Hi. My name is Miss Waterfall and I’m a shoe-aholic.
Yes, it’s true. I have a bit of a footwear substance-abuse problem (but I can stop any time I want!). I blame HBO and little Miss Carrie Bradshaw for brainwashing me into this whole mess.
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Image via It’s Geek Chic!
My personal favorite, Carrie’s blue wedding Manolos:
With so many options out there for creative guestbooks, it’s easy to fall into option overload and not be able to decide. This is where having a theme or overriding idea can really help narrow the options to the ones that really drive that home.
In our case, I was looking for something easy to sign and collect that suited our vineyard theme. It’s not exactly a big leap to corks, now is it?
Recycled corks / Image via Amazon
Depending on the size of your wedding, your drinking habits (and those of your friends and family), and how much time you’ve got it’s not unreasonable to collect all the corks yourself. Of course, as the wine industry goes to synthetic corks and screw-top bottles for various reasons that might get a little tougher, so lucky for us that plenty of places sell both used and unused corks.
Now, having crafted with corks before, I think it might be easier for folks to sign fresh corks as opposed to used ones that might be brittle or uneven in shape. We’ve got quite a collection already going, but there’s also a home-brew shop just down the road that sells fresh corks by the bag-full for not very much cash. That’s good no matter how you slice it.
Amber is selling a Cara Mia all lace wedding gown. She is asking $875 for the size-2 dress.
Have a wedding item for sale? Post it with pictures in the Weddingbee Classifieds, and you might see it featured on the blog!
Other great items for sale:
Kendra & Justin celebrated their marriage with a four-day destination affair in Mount Washington, New Hampshire.
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The Details
Bride’s Name: Kendra
Groom’s Name: Justin
Venue(s): Omni Mount Washington, NH
Wedding Date: Sept 2, 2012
Bridal Gown Designer: Maggie Sottero from I Do Bridal in Seattle
Florist: Sara, Omni Mt. Washington
Photographer: Kim Chapman
Videographer: Elena of Lobster Wedding
Cake: Candy buffet and mini desserts
Wedding Coordinator: Kerra Lynch
Bridesmaids’ Dresses: Mori Lee
Honeymoon: Southern Caribbean with Carnival Cruise Lines
Note: this post is long and picture-heavy. 
Answer: WHO CARES?! It’s your honeymoon!
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Hehe—it’s Mr. Palm Tree cheering you on!*
In all seriousness though, hive, Couples Negril has a BOATLOAD (again, pun not intended, but made me giggle when I saw it typed) of activities on a daily basis.
Normally when we go out of town and aren’t able to bring Lil Wingman with us, we find a friend or family member for him to stay with to make sure he stays out of trouble. This is proving to be an issue on the day of the wedding, since all of our closest friends and family will be celebrating with us and unavailable to puppy-sit.
Mama and Papa Plane will be hosting Lil Wingman while we are on our honeymoon, but we definitely needed a plan for him on the night before as well as the day and night of the wedding.
I started researching boarding facilities near the wedding venue and the hotel, as I figured it would be easiest for drop-off and pick-up if he was nice and close. I did some research and narrowed down my options based on the following criteria.
(Warning: gratuitous doggie photos ahead—all personal)
Sunday pick-up available: Because Mama and Papa Plane will be home Sunday night, there is no reason to pay for an extra night of boarding if Lil Wingman can be picked up the day after the wedding. This also works because we will be able to see him on Sunday and say goodbye before we leave for the honeymoon.
“I don’t always ride in the car, but when I do, I require a chauffeur.”
Ample play time: Lil Wingman loves to play with other dogs. We take him to the dog park all the time and he gets along really well with most canines. In the case of finding a boarding facility, I wanted to ensure that he wasn’t going to be sitting in a kennel all day without being able to interact with the other “guests.” A caveat to this is that the facility must also require every dog that is allowed play time to pass a behavioral assessment—I know my dog plays well with others, but I want to make sure the new friends he’s making play nice, too.
Since Mr. Jet and I wil be doing a first look, we needed a single mode of transportation that will round up our crew, including fur baby Bruce!
Ideally, we wanted a four-to-five-hour rental that would pick up all of the bridal party and our photographer (Uncle J), bring us to a few local places we wanted to take pictures at before the ceremony, and have a final drop-off at our ceremony/reception location before our 5:00 PM ceremony start. I immediately crossed out the limo idea, as I am about as graceful as a St. Bernard on a slip and slide—never mind when tied up into a wedding gown. Something I can step up into was preferable, if not mandatory.
I looked into trolley rentals in our area. I figured they weren’t quite as popular as the limo and maybe not as expensive. WOW, was I ever wrong! The trolley rentals I found were almost 50% MORE expensive than the limos and most required a six-to-eight-hour rental minimum. It was way outside the (completely arbitrary) $500 budget I seem to have set for everything, but I was determined to find something more affordable.
In our small-ish city, we have a few city trolleys which operate in the summer months doing tours of museums and “famous” locations around town. I inquired with the city to see if they rented it for private events. They don’t.
Never fear, a similar small-ish city is only 20 minutes away. I shot off an email to their parks and rec department…
TOTALLY hoped that she’d respond!! / Image via NBC
GOOD NEWS! This small-ish city rented out their trolley for a song! Only $100 an hour with a four-hour minimum rental. My penny-pinching inner self was shouting from the rooftops! I booked a meeting with Tammy and the trolley at the city bus depot to check out the trolley to make sure it wasn’t a hot city mess.
(All photos are personal)
So, I love wine. I blame the French. I did a summer in Lyon after my first year of law school to study the law of the European Union, and while I remember very little about the actual course, I got quite an education…in wine. For those of you that don’t know, Lyon is in the Beaujolais region of France, a huge wine region. Wine was literally cheaper than water and tasted amazing!
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Miss Waterfall sampling wine at a vineyard in Pays Lyon, Beaujolais region, circa 2006 / Personal photo
Cut to now, and Mr. Waterfall and I share a mutual love of wine. We definitely enjoy a nice glass of red (or white, or rosé) with dinner most nights.
We settled on DIY submerged centerpieces a while ago, and trying to find cheap vases in the width and style that we were looking for proved beyond difficult. Then, I came across Mrs. Pain au Chocolat’s posts about cutting wine bottles and a light went off in my head. Brilliant! It would be cheap because we were already drinking plenty of wine, AND we would be recycling!
Anyway…we happily started collecting bottles and I finally got around to buying a glass cutter. This is not the exact one, but close enough.
The guestbook is one of those bits of wedding decor that actually has an honest-to-goodness purpose—it even gets its own table, putting it right up there with the cake in level of importance.
Darice Guest Book Set / Image via Amazon
And, yet, after the wedding the guestbook generally gets shoved into a box or onto a shelf, seldom to be looked at again.
Hardly seems fair, right?
Which is why I always thought, even when I wasn’t considering another marriage as a possibility, that having guests sign a photo mat that could then be hung in the home with a picture from the day made much more sense in the grand scheme of things.
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