Caitlyn+Joe: Engaged in the Outer Banks

Caitlyn and Joe are like the Carolyn Scott Photography unofficial fan club presidents. The best part about having fan club presidents is that sometimes they take you to the beach with them and let you stay in their beach house and feed you milkshakes from a grumpy man in the Outer Banks when you take their engagement pictures! The other best part about having fan club presidents is the psychic connections that you can develop with them… like when we played Catch Phrase and Joe said, “I have no idea who this is. She’s an older lady,” and I said, “MERYL STREEP!” and he was like, “YES!” and we won. See? It’s like that with us and Caitlyn and Joe.

Initially we were like, “What’s it going to be like staying at a beach house with these people that we kind of know but don’t really know?” and I was terrified that we’d offend them in some sort of way. And we quickly realized that while we had opposing views on music and firearms, that we all equally loved House of Cards and 24 (except Joe who needs desperately to catch up on all episodes of 24 like right now). I was still worried that we offended them in some sort of way about the music and/or firearms until their friends showed up with Cards Against Humanity and all bets were off. I realized that not only did we not offend them, but you kind of can’t offend them, so that was good. We played games for the rest of the trip, saw lots of dolphins, Carolyn got stung by a jellyfish and the friends told Geoff to pee on it (he didn’t), we caught up on some much needed sleep, and we read a lot (they still read!! like us!!). We like them a lot.

They live in Virginia but are originally from Connecticut and were best friends throughout high school and beyond and eventually became more than friends and eventually got engaged and eventually e-mailed us to ask us to photograph their wedding in Connecticut next year and we were like SURE! and then they eventually e-mailed us back to ask if they could have their engagement session in Corolla in the Outer Banks with the wild horses and we were like OKAY! and then this happened.

Tracy+Colin Get Married at CAM

We get super nice and awesome clients all the time, but we feel like we really kick butt with the ones where we’re like, “YEAH, YOU REALLY GET WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO DO HERE, MAN!” They just trusted us, and we felt the vibes of trust, so in turn we were able to do what we do best, and put orange parking cones on the bridesmaids’ heads.

We met these two a while back. Both are from Pennsylvania (although Tracy grew up in neighboring Ohio), but Tracy roots for the Steelers (yeaaah!! wooooo!)  and Colin roots for the Eagles (booooo… hiss!!!). They told us at that initial meeting at their friends were going to be rowdy, and that there would be a lot of them. They were accurate on both accounts – this was the “youngest” wedding we’ve ever attended, with probably 70-90% of the guests being Tracy and Colin’s age, and it was also quite rowdy (details left out to protect the would-be innocent under probably more normal circumstances). We were also informed closer to the wedding that Tracy’s sister Karen, who is in the military, was Tracy’s maid of honor. However, the military wasn’t permitting her to leave base for the wedding, so they Skyped her in via iPad (she was carried down the aisle and was part of the family pictures).

When I asked Tracy what her dress looked like, she told me it had a “crumb catcher”… which was explained to me that it was fitted but had “a bit of pizazz at the top.” She then proceeded to make large jazz hand motions near her armpits. Turns out that she was totally accurate and her dress was kinda like having permanent jazz hands attached to the top and was awesome and completely gorgeous (Colin, you weren’t too bad yourself as the coral tie probably served as a bit of a jazz hand too). I told Tracy to make sure that she ate things really messily to see if the top did actually catch crumbs. I hope she did. Best part of the entire wedding? Listening to “I Swear” by All-4-One during their first dance and witnessing it cause middle school dance flashbacks for everyone involved. We love youuuu, Tracy and Colin!

Date: June 15, 2013

Ceremony and Reception Venue: CAM Raleigh // Raleigh, NC

First Dance Song: “I Swear” – All-4-One… nothing like a middle school throwback

Tracy’s Occupation: Marketing and public relations for an engineering firm

Colin’s Occupation: Engineer

How You Met: Not at work! We actually work for different companies. We met through friends at Village Draft House and bonded over iTunes playlists.

Interesting Bride Fact: Terrified of cats (sorry, Carolyn + Geoff!) + Edward Scissorhands **Editor’s Note: It’s okay, Tracy, we still love you.

Interesting Groom Fact: Holds New Eagle Elementary School male pull-up record (held overall record until recently beat by a female gymnast)

Honeymoon Destination: Turks + Caicos

Vendor Credits: Officiant – Pastor Lindsey Williams | DJ – Randy Bennett of the Joe Bunn DJ Company | Florist – English Garden | Cake – Sugarland | Caterer – PoshNosh | Hair/Makeup – Belle Trachtenberg of Alter Ego | Coordinator – Jamie Leigh Events | Graphic Design – Lauren Hall

