Weddingbee Blog

Another Kitten Teaser Pic!

Photo by Joe Simon

After some research, I determined that StillMotion was out of our budget (although they were super helpful and nice!), but the very talented Joe Simon could work with the Kitten budget. With Joe I found exactly what I was looking for–a wedding cinematographer with a fresh, artistic style who makes wedding films that I could actually afford! If he sounds familiar, it’s because he filmed Mrs. Bird of Paradise’s wedding back in 2006! Joe travels all over the country and abroad to film weddings, and he was thrilled about the prospect of coming to the Cayman Islands.
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I thought finding a reception space was hard until FMIL asked me to look for a rehearsal dinner spot. The requirements? A place for 35 people to dine for about $25-30 a head (not including, tax, tip or beverages), serve wine and beer, have some vegetarian options, and will serve family style (no pizza). Oh, on a Friday night around 6PM-ish. Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong! I’ve dealt with 6 different restaurants, some leading me on, and others flat out telling me that they were not willing to lose that Friday night business.

I’m not trying to arrange a budget dinner at a 5 star restaurant. All the places I looked had main courses that feed 2-3 people for $10-15 a piece. I’m (well, my FILs are) willing to spend over $30 a head for a 2-hour dinner. I think the math says our group is more lucrative.

I have to say that I am really amazed that people don’t want our money.
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Some people have been wondering where I got my ring’s box. I’m a modern girl, but sometimes I just love vintage accessories. (Take my ring, for example… or the whole ’getting-married-in-the-courthouse’ idea.) A while back, Miss Snapdragon featured an antique ring box that her [nasty jerk of an ex] fiance had bought to present her with her engagement ring. I decided that I needed one.

Mr. Mary Jane is always overwhelmingly supportive of me buying stuff I like (even impractical stuff!), but he was curious as to why I wanted such an item. After all, the ring was going to stay on my finger from here on out… why would I want a box? I figured that a fabulous ring deserved a fabulous box. That’s as far as I’d thought about it, really. My amazing, sparkly, unique ring deserved more lavish accommodations than the white pleather generic jewelry store box in which it came. Also, the photographer in me knew that it’d make a perfect prop for the plethora of ring-shots I planned to take. (Mr. MJ was definitely on board with that - he’s a photonerd too!) And (if you insist on practicality…) we could at least use the box to store our bands until the big day.

We don’t live in a very big city, and there aren’t a lot of kitschy jewelry/antique stores. Most just sell furniture and larger knick-knacks. We do have some second-hand and thrift-shops, but I was honestly too lazy to set aside hours for digging through what amounts to mostly random, worthless old junk. Sometimes I get in a mood for “going thrifting”, but as a rule I find that it’s never worthwhile to go in to a second-hand store expecting to find a specific item. So after only briefly considering my local options, I turned to my friend, the Internet.
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(a lot)

And I “collect” it. Yes, I’m one of those people- a “fabric hoarder”. As is evidenced by this:

I wanted to incorporate fabric into the wedding because, well, I love it… and I love to sew. Conveniently, since I knew I wanted to avoid using fresh flowers if at all possible, I had a solution. I decided to make our (and by “our” I am including the bridal party as well) bouquets and boutonnieres from fabric. I searched many sources online (including Martha Stewart and Etsy) to get ideas on what fabric bouquets and flowers should look like, but I really didn’t find anything that inspired me enough to produce an exact replica. The solution? I worked from scratch to create my own design.
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I went shopping - and found THE MOST PERFECT WEDDING SHOES (again). They were yellow. They were Cole Haan (whom I have had a longstanding and unabashed love affair with for years). They were flat. Unfortunately, they were a size too small, and they only had one pair on the rack (clearance, obviously). They were perfect, and I contemplated torturing my feet for just one day, for maybe 10 minutes. In the end, I decided against it after what happened with the last ’perfect shoes’.

I had found two other pairs of shoes I was getting, so I made my way up to the counter. I waited in line, and then I asked - just out of curiosity - if they had any shoes in the back. They said that typically clearance shoes are all out on the racks, but volunteered to check anyways. I waited in suspense. The cashier said the woman checking would probably just call if she didn’t have any left. No call came. I saw her, and she had two boxes of shoes in her hands. I got excited, my stomach got all fluttery… and they were in MY size!!!! They’d never been on the floor, never been tried on by anyone’s feet but mine, and they were the perfect patent leather lemon yellow Cole Haan Piper Ballet flats in a 9.

