In Transition

During our hiatus, we're quietly remodeling the blog.

Until we're back from our honeymoon (end of May), new content will be a little sporadic. Also as I work on organizing and editing hundreds of pages of blog entries into a riveting rendition of Our Story for our parents, as well as for our wedding album, you'll see archived posts begin to populate on the "new" blog. With the exception of corrected typos and poorly credited images, the posts will be identical the original content. The post here on the "old" blog will include a jump there to the "new" blog. 

Our editorial calendar will be also changing. Don't fear; your favorites - Tuesday Shoesday and Thursday Purseday - will still be here. Fashion Friday is going to become a monthly rather than semi-weekly series, look for it the first Friday of the month. What Inspires Me and My Favorite Things are going to merge into In the Moment, a round up of what's inspiring me at the moment; it'll be appearing on Mondays because everyone needs some eye candy to start their week off right. We'll also be introducing Friday Food for Thought with illustrations or quotes from my collection of vintage home economics texts and cookbooks.    

Ciao Bella!

Eden

New Year; New Look

On October 10, 2010, cubes and I were officially married. It felt perfect, but like any wedding wasn't. It wasn't a budget wedding, but it was a modest wedding. At the end of our recaps I'll tally up how much we spent.  Along with our friends, we planned the decor, the flowers, and made all of the paper goods ourselves.

If you're just joining us and want to start at the beginning of our story, please do. At the bottom of each post, you'll find a link "Newer Post" that will take you to the next post.

What will you discover as you read? You'll see how we planned two weddings - not just one - in eight months, helped build Syzygryd, and ran a Burning Man art support camp. It was definitely a roller coaster ride and not for the faint of heart.

I thought I'd be tired of all things wedding after our big day, but I find I'm not. Occasionally cubes will join us here and give the always needed and appreciated boys' perspective, but mostly it'll be me writing. The focus will be on crafting a vintage wedding.

Image courtesy of Mad Saint Rat (Etsy)

On this blog you'll find inspiration with What Inspires Me posts. Fashion and decor ideas, from shoes to purses to vintage ephemera with Tuesday Shoesday, Thursday Purseday, and Etsy Tuesdays posts. You'll also see tips and ideas about making green[er] choices.

Credits

Design of this blog started with Blogger's Watermark template. I created all of the images using Adobe Photoshop C3. The majority of the writing is done by me - Eden Hensley Silverstein - and sometimes when the mood strikes him, my husband - Daniel "cubes" Silverstein. We occasionally invite guests to join us; their posts are clearly marked. 

In a nod to our recent wedding, the title of the blog and category bars are typeset in Park Avenue. The tagline is typeset in Bodidota Regular. These were two of the fonts used in our wedding stationery.

Currently we're hosting this blog on Blogger.com.

Attribution

When sharing an idea, we always try to credit the person(s) responsible for it, as well as how we found it (blog, website, store window, etc.). If we've incorrectly credited an image or you would like your image removed, please let us know and we'll fix it.

Advertising

We write about what catches our eye and what we're planning on buying or what we've used. Unless noted, neither my husband nor I have received compensation for products we review. We do participate in Google AdSense and Amazon Associates, receiving a small referral fee when you click through and purchase a product we've recommended or reviewed.

Where We're Headed

(Source)

If you hadn't noticed already this blog has already started changing. Subtle yes, but changes nonetheless.

As my focus moves from planning our wedding to actually attending our wedding and the surrounding festivities, there have been less DIY projects, less general event planning tips, and less discussion of green choices. There's been more focus on creating images that tell a story, more focus on what I'm thinking of wearing, and more focus on budget decisions.

This blog will live on (as long as I have an hour train ride to and from work). The number of posts per day will probably decrease to one. However, a lot of the regular features will remain. Paper goods and tablescapes from weddings will always (along with other sources) inspire me, so look for the Wednesday "What Inspires Me" feature. I can't see myself resisting the pull of shoes and other fashion accessories, so "Tuesday Shoesday" and "Thursday Purseday" features will stay as well. Also, I love Etsy for vintage decor and clothing, so you'll also still see "Etsy Tuesday."

Now what topics/features would you like to see continued on a weekly or monthly basis?

As to other topics/features that I'm interested in that will start appearing, well they be related to our loves/hobbies. The most obvious: food and entertaining. Post ceremony, cubes and I will return to sharing home cooked meals (I'll share the recipes on my food blog, Recipes for the Good Life), savoring meals at local restaurants (I'll post pics and reviews of what we eat on my food blog), and hosting dinner parties (I'll share decor and DIY projects for these themed meals here).

Obsessed with Statistics

When we first started this blog we assumed that only those in our wedding party and only our guests would want to read about our wedding.

We quickly discovered that most visitors didn't know us. How do we know that you haven't met us personally? Statistics. Specifically Google Analytics. We have visitors from over 40 countries, including Australia, Canada, Costa Rica (one of my all time favorite places to vacation and where we might be honeymooning next year!), and The United Kingdom.

In the real world I work in Marketing. My team is responsible for our company's website, blog, and social media presence. Our website has been established for over 10 years, so seeing the effect of a given change is sometimes hard. As new technologies and new mediums for engaging audiences come out, I experiment with them by introducing them into my personal websites or media streams. (I'm really enjoying scheduling tweets with CoTweet.)

Why is this important to our wedding blog? Well, as you might remember this blog was going to be a journal of what we were planning aimed towards our guests.

Based on our statistics our audience is different. We've also discovered that more people read our blog on Tuesdays and Wednesdays than other days of the week. We have the most visitors when we feature Sneak Peeks or planning Updates. Whether we have new content on Sunday or not we have the same number of visitors.

You might have noticed that we've been trying to create an editorial schedule and better tailor our content. Here's the schedule we'll be testing over the next couple of weeks.

• Monday: Details or Update
• Tuesday: Tuesday Shoesday and Etsy Tuesday
• Wednesday Early Morning: DIY Project or Choosing
• Wednesday Mid-Morning: What Inspires Me and From the Movies
• Thursday: Thursday Tips and Next Best is Better
• Friday: Sneak Peek or Update
• Saturday: Check In or Recap

Oh, and we apparently do not have any Bay Area brides who are just starting to plan their wedding following us (as evidenced by zero entries in a giveaway we tried).

What do you like about our blog? What would you like to see more of? With under three months to go until our wedding you're definitely going to see more DIY Projects, more Sneak Peeks, and more Final Reveals. Are there details you want to know more about?

UPDATE Sunday July 18th 10:51AM: We finished the week with our highest to date unique visitors (94 versus 88 previously) and total visits (174 versus 166). Thank you! It's so exciting to see that people are reading about (and enjoying) our wedding.

UPDATE Sunday July 25th 10:17AM: We broke last week's records! When the week finished, we saw our highest to date unique visitors (118 versus 94 previously) and total visits (180 versus 174).

UPDATE Sunday August 1st 7:34AM: We continue to see more visitors. While no individual day set a record, overall we saw our highest to date total visits (187 versus 180).