Finally Photos for Mr. & Mrs. Telford-Rake!

I am SO excited!

I only say "finally" because I have been so anxious to see the photos from our wedding. It is just over a month since we got married (four days over a month, in fact), and I have barely seen any pictures.

The photographers' set is ready and online! You can find them here. The password is " hopesebas .

I cannot tell you how happy we were with our photographers. They were thoughtful and kind, knowledgeable, and they are really wonderful artists, to boot! If you are looking for a great photographer in Portland, I would definitely recommend Drew and Jai, of His and Her Photography.

I hope I get to work with them again!

I apologize about the quality of pictures on this post. We do not have any high-resolution images yet, so these are the large thumbnails, from the site. They look great at this size, but check out the site for some nice lush photos!

Crane Chandelier Project, take 2

We had SUCH an amazing time with everyone last week!! What a wedding.... It was so great to have so many people we love there with us!

We just returned today from our honeymoon (it was a wonderful week), and there are so many things I would like to write about.

For now though (I am a TIRED girl), I just wanted to send a link to the Wedding Co.'s blog - we were featured, with pictures and everything! How flattering! And how excited we are to be able to donate many of our 1001 paper cranes from the wedding to a great cause. The Wedding Co. is sponsoring the Crane Chandelier Project, and donating $0.50 for every crane received. This money will go to cancer research. Please check out their website at www.theweddingco.com. We are going to ship our paper creations off as soon as we are able!

Sarah Chapin took this lovely photo of the cranes at our wedding. I hope she doesn't mind I used this photo! There are others that show more action, but this one is nice of just cranes. I am not sure if you can tell from this photo just how many 1001 turned out to be!! These strings were LONG!!

Crane Chandelier Project

What is the MOST exciting thing about this is that we made these cranes for ourselves, but they are going to be charitably re-purposed after our wedding. We got an email from a good friend (who is coincidentally getting married two days after we do). She knew that we were in the midst of crane-making, and stumbled upon a blog that mentioned the "Crane Chandelier Project," which is the work of a Toronto artist. The project is to collect 10,000 total cranes, from brides and grooms. The bride and groom sign the crane with their names and the date they are getting (or did get) married. For every crane that is given for the project, 50¢ is going to be donated toward cancer research. Sebastien wrote to the organization hosting the event (The Wedding Co.), and said, "Hey - I know that you are trying to get cranes, and that you usually get them one at a time - would you be willing to still donate 50¢ per crane, if we donate 800 of them?" (or some thing like that).
They said YES!, and so we are psyched! That is $400 (at least!) that we will be able to donate. I am so happy we can do this.

That's a Lot of Birds!!

I told you a couple of weeks ago that we had finished with our cranes. Last Wednesday (Canada Day), we had off from work, and we mainly stayed around the house getting things done. We wanted to begin to string the cranes, for decoration, and needed to make some sense of them, so I decided to dump all the colored cranes on our flat file, in the middle of the living room (most of them are there still....) Keep in mind that the flat file is approximately 3'x5' large.
Anyway, I emptied the multi-colored cranes from a box onto the table, and was in awe that they only make up a third of the number of paper cranes we made (it was interesting that without any planning, we had roughly equal numbers of multi-colored, large silver, and small silver cranes). I decided to pull the red ones aside, to use with some of the silver that we want to string. When I did that I thought, "I wonder how many orange cranes we have?," and so on with green and light blue, etc....

Soon enough, the table was covered in little piles of color, and it didn't take any time at all to give them a ROYGBIV-type organization. Once we said "How cool!" enough times, I realized that the center of the table was a perfect place for all the silver cranes as well (the top picture is only half of the silver ones!). You can see the results. We were pretty excited that the pictures turned out so well too.

Wonderful Party - and Great Inspiration!

