The Kettles Approach The Finish Line

My wedding is less than a month away now. Yikes!! It's so exciting and so nerve-wracking all at once. I'm so excited to marry Mr. Kettle and I can't wait for our wedding day. But on the other hand, there are a million and one things left to do that I likely don't have the man hours to complete.

There are big things that happen around the 30 day out mark that any bride should be aware of. These things were not on any of my checklists!

1) Make final payments to vendors. Unless your vendors are magical elves who will take a credit card payment over the phone or internet, you'll need to schedule time to make these payments. Between Momma Kettle, Daddy Kettle, and myself, we've been running around the Chicago/Joliet area like chickens with our heads cut off delivering certified checks to all our different vendors.

2) Confirm all details on all contracts. Again, unless your vendors are magical elves who have Ivy League or Oxford proofreading skills, check your contracts. There were errors we caught in contracts from our florist, our venue, and our photographer. They were small fixes, but they were details that were important to the vision of the wedding.

3) Make sure your wedding party knows their schedule for the next 30 days. This is especially true if you have wedding party members who live out of town or have a hard time taking off from work. They need to know when and where you expect them in town. If you need to send out a newsletter or make 20 phone calls, make sure they know, otherwise you'll be missing a bridesmaid from your wedding rehearsal, and you don't want that.

4) You will have a lot of final details to decide, keep a list!! This one is important. You don't want to leave things like assigning someone to pick up grandma from the airport until the last minute.Sort out these final details and decisions as soon as you think of them, and keep a list so you know who is responsible for what. You will thank your self later when you aren't nearly as stressed as you could be.

These are things I picked up in the last couple days I just wanted to share with you. I climbed from underneath a pile of ribbon, satin, and tulle to keep you in the know. I'm looking forward to sharing posts soon about the frame I made for the sweetheart table, the (finally finished) ring bearer pillows (again!), and the flower girl baskets.

But before I go, I also want to share one of out final details. Mr. Kettle and I had a mini photo shoot with our wedding photographer. She was amazing and I'm so excited to work with her in a little under one month. The photos that she took will be used for our Poster Guest Book and also our personlized photo order cards that the photographers gift to the guests at the wedding. Want to see the photos we picked? Of course you do!

Image via Jolie Images

This shot will be for the poster. They are going to de-saturate the color so that the guests can sign all over the whole page. I've purchased purple, black, and gold permanent markers for them to sign.

Image via Jolie Images

This photo will be used at the photo card. This will go at every guest's seat at the reception so they know where to go to order photos from the photographer after the wedding.

Any tips for getting through the last 30 days before a wedding?

Guest Book Schmuest Book

I didn't want a traditional guest book. I never have. If I wanted a list of every one's names and numbers, I'd compile it all myself. Oh wait, I did. It's called my guest list.

That being said, I did want some sort of memento for myself that would be a record of the guests who were there. Something other than my RSVP list that is. There are some great ideas out there.

Image via Give a Caricature / Having a caricature picture for them to sign would be great if we had any history with caricatures.

Image via Bow Ties and Bliss / The thumbprint is pretty popular, but to be honest, I don't want to have fingerprints of all those people on file should the police come looking...

Image via Martha Stewart Weddings / When Martha Stewart does traditional, it does look enticing... Nah.

Image via Wed Loft / Gotta love the photo guest book. It's the top contender for ideas to me right now.

Image via Lovely Little Things Blog / I can't even tell what the book looks like, but I'm fascinated with the styling around the book.

Image via Jamaica Wedding Blog / I've really loved this idea for a while, but we're moving across state lines and then an ocean in the next handful of years, I can't even imagine trying to move with a glass box/vase filled with rocks.

Image via Clark Walker Studio / We love music and we're music people, but I can't imagine ruining a record by letting people write on it. I listen to all my records on my record player.

So with all these wonderful options, I was in no place to decide when I lost my ability to make decisions. But with a few big decisions under my belt, I've rediscovered how to choose.

It helps that our photographer offers a couple great add-ons to our package. One of them is to do a portrait of us. They can turn that portrait into a guest book. The picture I linked to about shows the couple in a frame with a wide border to have room for their guests to sign.

We will have way more guests than any width of border will allow space to sign. I had another idea. I figured we would just get an obscenely large photo taken of ourselves. We will wear all white so that people can just sign the pictures. That way, everything but our faces will be space to sign, at least that's the idea.

I've got a great dress to wear. It's the same one I was planning on wearing to our pre-wedding dinner. It's pretty summery. Mr. Kettle is planning on wearing a summery look too. I figure it will work since it will be one of the only real summer-like things going on with this wedding.

I have to talk to the photographer to make sure the idea will work, but I think it might. Momma Kettle doesn't hate the idea, which is a bonus. If it works, we'll be going in a couple weeks to take the photo.