Liz & Nate

I have a ring!

We found this at Ames Silversmithing, and we love it.  It is a Damascus steel ring, which comes out as a sort of wood grain pattern.  Liz found it when we were just browsing, and I just had to have it.  I don’t know that we could have found a better ring for me.  I have recently found a passionate love for woodworking, but have also done a lot of metal work over the years.  It is a wonderful marriage of the two.  And now for some gratuitous product shots.

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Wedding by Nate

We have now passed 6 weeks to go, and things couldn’t be crazier. As a prime example we spent an entire afternoon jetting around our reception venue and the surrounding area taking some fabulous pictures with our photographer Dave.

We make such a disgustingly cute couple, it should be outlawed.  But alas, the wedding is still on.  We had a lot of fun exploring our venue at the Historical Building.  Trying to capture some of the really neat angles 3 stories of openness entail.

We even got our obligatory ring shot on the way to the Papajohn’s sculpture garden.

But there is entirely too much of us in that shot.  I mean, its all about the ring right?

Closer, but we will have to work on finding just the right hand shot.  Neither of us are hand models, but we do our best.

We even got a new picture that we will hopefully turn into a new banner for the website.  Stay tuned, but here is a sneak preview.

I really love the look down the street.  It has to be one of my favorite shots of the day.

And finally, I will leave you with some wonderful things that we all love.

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Wedding by Nate

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Wedding by Liz

Last weekend, my cousin Kathleen threw me an absolutely perfect wedding shower! We had a fabulous lunch, tea, desserts, and (non-embarrassing) games at her lovely house. It was nice to have so many of my favorite women all in the same room together.

When I arrived, I was greeted by one of my best friends from high school and her brand new baby, Harper. Her fiance, Adam, immediately passed Harper to me and I held her awkwardly while he showed me pictures of her on his phone. They are so proud and I am so happy for them. (Note to self: be sure to push glasses up before having my picture taken).

Kathleen’s husband, Chris, made these amazing cookies from a family recipe.

Perfect shower food: Chicken salad and croissants, salad with strawberries and champagne vinaigrette, fresh fruit, and cucumber sandwiches.

Oh, and what’s this? A chocolate cake? Not quite…

Thats a stack of towels from my registry with a loofa topper and soap flowers. Its still sitting on my dishwasher after a week. I haven’t been able to bring myself to dismantle it because it makes me laugh every time I walk into the kitchen.

Enjoying our lunch.

Here’s my grandma Mary, my aunt Jane, Jane’s daughters Kelsey (left), Jessica (center), and Erin (right); and Erin’s daughter Kiki on Jane’s lap.

From left to right are Gaoder and Momoka, two of my wonderful roommates from ISU; Kathleen, who threw this perfect shower; and myself, having entirely too much fun.

Gaoder and Momoka dutifully used all the ribbon, bows and tissue paper from my presents to make the biggest practice bouquet known to man.

Speaking of presents, my flowergirls, Caroline and Julia sent a bunch of drawings with the present from their mom (Nate’s cousin, Lori) and their grandma (Nate’s aunt Linda). Obviously, I loved them. Who couldn’t?

My future-cousin, Becky, wasn’t able to come but sent a present anyways. I was good and waited until the shower to open it, but had I known what was inside, I would have ripped it open right away. She made me the cutest (reversible!) apron. Not that I’m much of a cook, but now I can at least look the part.

For one of the activities, Kathleen printed off words of “advice” for new wives from a 1950’s magazine and everyone took turns reading them to me with fake sincerity. Here are a few notable quotes:

“Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement or integrity. Remember, He is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.”

“Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.”

“Don’t complain is he’s late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.”

Yeah… right. I’ll be sure to remember all that. There was one, however, that I think I can abide by:

Thank you so much to Kathleen for throwing me such a wonderful party and thank you to everyone who was able to come and make it so special.

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Wedding by Liz

(most of them, at least)

A big “Thank You!” to Becky for helping me stuff, stamp, stick, and seal so many invitations last night. You’re a lifesaver!

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Wedding by Liz

For those who have been talking to us about the wedding, they are probably aware that we are working on a couple of custom projects for the wedding. My primary, and mostly only project for the wedding is custom cake stands. We loved the idea of a cake on every table, with lots of variety, but the cost of “real” cake stands was outrageous. So I volunteered to build them myself. After many months of careful planning, I now have stacks of parts.

Legs galore.  Too bad there are another 20 not in the picture.

And tops as far as the eye can see

Making those complex curves in the legs required some engineering. Fortunately I like that.  I’ve got one jig for the outside curves, and another for the bottom profile.  These made the cutting of the profile go so quickly that I was sanding before I knew it.  Now to engineer a better way to sand…

All in all this has been quite the interesting project.  Hopefully I will get it done before the wedding.

