June 29, 2013

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

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June 27, 2013

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

Bouquet base: Glue the styrofoam ball to the cone with your glue gun.
Bouquet base: Paint the styrofoam ball the color of your choice. It’s okay if paint gets on the cone.
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.
Bouquet base: Repeat until the cone is completely covered in ribbon.
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).
Flowers: Fold all of the sheets of paper and glue together. I followed the Capitol Romance directions.
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.
Finishing: Use a small knitting needle or something similar to poke a hole in the styrofoam ball.
Put some hot glue on the toothpick of the first flower and stick it in the hole.
Repeat for 2-3 larger flowers.
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.
Voila! A bouquet that will never die!

Final Product

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

3 nice things said

June 13, 2013

Stephanie+Matt Get Married at Marbles Kids Museum

I (Carolyn) would like to take a moment to puff up my chest a second here and claim responsibility for putting these two together. I really didn’t… I guess… but I kind of did! So I’m claiming it. I first met Stephanie in super early 2012 when she hired me to take portraits of her for her website. We don’t usually take work like this, but I kinda fell in love with her humor and attitude and took her on, we took awesome pictures, the end. Only it wasn’t the end! She also used those pictures on her online dating profile… and Matt saw them. :) SO I’M TOTALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS, RIGHT!? Right!! :)

Matt saw them, also met her, and also presumably fell in love with her humor and attitude. Only instead of taking her on for a portrait session, he proposed, they got married at Marbles, and here we were a little while later shooting their wedding. :) There was a brief period of getting ready, a brief ceremony, brief portraits, then a whole lotta reception with… wait for it… wait for it… breakfast for dinner. This, my dear readers, was the best thing I’ve ever heard of in terms of food at a reception. The even better part is that there were celiacs in her family so there were gluten-free pancakes for us!! Gluten-free pancakes with freakin’ Reese’s Pieces in them! And bacon! And omelets! And cranberry juice! I never write about (or blog pictures of) the food at weddings but I had to for this one because this was the best thing I’d ever seen and some of you pondering what to eat for next year should probably take notes because who doesn’t love breakfast? Evil people, that’s who.

Anyway – we were so honored to be asked to do this wedding. It’s really cool when you photograph someone and they keep bringing you back. :) We met Matt at the wedding and LOVED HIM. Almost as much as the Reese’s Pieces in our gluten-free pancakes. Well, maybe more. ;) He treats Stephanie like gold and you can see that he really loves her. They’re adorable together and we had an awesome time at their wedding. Congratulations, you two, and don’t forget what pictures started all this. ;) :P