I am fond of DIY projects, so I decided to take on designing my own Save the Dates. I had a great idea inspired by Dandelion Bud’s postcards, but the end result didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked:

I printed one out and they looked great at a distant, but even at a comfortable reading distant, you could see the pictures were pixelated and overall quality fuzzy. The poor quality comes from using a less than stellar editing program. Of course, I didn’t notice this at first because I had just spend several hours staring at a computer screen and blamed to fuzziness of that…

The next day, I sent the file to my sister to get her opinion. Was the quality too poor to print? In her brutally honest fashion (which is exactly what I was looking for), I got a resounding “Yes!”

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I am a AAA member, and one of the perks of membership is receiving Via, a bi-monthly travel magazine. Honestly, I have chucked the magazine into recycling every time I have gotten it… until today. It caught my attention this time around because I saw “Mendocino Getaway” on the front cover and beautiful Mendocino, CA is where we are planning to go for our honeymoon.

From flickr.com

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I’m not really one of those women that dreamed about my wedding day since I was 6 years old, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a fantasy dream wedding. You know, the wedding you would want if money were no object and you didn’t have any real restrictions…

One element of my dream wedding that I do get to have is an evening candlelit wedding overlooking a lake.

photo from cpyangrealty.com

I saw an episode of Whose Wedding Is This Anyway? where the couple had fireworks, and I thought, I WANT FIREWORKS! I had visions of fireworks reflecting in the lake at the end of our reception.

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Our venue, the Lake Merritt Sailboat House in Oakland, CA, has concrete stairs leading up to the clubroom where our wedding will be. As a DIY kinda gal, I have decided to make my own luminaria bags to line the stairs and walkway, something like this:

This was the best website with the “technical” know-how to create beautiful luminarias, but this is a pretty straightforward DIY craft. You’ll see relatively expensive luminaria kits, but buying your own paper lunch bags, candles, and getting sand from a local park make this a very inexpensive idea to add pizzazz to your wedding decor. You can even use them indoors (and we plan to)!

To add a special touch to my lumniaria bags, I will outlining the cut-out design with copper paint to bring in our colors and help create an even warmer glow (our colors are copper with accents of red, burgundy, and burnt orange). For safety, I will be using LED candles since the bags will be left outside unattended.

I haven’t quite worked out the design, but I always find it amazing what you can do with scissors, some paper lunch bags, sand, and candles!