While the girls and I were rolling around in a limo, the boys were off in their secluded room on the first floor of the museum, preparing to take group photos. Mr. Candy Corn was especially nervous—he later told me how he tried his best to distract himself during this time from obsessing over what my dress looked like, and how he would feel to see me walking down the aisle. He said that five minutes felt like five hours and how surreal it was to have the ceremony just moments away.
I hadn’t planned on displaying my bee-hind to you so early; I thought you’d at least take me out to dinner first. But since yesterday’s Weddingbee Wiki post was on bustles, I figured I’d be topical and show you the photos of my bustle from my second fitting yesterday.
My seamstress, Anahit (who, incidentally, is quite possibly the best bridal seamstress in New England — thanks, Mrs. Toucan, for the recommendation!) put in a one-point French bustle — simple, classic, perfect. And she blew my mind by showing us that you can wear a French bustle two ways. First, she created a mermaid’s tail look:
But with a simple flick of the wrist and some magic, Anahit changed the bustle to a more drapey look:
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Now more than ever, I have noticed that there are plenty of ways to politely decline an invitation to a wedding. You see, during the past few weeks we have received several polite declines.
Unfortunately, a polite decline is still a decline, and in my case, it still hurts. I understand that not every guest can attend, but with each “sends regret” box checked, my heart sinks a little. It especially hurts when a decline is a decline without reason. You see, our RSVP cards included a place for guests to leave us a note; many declined without a note, without reason. I was secretly hoping for guests to explain their decline. Overall, I am very grateful that we have family and friends attending, but I can’t help feeling rejected by many.
How do you/did you deal with RSVP rejection?
Last month, Mr. Eggplant was the best man for our friends’ wedding in San Diego. Coincidentally, one of my bridesmaids was the maid of honor! The wedding was gorgeous. Our friends hosted a lunch reception at the Marine Room, a restaurant with an AMAZING ocean front view. The beach was literally right outside the window. Unbelievable. And the food… Oh. Mah. Gah. It was the best wedding food I’ve ever tasted.
Hubs gave a hilarious Best Man speech where he made fun of the Cal/Stanford rivalry between the couple (Mark, the groom, graduated from Cal, and Catherine, the bride, from Stanford). Hubs got some good chuckles from the crowd–he’s such a ham. He also prepared a slideshow for the couple, which was better than the slideshow he prepared for us! Why? Well, Hubs did something super sweet for the bride and groom: he emailed all of their close friends who couldn’t attend the wedding and asked them to record a short video sending well wishes to the newlyweds. Then Hubs added the footage at the end of the slideshow as a surprise! The couple was definitely surprised. How stinkin’ sweet is that? I’m so proud of Hubs. He thought the idea up all by himself.
Featured on Weddingbee
All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
Reader scarlet is selling her Nicole Miller tea length gown. It is size 4, and features lace over silk in an off white color. She is asking for $150 OBO.
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:
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With less than three months to go until we get married, I’ve decided it’s time to start working on the part of the whole thing that I look forward to the most: the ceremony.
I was a bit uncomfortable about writing it; if I know every word, every passage, every sentiment, will I feel as engaged (no pun intended) during our ceremony?
But after much web surfing and some shower time (don’t you do your best thinking in the shower?), I’m very excited. I figure it’s much like live music: I may know every word and every note, but there’s just something special about hearing a song sung live.
So, as I get started (Wheeee! I’m excited!), I thought I’d share all of my ceremony links from Weddingbee. You can recreate my search by reading through every post tagged “ceremony” — or you can just use the list below.
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Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
I can’t even express what a relief it is to have booked the venue for our rehearsal dinner! It’s been a long haul, brotha’man.
Okay, well maybe we’re partly to blame for having difficult criteria. We wanted a spot that was unique to the LA area, which ruled out easy choices such as Maggiano’s or Bucca di Beppo. We definitely wanted a private room, since we’re anticipating 30-45 guests and wanted space to be together and not worry about noise. We wanted it to be relatively close to the hotel, so our guests wouldn’t have to navigate the nightmare roads of LA too far to find us. Lastly, we wanted to keep the cost to a very reasonable number, while still providing dinner and drinks to our out-of-town guests. However, finding a space that accommodated all that criteria was starting to feel like a pipe dream after months of seeking the perfect location!
We looked seriously at a couple of options:
Miceli’s is an adorable old school pizza/pasta restaurant within walking distance of the hotel, with ambiance like crazy, including chianti bottles dangling from the ceiling. Since we heart pizza like it’s life-blood, and they have a basement room, it seemed a perfect choice. Unfortunately, their $30+ per person pizza/pasta buffet didn’t include drinks, and that was decidedly not perfect.
I love playing with different fragrances. I’ll layer a scented body lotion under a refreshing body splash, or wear different perfumes depending on the weather, my mood, etc.
I’ve always known I wanted something special to wear on W day. Since I like and wear such a variety of scents, I don’t really have one that’s my “signature”. You know what that means — time to go shopping!!
Our wedding is outdoors in April. Thus, I wanted a fragrance that evoked springtime, was light and airy, and fresh and clean. After sniffing (what seemed like) hundreds of different scents I think we’ve found a winner, something worthy of becoming my signature bridal scent—
We’ve been planning to do a candy buffet as our favor since we got engaged. I’ve been approaching it with mixed feelings these days. For starters, candy is expensive. I’m really, truly trying to push that thought from my mind until I have to worry about it this summer. But beyond the cost, I’ve found that it’s hard to do a candy buffet and make it look great! If you don’t give a lot of thought to texture, colors, containers, and varying the heights, your buffet may fall flat.
