wedding: invites//venue.

part v: invites & venue.

hey friends! i know it's been a while since i did a wedding post (nope, i'm not finished with em... heh heh) but here i am, to continue to document our special day! :) and so that friends and family who didn't make it can see what went down on september 22nd of 2012. haha.

we got extremely lucky with our invites. justin's older sister is quite the graphic designer! i emailed her a couple samples of ones i liked. erika and i emailed back and forth maybe three times, and she nailed just what i wanted. she worked for some editing/printing company, so as a wedding present to us, she printed all of our invites for us for free. it was really amazing, and i am ever so grateful to her! thanks to her, we were able to spend our "wedding invites" budget on other things. the photo's i printed from snapfish when they had some promotion going on- and i highly recommend it! they do a great job and the coloring is perfect. we didn't have enough, so i printed more from walmart with a promotional code. their photos were really saturated and way off, but at that point we didn't care since people would be throwing it away anyways. haha.

when our guests opened their envelopes, this is what they got:

and just as a sidenote- LUKE was my maiden name. i know a whollleeee lot of people always think sayumi is my last name, but it's actually my middle name. so sorry for those of you who feel like i have been deceiving (cough cough aka lo & mad). i seriously get it a lot, even from people who have known me since the tenth grade. "your last name is luke? oh... i thought it was like... salami or tsunami?" "uhhh no sayumi is my middle name, luke is my last" hahha.

VENUE.

oh boy oh boy. this was a toughie.when justin and i first got engaged, we had planned on getting married on november 17. I thought I would need from july-november to plan a wedding,for some reason.

but then one day we felt we should move it up. so we did. to september 22. probably the best decision we ever made. It made everything so much easier. I used my summer time July-August to do most of the planning, it made figuring out our housing situation much easier, and at the pace i was planning the wedding anyways, it would have been a long wait till november. i was freaking out when we still were set on november, since renting a venue is sooooooo expensive! i mean really! if you find a cheap venue, then of course they MAKE you hire THEIR catering and flowers and charge a big tip fee so the whole places ends up five thousand big ones (aka the dollar monies). now i know many people have their reception the the cultural hall of a church, buuut that just wasn't my dream wedding. we also did NOT have the money to rent/buy/make a bunch of decorations that would have made a cultural hall look half decent...

so once we bumped it up, i had the option of having it outside, which is what i have always wanted anyways!! since my parents don't live in utah, and justin's parents lived further away from provo than we wanted for a reception (we figured the closer to provo, the more willing friends would be to come haha)  i was asking tons of local friends if they knew of neighborhood clubhouses or parks that would let me have a reception there for a low cost. i asked my freshman year single's ward bishop where he knew of, since he is from the provo area.

being the kind, selfless man he is, he talked to his parents about letting us have our reception there.

uhhhhh. can you say nicest family ever!?!?!??!?!?! letting two random college kids hold a reception in their backyard. it was truly so selfless. i cannot thank them enough for letting us do that. it is an absolutely beautiful backyard, and the landscaping was so perfect that i didn't need a ton of over-the-top decorations to make the reception as a whole look complete.

my cousins, uncles, aunts, parents, everyone helped with setting up tables and putting lights on the gazebo to fulfill my dream! it was so pretty, especially when it got darker.

the trees, the landscaping, the plants, the gazebo, the well-taken-cared-for lawn...

it was perfect.

i am ever so grateful.

tip #6: again, as i've said before, use your resources. ask around, people are always willing to help.

thanks for reading!!