It's official!

We booked our wedding venue last week. We are now officially getting married on October 16, 2010. I'm psyched. I love fall, and that should be right around peak foliage. Our venue is a small family-owned ski resort in western Mass. It's going to be just lovely with all of the leaves changed. We're hoping to have the ceremony outside,

either here:

or here:

but if it's too cold or rainy or (heaven forbid!) snowy, they also have a nice indoor backup space for the ceremony:

And this is the lodge where the reception will be. We lucked out and were able to see it all decorated for another wedding.

The best part is that this was one of both of our favorites out of the 9 sites we visited, just from a purely personal/aesthetic (non-budgetary) perspective, but it also happened to be the cheapest! Clearly it was just meant to be :)

Now we just have to decide on a menu, find a photographer, an officiant, figure out decorations, get a dress, etc., etc., etc... It's amazing how many decisions there are to make. Good thing we have a full year to do it, though I'm sure it'll just fly by!

Check out this fun little gadget we picked up for the reception.

We had been talking about getting a Polaroid camera so people could snap pictures of themselves and put them in the guest book, but it turns out the Polaroids of old are no longer being made! Shocking, I know. BUT, they do have these fun little combo digital camera/mini printer thingies that fill a similar purpose. Since we already have 3 digital cameras between the two of us, it seemed a little silly to get another one, but they also sell just the mini printer. So I wrote it down in my "ideas" notebook so I wouldn't forget, and a few days later, the exact printer was the Amazon deal of the day! It was marked down to $30 from its usual $48, so of course I just had to buy it. It came a few days ago and it's so cute!

It's about the size of a mass market paperback book, maybe a little smaller. The paper that it takes is 2"x3" and has adhesive backing. So people can just print out a little pic, peel off the back, and stick it right in the guest book! I'm so excited about it. I'm thinking of setting up some kind of a backdrop for a sort of DIY photo booth. It'll be like an instant scrapbook that I don't have to spend hours upon end putting itty bitty photo corners on my pictures. (I still haven't finished my scrapbook from Ireland. So close... Oh so close...)

In other news, we finished the top for the neverending quilt! So maybe, just maybe we'll actually finish it by my self-imposed deadline of the end of this month. We already have fabric for the back, and we have the batting, but we aren't sure what we're doing for the binding yet. So that could be a hangup... I guess we'll just have to see how it goes, but the chilly weather is definitely providing additional incentive!

The Neverending Quilt

I can't even tell you exactly when Cale and I started working on this quilt. But I know we were still living in Boston at the time, and I think it was at least a few months before we moved to NYC. So... since we just renewed our lease, that means it's been over a year. And it's not a complex quilt. In fact, it's a really simple pattern. But we have a tendency to get sidetracked.

Basically, we've gotten as far as we have by working in spurts of diligence. We'll go through a week or two when we work on it a little bit every night, and then we just don't. For a few months. And then one of us will be inspired to go back to it, and we go through the same cycle again.

Our last "on" period was sometime in the dead of winter, and we were making such good progress that we thought we might finish before the weather got too warm to use it, and we even bought a gigantic roll of batting in anticipation. Well, now that batting has been taking up a good portion of our limited storage space for a good 3-4 months.

Well I got inspired again, after unearthing the quilt pieces when I was cleaning a few days ago, so we're working on it once again. I'm hoping that putting this out there in the blogosphere will help me keep up the momentum to actually finish this thing. We're about 3/4 done with the top, and then we need to assemble the layers, so if we keep at it we should be able to finish before the weather gets cold again.

I'm pretty sure I said that to myself around this time last year, but now I'm going to make it an official goal. This quilt will be complete before the end of October. Oh boy, now I've said it. Can we do it??? Feel free to leave me words of encouragement!

And now for some pictures of the infamous quilt...

It's got a two-way gradient thing going on, so the green gets darker as the brown gets lighter. That bit wasn't in the pattern - the pattern just had blues and creams randomly distributed. And man, it took us for.ev.er. to pick out fabrics, and decide on the layout of the blocks. I'm liking the look so far, though. Can't wait till I can sleep under it!