Location, location, location!

365 days. Yep, that's right, we are getting married one year from today! Today we are also signing the contract and paying the deposit on our ceremony and reception location (visit their website: Lake Natoma Inn). Here are a few pictures of the location for your viewing pleasure.

This is the gazebo area where our ceremony will be held:




And, this is the Pavilion, where our reception will be held:



We are very excited to have our wedding and reception at Lake Natoma Inn! The gazebo ceremony will be wonderful (unless it rains - and if it does then the ceremony will be held inside the Pavilion, table side). The Pavilion is gorgeous with the draped ceilings and crystal chandeliers AND they have new, beautiful carpet (that is not shown in the picture above) but it really adds to the rooms beauty.

The Lake Natoma Inn is in old town Folsom, CA. The Inn is a hotel ... which just adds to how perfect a location this is for a wedding ... it has everything!

Monograms!

For the past few weeks I've been obsessing with monograms for our wedding. I've searched through thousands of images and websites ... and I even experiemented with creating my own with PowerPoint. I discovered Jenn Johnston, a graphic artist/photographer/designer (you can see her work at: Jenn Johnston Photodesign). These are the monograms she made for us:







Here are a few that I designed in PowerPoint:











We haven't made any decisions as to which ones we are going to use, yet. We L-O-V-E the chalkboard design that Jenn Johnston made for us SO we will definitely plan on using that one.

Possible ways to use our monograms:
Envelope labels/stickers
Personalized stamps
Personalized aisle runner
Programs
Seating chart
Wedding invitations
Engagement invitations
Personalized napkins
Favor tags

We finally finalized the date!

Welcome to my wedding planning blog! I recently started a blog for all things food (you can visit it here: The Jesse's Recipe & Baking Blog: A few of my favorite things)... it's still a new project for me so check back often for new additions. I then decided that this would be also be a great way for me to convey our wedding planning ideas to our wedding party, families and friends! Check back often ... I've got a thousand and one ideas running around in my head ... I'll probably be updating this often!

And now ... a little blurb about how we picked our wedding date!

Originally Jon & I had talked about getting married in June 2009 (Jon is a teacher and wanted to be able to go on our honeymoon immediately after the wedding) but after a few long discussions we decided to change it to March 2009 because I didn't want to have a summer wedding in the hot Sacramento valley AND I don't care if we have to wait to go on our honeymoon (since we are having a March wedding we might be able to go on our honeymoon during spring break next year - otherwise we will just wait until next summer when schools out of session).

We decided on a spring wedding and chose March 21st (here's a little tidbit about why we picked that date: my favorite number is three and if you add up all the digits in 03.21.09 and then divide it by 5 you get 3, 0+3+2+1+0+9=15/5=3 ... March is the month that we started dating ... and last, but not least, March 21st symbolizes the first full day of spring and spring stands for new beginnings, exactly what this next chapter in our lives will be). When we went to visit our ceremony and reception location the on-site coordinator told us that the 21st was already reserved SO we changed the date, again, to the following Saturday, the 28th (which is still "early spring" and in March - so we were okay with that). It was a relief to finally have a date and a location.

THEN on our way to San Diego for spring break the wedding coordinator from our venue called to let us know that the 21st had opened back up - the other couple BACKED OUT of their contract! Jon & I jumped on the chance to have the 21st back AND now we are happy to announce that we will be getting married on March 21st, 2009 - and NO we don't anticipate any other date changes - at least we hope not, we already have a graphic artist working on our monograms so I hope we don't have to make any more changes!

Now that we have an "official" date and the venue booked thats two less things for me to obsess about (most of you know how obsessive I can be) ... now I'm obsessing with our monograms ... we should have those by the end of this week!