I have been following this blog a bit lately - A Cup of Jo. The blogger also writes columns for MarieClaire and the New York Magazine and Glamour (to name a few), but I really like her personal site a lot. She has lot of good ideas about things to make and do, and she has a really good eye for design. There are two parties I found on her blog, and one separate entry (I think they are old posts) that I thought could be helpful if you are wondering what the Jazz Age style was like, and how it could be carried out.

These should give you an idea:

1930's (new) Depression Party

Great Gadsby Goodbye Party

and lastly (scroll down for this - these dresses are worth it), 1930's Europe

One Month and Counting!

We are quickly approaching July!! Our to-do list is getting longer and longer, even as we cross more and more things off.
Sebastien and I have been busy the last few nights, learning how to make neckties. We are sewing his silk tie, as wall at the one for his Best Man. They are looking good so far! This photo shows our living room, in the midst of project-time, and my "sewing table" (a.k.a. a plywood board balanced on a sawhorse). As you can imagine, our 760sf apartment gets pretty full, fairly quickly. You can see one of the silk ties on the table (we haven't started the other one yet), as well as our practice tie, made of cheap muslin. This photo is me, with the practice tie that we made this past week. It turned out surprisingly well, so I am excited to see how nice the silk looks!!

We've Finished....

Making cranes! We re-counted them tonight, and we have one thousand and one (1001) paper cranes!



2/3 of them are silver, and the rest are colored or patterned. They are all unique. I am excited that we finished with so much time to spare! Now all we have to do is sew them all together! We'll see how that goes....

Rooms at Edgefield

I just wanted to let everyone know that we are almost reaching the end of our "blocked rooms" date! On June 23rd I believe (please don't quote me) we will no longer have a hold on these rooms. If you haven't booked, please do soon. We really want to see you there, and if you stay on premises, you don't have to go home after the party! --And everyone likes that!

Some more Illustrations!

I thought you all might find some of these interesting too…. I just love the illustrations. Anyway…. That is all, until I find more!!

More Fun Patterns!

What You'll Get in the Mail

We are very excited this week. We got so many things done over this past weekend, and we are headed to Portland to tie up a few loose ends that need tying. Things are really coming together! It is so much fun (and so much work!) to plan such a big party for so many people! I am so excited to see everyone, and really happy that so many people are headed out to share such a special time with us!

When we get back, we are start our invitations. We ordered a stamp from a rubber-stamp producer, and I really like the effect of it. We are designing all the stationary to be really simple and clean. We also wanted the stamps to have a bit of the Jazz Age in them, so hopefully the fonts and the motifs pull it all together! So far so good!

I'll take some pictures of the assembly line, when it happens, and you can see all of us hard at work!

Wowza

How lavish are these designs?! I love them!

Some Jazzy Ideas

I think I am going to post some of the great Jazz Age stuff I am finding to my blog, because I love it so much! I hope these can give you some good ideas!
The clothes were so sophisticated and simple, and the ladies looked so elegant, so self-assured.

I love the hats and the dresses....

I love that everyone looked as though they were going places!

One place where my time has been....

I am working on making some tablecloths for the centers of the tables. The fabric is lovely (I will probably save it as a surprise), so I hope I can do it some justice! That is another project for tonight (haha - along with doing the dishes and taking out the garbage)! I already cut all the fabric, but I am in the middle of folding the edges and making them look nice and finished off! Next will be sewing, and I always enjoy that! I just wish I had more time for all of these projects! There are so many things I want to work on!

Three Hundred Fifty More to GO!

I have been having a great time getting ready for our wedding in July. I won't lie: my life is much more hectic than I would like lately, and I feel as though I am forgetting things I need to do....
Everything will get done, I guess, and what doesn't get done isn't that important. As I keep telling myself, as long as we are married by the end of the day, things will have gone perfectly.

We have oodles of cranes right now. 650-something, in fact. I am going to make more tonight. We sorted them last weekend, according to size and color, and at that point we had 632. They don't look quite as happy separated into plastic bags as they did all together in one big box, but they have all been accounted for.