Fortunately, Flickr has a Candy Buffet Photo Pool, so you can search through example after example with ease. To make the execution of this favor even more accessible, I’ve decided to break it off piece by piece. Let’s start with signage, take away containers, and texture.
Candy Buffet Take Away Containers
I’ve seen different boxes and bags for guests to fill up with candy. Chinese-style takeout boxes are popular, but I have no desire to have a stack of these just asking to be knocked over! The most functional (and affordable) option I’ve seen are bags that coffee is normally stored in, complete with the twist tie top.
Source: Flickr.com
Mr. D and I often dream of the time after August (maybe even before!?) when we’ll have a place to call our own. Not only that, but we’ll both have jobs, we’ll living in the same country (with our pets!) and won’t be living with roommates. I know, such is the life we dream about.
It may not seem like much of a dream to many of you. In fact, you may be living our dream right now. Mr. D and I enjoy looking at design blogs and saving pictures of elements or rooms we like. We also delight in going to IKEA and pretending we live in a few of the “rooms”. We just can’t seem to stop these random people from entering our kitchens and living rooms, though. We like bookcases! 
I noticed that a few commenters on yesterday’s Valentines post mentioned that they forgot to send photos. If there are any more of you out there, this is your last chance! We are going to post one more round of photos so that everyone can see all of our Weddingbee crafting goodness. Email photos to canary [at] weddingbee [dot] com.
If we weren’t having such a rustic wedding then I would 100% use this idea in our wedding and/or purchase these great candles from Etsy’s Something Beautiful.
The search for my wedding dress had officially begun. Mama Duck and I went to two different bridal dress stores. You may remember my first post regarding my feelings for wedding dress shopping. I’m pleased to say that I actually had a good time and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
There are a few things that began to stand out as I tried on dresses. I really liked dresses that had rouching in the bodice. To my surprise, a dropped waist looked good on me. My fear was that I was not going to be tall enough. However, the height was not an issue and the dropped waist showed off a bit more of my figure.
Our first store was Here Comes The Bride in San Diego. It is one of the more popular stores down there. There is a big room that has lots of dresses and then a hall with several “bridal suites”. The bridal suite is where you try on the dresses and it has a comfy couch, big mirror, pedestal, and a little cabinet with water, binder clips, and other things I don’t know about.
Basically I just took a deep breath and went for it. I learned the “duck and dive” move it get into the dresses. Thanks to some advice from a fellow blogger, I wore a strapless bra and some bikini panties so that my butt was not exposed for all to see. I’d say that the experience was not necessarily emotional, but kind of a “woah moment” when I realized I really had a wedding dress on.
Okay loyal readers, I did take pictures… or I guess Mama Duck did. However, she was sitting down taking some of them, and tended to just hit the button at random times. The result being that these pictures are NOT flattering. I will show them to you as long as you promise not to laugh at how scary I look. If you have never seen a picture of me before, I apologize in advance and encourage you to keep checking back for when my posts don’t contain terrible pictures of myself. I am trying to be a brave and be a devoted blogger and will show you the good, bad and ugly. Here we go…
NOTE: Mr. Ducky, if you are randomly looking at this blog, do not look any further. I mean it! You will be sorry…
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We chose our simple, unassuming ceremony site in Polebridge partly for its convenience, accessibility, and proximity to our reception, but there was also something utterly breathtaking about being married in center of a small town in the shadow of such stately peaks. Although part of me wishes we’d chosen to be married on the shores of Lake McDonald or had been given permission by the Park Service to wed at Bowman Lake, I loved our ceremony setup something fierce.
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It was now April and we’d been together 5 months. Mr. Bee’s parents were coming to visit for a week from the Philippines. I had already booked a flight to New York before they decided to come and was scheduled to arrive the day after they left, but I changed my flight so that I could meet them. Dinner went off without a hitch. Mr. Bee’s parents were nice, friendly, and they didn’t have any objections to us getting married. Phew.
I came back to New York the following month, and I knew that Mr. Bee was going to propose on this trip. We’d been together 6 months by this time, and I couldn’t wait because 6 months may sound like a short period of time, but it felt like an eternity because we’d been talking about getting married for over 5 months at this point. My parents would never have let me move cross country to New York unless we were engaged, and we desperately wanted to be together.
On May 7th, we returned to that same wine bar where we first met. Our waiter was acting suspiciously nice and nervous when we arrived. To tell you the truth, he gave it away and I immediately knew, but I played along. After our dinner, the jazzy music playing overhead was suddenly eclipsed by Top of the World by the Carpenters.
When I returned home after I first met Mr. Bee, my dad caught me walking around the house singing Top of the World. He said to me, “Why are you so happy? You must be in love!” I wasn’t even aware that I was singing! Hehe and he was right of course. When I told Mr. Bee about this, he immediately downloaded the song and listened to it over and over. So cheesy as the song is, it kinda became our song.
I digress. As soon as I heard the song, I knew that he was going to propose at that very moment. Mr. Bee said all these wonderful things to me, but I was soooooooooo excited, I’m not sure I remember it all because he opened the ring box while he was talking! He proposed and of course I said yes, yes, yes! I didn’t believe this before I met Mr. Bee, but when you meet the person you want to marry - you just know. It doesn’t take you years and years to decide if he or she is the one. We both knew that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together after that first week.
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