expensive to fly her band to Seattle for our wedding, of course. I mean, really - they book fancy pants hotels/casinos in Vegas. They're big time!

However, we told Dara our budget, and she's offered to round up some folks she knows in local Seattle bands to play for us within our budget. She's making this happen by donating her services as lead singer as our wedding gift! How unbelievably terrific is that!? Plus, not only is she gorgeous and talented, she's a performer, you know?! Of course you know - you can see the video. If you want to hear more, (or you just want to boogie down to her music in private - don't worry, I won't tell) you can find Dara's YouTube page here and her website here.

One more big fat thing crossed off the list! We're looking to hire a pianist for the ceremony as well, but we have a resource for that already. Now we just need to find an officiant and I think almost all of the "biggies" will be crossed off the wedding to-do list. Have I mentioned how much I enjoy crossing things off of lists? I makes lists just to cross things off of them - yep, I'm one of those. This probably doesn't surprise many of you.

Things are really coming together and this is going to be one heck of a dance party!