Office Under Water

Here is my good friend Caitlin a few weeks ago, in response to what happened at our office:
So this is a little late in coming, but I have a lot to catch up on. Our office had a flood. Vancouver has been having an extremely unusual winter, much colder and dryer and snowier than usual. The pipes froze in the suite of offices above ours, and burst all throughout our floor. All of the elevators were rendered unusable for a few days, and only one out of five is really back to working without any hitches now. The flood thankfully happened a few days before Christmas, and so quite a few people were out of town, which, as you can probably see from the pictures was a good thing. I got some calls after it happened saying not to come in to work the week before Christmas, but I went in after we got back from Oregon for cleanup. One of the calls was my boss saying, "we just poured a bunch of water out of your computer!" I wish these photos could show the damage was done, although it could have been MUCH worse. Mostly, the carpets all had to be pulled up because of mold, and this is still affecting the air quality. Besides that, and tons of ruined drawings that were lying under people's desks (two boxes of archived drawings under mine - whoops!), things are turning out fine. My computer even works! That was kind of a bummer.... I wanted an excuse to have the office buy me a more powerful computer.

To Get Us in the Mood for a little Swing....

When we started planning our wedding, we decided that because music is such a big part of both of our lives, we really wanted to have a band. And we want to dance.
This is the band we are having play our wedding, The Kung Pao Chickens. They are a Portland-based Gypsy Jazz band, in the style of Django Reinhardt. They play locally in Portland every Monday at the Laurelthirst Public House in NE Portland, so if you are in the area, you should check them out! They are really fun and vibrant, and they have such a great way with music. I am really excited that we were able to book them for our wedding. They are going to play during the cocktail reception, and then for a bit before dinner. I hope you like them as much as we do!

In Sebastien's Words

Things are starting to come together, in getting ready for our wedding.  I thought it might be a good time to plagiarize an old post off Sebastien's blog, that I already copied in MY blog, so I apologize to those of you who already read it, and I REALLY apologize to those of you who read it twice.  Sorry, but you are warned.  

For those of you who didn't read that entry, this is the story of how Sebastien and I got engaged:

"Hope and I are engaged!

....Hope and I went to see Radiohead in concert. The show was incredible. The music, the lights, and the rain all made for a very inspiring and emotional night. Hope and I were unfortunately separated during most of the show. During the first encore, Hope became overcome with emotion. While the crowd was shouting for a second encore, I found Hope. --And during the last song, as the band played the opening rifts of Paranoid Android, Hope turned to me to ask, "will you marry me?" I was pretty shocked. It was the end of an amazing show, and here, Hope just asked me to marry her. Not finding any words, I kissed her, with 10,000 people pressing around us. Of course I told her yes, and the last five minutes of the show were surreal. Smiles were plastered on our faces.

We thank each and every one of you for your blessings and support.
Love to all,
Sebastien & Hope"

That is how it happened! It was THAT easy! Hehe. All I had to do was ask....

Also, on a (sort of) related topic, if you were enticed by the links at all, listen to this concert, recorded by NPR's All Songs Considered at the Santa Barbara Bowl. The show was fairly similar to what we saw, in terms of songs, etc., but the sound quality is AMAZING. Please, if you like Radiohead, take a listen!

Welcome (to Wedding Stuff)

This is the first post on our (wedding) blog!  Hopefully we can keep you all up to date on our progress on some of the projects we are doing for the wedding, etc.  

One of these projects, probably the most extensive, is making 1001 paper cranes to hang at the wedding.  Making these birds has always been a way that we communicated with one another, when we were first getting together, as much as now.  Right now, we have approximately 500 cranes already finished, taking into account some of the ones we made for one another over the years that we have been dating.  

Please feel free to comment on anything you see.  We are looking forward to seeing you at our wedding in July!  As of today, that is about 7 months, 21 days and +/- 2 hours from this posting.