Erin Akin Carroll

Todd and I had such a great day in Greenville yesterday. We visited the gorgeous campus to look for beautiful photo spots, visited the hotel and the downtown area and then went to our cake maker’s house to go over our cake options.

Here’s a picture of Todd and me just outside of the Charles E. Daniel chapel. Such a pretty day, but we needed our sunglasses!

I’ve spent the day doing some of the more tedious projects to get ready for the wedding. We wrapped our wedding party gifts and wrote more thank you notes. I’ve written at least 100 thank you notes in the past month and there are more to come!

I had to get all of our baby, childhood, and courtship pictures together to send to the videographer. I found a videographer that would also make our rehearsal dinner/champagne party video and I was so relieved to find someone to take that load off of us. All I had to do was organize the pictures in categories — after I found them, printed them, and narrowed them down. The videographer recommended that we narrow it down to 125 pictures, but after I organized and numbered them all in order, I had 280 pictures. Oops. Oh well. It’s our video.

I had such a good time selecting the music for the video. I would choose a song, put it in a playlist and flip through the pictures as I listened to the songs. I selected the following tunes for our video:

Blessed by Elton John for baby pictures of both of us
American Girl by Tom Petty for childhood pictures of me
Drive by Alan Jackson for childhood pictures of Todd
You’re My Best Friend by Queen for pictures of Walker and me
Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry by The Crystals for pictures of Todd and me during high school and college years
I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers for pictures of our courtship
Everything by Michael Buble for more pictures of our courtship

I really love the songs and can’t wait to see the finished product of the video. Hopefully the videographer will still finish it even though we have twice as many pictures as we’re supposed to have!

A few readers asked how we were able to transfer the lace from Todd’s mom’s handkerchief into the design for the Save the Date, the invitation, and the program. We knew immediately that we wanted the paisley lace design to be the common theme throughout the whole wedding, but we had to have it photo ready, so we sent the hankie to Kelly Moore of Kelly Moore Photography (my photographer). She took pictures of the lace and the quality was good enough for the invitation company to use it on all of our print pieces.

We decided that we wanted to use that same design on our cake. Unforunately, our cake maker doesn’t free hand her designs and we needed the lace design on the cake to look exactly like the hankie or else it would lose its whole effect. We found a company that makes fondant molds and sent the hankie to them. They returned the mold to us and it looked like it might actually work. I sent it to the cake maker and she called this week to let me know that it isn’t going to look that great.

So now we’re sort of back to square one with what our cake will look like. I know that it will be square because we bought a square plateau that I love. I’m going to Greenville to meet with the cake maker again on Sunday afternoon and hope we’re able to come to an agreement. It’s just so hard because I could visualize this perfect cake with our beautiful lace design on it. One thing’s for sure… her cakes taste amazing, so it won’t really matter what it looks like! Yeah…. right…

My parents were here all weekend! It was so nice to hang out and relax (sort of)! Our weekend was pretty busy and we had to squeeze in wedding conversations while my mom sewed trim onto our bedroom draperies. She’s the hardest worker I know and she didn’t stop all weekend. I picked them up at the airport on Friday and I made (with mom’s supervision) shrimp and grits for supper. It turned out to be really good! We just hung out all night and all fell asleep on the couch.

On Saturday morning, mom and I drove to West Columbia for a shower in honor of Todd and me hosted by some of Todd’s family friends– and new friends of mine. Todd met my dad and his dad at our house and they all built our storage shed in the backyard. The shower was beautiful and the brunch was fantastic! I got to see some friends of mine, meet some great ladies, and we got some truly beautiful things. Two of the best gifts of the day….

Lindsay Adams and her mother, Cathy, were two of the six hostesses of this great event. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know them. They are Todd’s second family and I’m looking forward to them being my third family. They are the sweetest, most loving people and I already feel so fortunate to know them. Lindsay and her husband have a blog, too, and I love reading about her adventures in baseball land!

lindsay and me

nana, PC, me, and mom

the hostess in their aprons and oven mits!

the hostesses and me