How to Make a Paper Flower Bouquet: By Lauren

**Friends! We are sorry it has been a while since we last updated the blog – we have been on tour! We just finished our Pittsburgh, PA leg (with only 1 session rescheduled due to rain out of 3, which isn’t bad for Pittsburgh) and are back in Durham to hustle, hustle and get a lot of work done before our New York leg starts. :) We’re working on editing our last Raleigh wedding from before we left so it will be a couple of days before we post it, so it’s the perfect time to insert Lauren’s fantastic guest post about how she made super badass paper flower bouquets for her wedding party. We loved these things… LOVED THEM. And so we asked her to do a guest post for us to spread the love and knowledge for the rest of you crafty kids, should you be so inclined. Thank you so much, Lauren, for doing this for us! CUE LAUREN!**

Hi all! This is Lauren from the Nick+Lauren wedding and engagement posts. when Carolyn asked me if I would like to write a post about my bridesmaids’ bouquets, I said “Heck yes! doesn’t everyone want to learn how to make paper flower bouquets?” So, I’m bringing a fun little tutorial for all you future brides or generally crafty people. At the end, you’ll have a great origami flower bouquet.

If you want to see more crafting, feel free to check out my blog. I’ve been putting up some other tutorials and such!

These bouquets were an interesting item. My mom was sad because I didn’t want real flowers, plus she doesn’t quite have enough confidence in my ability to craft. I think she really thought they were going to turn out ugly. I proved her wrong. They did not turn out ugly. And want to know something funny? She now wants me to make her one of her own. Ha.

So how do you make these bouquets?

Inspiration

I saw this bouquet from Capitol Romance and and immediately knew I was going to make it for our wedding.  For those of you who have gotten addicted to Pinterest, you’ve seen bouquets like this before. I found lots of helpful instructions for making the flowers. however, when it came to putting together the bouquet, it was definitely a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants moment.

Supplies

  • (1) 4″ styrofoam ball for each bouquet – $2
  • 1 cardboard yarn cone for each bouquet – $0.50
    For those of you that live in the Triangle area of NC, Scrap Exchange in Durham has these for 25 or 50 cents. They are also available on Etsy.
  • acrylic paint – $0.50-1
  • 2 rolls of thin ribbon – $1
  • tacky glue – $2
  • toothpicks or wood dowels  (optional) – $1
  • origami or scrapbook paper – $20

I picked up one of those 12″x12″ scrapbooking paper sets for $20. I used most of it for the 3 bouquets I made.

Total: $27

Tools

  • paint brush
  • ruler
  • scissors or xacto knife
  • paper clips
  • hot glue gun
  • knitting needle (or something sharp to poke holes in the styrofoam ball)

Time

Not gonna lie. These took a long time. Hours upon hours. The folding was, by far, the most time-consuming portion of it all.

Helpful Hints

  • When you start gluing your ribbon to the cone, make sure to overlap the end. When you finish, overlap again.
  • Glue is gonna soak through the ribbon. Don’t worry about it. It’ll dry clear.
  • If you can enlist someone’s help with folding flowers, do it. Bribe them.
  • Another good way to get the folding over with is to find a show on Netflix or Hulu+ to keep you busy. Might I suggest some classics like Arrested Development, MTV’s The Challenge (super classy) or Toddlers and Tiaras (good way to find some additional uses for your glue gun).
  • My bouquets took a total of 37 flowers each and were a mix of 3″ and 4″ folded paper flowers.
  • I found that I needed to use a paper clip to hold both multiple petals together. The Capitol Romance tutorial doesn’t show that.
  • Start placing your flowers from the top of the bouquet and work your way down. If you can’t fit flowers all the way down to the base, no one’s gonna be able to tell.

Directions

  1. Bouquet base: Glue the styrofoam ball to the cone with your glue gun. 
  2. Bouquet base: Paint the styrofoam ball the color of your choice. It’s okay if paint gets on the cone. 
  3. Bouquet base: Put a thin layer of glue around a 1.5″ wide section of the top of the cone and start attaching the ribbon. 
  4. Bouquet base: Repeat until the cone is completely covered in ribbon.
  5. Flowers: Cut paper into 3″ or 4″ squares. You obviously get more out of the paper if you go with 3″ pieces. You need approximately 200 sheets of paper (Keep it in multiples of 5 for 5 petaled flowers, like mine).
  6. Flowers: Fold all of the sheets of paper and glue together. I followed the Capitol Romance directions.
  7. Flowers: Now here’s where I might differ slightly with the directions above. For the larger flowers, I did use toothpicks, but for the smaller flowers, I didn’t. I just glued the petals together. 
  8. Finishing: Use a small knitting needle or something similar to poke a hole in the styrofoam ball. 
  9. Put some hot glue on the toothpick of the first flower and stick it in the hole. 
  10. Repeat for 2-3 larger flowers.
  11. Start filling in with smaller flowers. For these, I just put some hot glue on the bottom and then glued 2-3 petals to the surrounding large flowers.
  12. Voila! A bouquet that will never die!

Final Product

Check out origami boutonnieres on my blog! http://prettyingmylife.wordpress.com/