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Cakestands, Wedding, Woodworking by Nate

A few weeks ago Liz and I hosted our families for Memorial Day. While this sounds like a fantastic idea at first, we quickly realized that this would entail catching up on 3 years of deferred maintenance on our house.

Exhibit A

We thought that since the weeds had completely taken over the area, that something drastic was necessary. We succeeded in the drastic part.

So here we are, removing all the rock. The original idea was that the weed barrier underneath wasn’t doing its job any more, and thus needed to be replaced. Unfortunately we didn’t realize how much dirt there was on top of the weed barrier, and how difficult it is to separate rocks and dirt. In your head I’m sure you are thinking that it couldn’t be that hard. And so did we.

One small bright spot was that we got to rip out the old junky plastic edging, and replace it with some wonderful bricks. I almost enjoyed that part.

But back to pain and suffering.

With a large volume of plant matter, and dirt intermixed with our rock. We tried to think up the best solution possible to “clean” the rocks. And this was our first mistake. Well, not first, but a serious mistake. Somehow I thought that water would be the best solution. Unfortunately, what do you get when you mix dirt and water? Mud, thick slimy, clogging mud. While clear water runs through the rocks quite well, mud does not. Mud drifts down just below the surface, and clogs up the works.

So here we are, maybe 20% through our pile of rocks that never seems to end, and thinking about all the mistakes that had been made. Fortunately, I’m an engineer, and what do engineers do? They solve problems. I simply had to figure out what problem I was trying to solve. I realized that I had some expanded steel sitting around that had smaller openings than the rocks, and I had a moment of inspiration.

Engineering saves the day! Or at least my sanity. An impromptu wheel-barrow with a grate for a bottom does a fantastic job of separating the rocks from the dirt. If only I had been concerned with separating instead of cleaning this could have all been avoided. Maybe not all of it, but at least some of it.

We still had the mess left over from the previous attempt with water.

And you know what that means! A new tool!

A quick trip to Lowes yielded a new pressure washer which blew away the dirt with a force untold to human kind before. Oh it was a magical feeling, eradicating all the evidence of our previous mistakes. Leaving no trace that we had done anything.

At least I got a new toy. New toys make everything better.

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Bad Ideas, House by Nate

I just want to remind anyone who might be in Ames this Saturday that the ISU glassblowing club, The Gaffers’ Guild, will be holding their annual VEISHEA sale from 10am-6pm in Old Sweeney (next to the water tower). Be sure to stop by, check out all the great pieces for sale, and watch some demonstrations. Our club will also be selling glass at the Art Mart sale from 10am(?) to 3pm. The Art Mart sale is located in the M-Shop at the Memorial Union. Besides our glass, there will also be pottery, prints, baskets, and jewelry for sale by local artists.

Here are some of my pieces that I will be contributing to the sale:

As part of the membership agreement, each glassblower is expected to donate half their pieces to be sold at VEISHEA and other sales. All of the proceeds then go back to the club to keep the furnace hot and full of glass. Most pieces are a steal at $5-30ish.

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Glass by Liz

I had hoped this next post would have pictures of our finished project room, but I’m tired of that ugly floor photo from the previous post being the first thing you see on our website. So this picture of a semi-finished project room will just have to do for now.

That is an 8 foot by 3 foot work table and it is glorious.

I still have curtains to make, cabinet doors to paint, baseboard to fix, and more stuff to move in.  Even so, I definitely think last week was a huge success. The best part is that the rest of the basement is not a mid-project disaster zone. It was cleaned up and back to awesome within the week!

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House by Liz

When we last left off, Nate and the project room were neck and neck. Over the last few days, we’ve definitely pulled ahead. Another coat of adhesive remover and a power scraper took care of the last stubborn remnants of vinyl. A little patching with some Portland Cement and the floor was basically prepped.

Next on our list was to paint the walls and floor. The paint treatment on the walls was pretty basic, but the floors got the works.

Ta dah! No more bleeding eyeballs!

And for the finishing touch, we installed new white outlets and rubber baseboard.

FYI, if you plan on installing rubber baseboard, it might be a good idea to find a brand that also sells corner pieces. I may or may not have posted this close-cropped picture of a straight section of wall for a reason. Lets just say my hot glue gun (recommended) might be needed to fix a few trouble spots.

Our week of “vacation” is almost over, but we’ve accomplished a lot. I’ve got a couple days to get the project room put back together and restore the rest of the basement to its usual fabulous-ness. Project room: 2 points (I gave it another one for the botched baseboard), Nate and Liz: 10,000 points (just because I can). We win.

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House by Liz