To the Dear Ladies @ Saks,
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The Treasured Petal

• A fire and ice wedding with flowers by The Treasured Petal
• A lavish wedding in Pasadena by Amelia Lyon
• Lo and Co in The Knot
• Delicate grey and cream letterpress by Betsy Dunlap
• Bella Figura’s invitation trends for 2009
• A true Maine wedding by Emilie Inc
• Mrs. Bee goes behind the scenes at Preston Bailey’s 60th birthday bash

source

We (okay, let’s be honest, I) babysat our neighbors’ six-month-old son this Saturday while they attended a wedding and it got me thinking about us and our future. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “Honey, let’s wait like a decade until we have kids. I need a nap.”

Him: “Okay. Whatever. Wait, but you’re really good with kids. I had no idea. You don’t even need me. It’s like you know magic to get him to stop crying.”

Me: “Thanks. It’s called bouncing around. WAIT. This is babysitting. Don’t get your hopes up. Come hang out with him.”
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Remember my photo tour of the F.U.E.L. House? All those open spaces, all that expansive marble and hardwood flooring?

Yeah, well, it’s beautiful, but not exactly conducive to hosting a wedding. No fleet of chairs is hidden anywhere within the F.U.E.L. House; no china, flatware, glassware are readily available for use when you rent the space.

Plates for our dinner and seats for our guests, though, are pretty high on our priority list. So… what’s the Bruschetta game plan? Working through our amazing caterer, we’ll be renting every single piece we need for our reception. Yup, enter the pink hippo.

(source)

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Every bride knows the little rhyme that tells them what they must carry with them on their wedding day. I thought I’d share one of my wedding day items with you all and the story behind it.

One of the first (of many) photos I had clipped out of a wedding magazine was this bouquet from Modern Bride.

I fell in love with the cameo that the bride had attached to her bouquet, in honor of her late grandmother.
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Hunting on Etsy is a hobby of mine. It is seriously what I do to relax, slow down after a long day, and be inspired. I found these belts and thought they would a perfect wedding accessory. I think a bride could use them on her dress, on the bridesmaids’ dresses, or for a flower girl. There are so many options. I found these in the Etsy shop of The Art Hive.

My favorite by far is this navy and pink one:

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In order to keep up with the huge list of blogs I read, I use Google Reader. All of the newest posts are delivered straight to my reader, and it’s easy to keep track of them. I hesitated to start Google Reader, but now I love it, aside from the fact than it’s harder to comment all the time now. I’ll often “star” my favorites for inspiration, tutorials, or just useful information. As I went through my “starred items” the other day, I began to notice a certain theme in some of the posts. Lately I’ve just been loving any sort of wooden detail. There is just this rustic charm to using wood slices, branches, and signs throughout the wedding.

Here are some of the wooden details that have caught my attention lately.

It would be so unique to use wood slice platters during your cocktail hour.

Ritzy Bee
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Previously:

1. Prelude, 2. Tea Ceremony, 3. Getting Ready, 4. The Kids, 5. Wedding Party, 6. Down the Aisle 7. Ceremony, 8. Group Shots, 9. Couple Shots, 10. Jump Shots 11. House Shots, 12. Cocktails and Dinner, 13. First Dance, 14. Parents’ Dance, 15. Toasts, 16. Cake, 17. Lion Dance, 18. Sweet Fountain

A lot of thought was put into the dancing portion. I know that while I put effort to get on the dance floor at weddings, I don’t often stay out for long. But when I do, watch-out y’all, we got a hot one in here!

From the DJ, to the music, to the set up to the timing of events, we considered as much as we could and made decisions based on what would keep guests around and dancing through the night. Well, our hard work paid off, because every single guest was on the dance floor at some point and most of them boogied ’til the end!

Here’s us showing ’em how itz done:

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Kitten Wedding Teaser Pic!

Photo Source

When I started planning our wedding, I never thought I would hire a wedding videographer. The wedding videos I had seen up to that point were, let’s face it, pretty darn boring. Sure, it’s great to record the day for posterity, but most wedding videos aren’t exactly something that a couple will pull off the shelf and watch very often. Most of my married friends didn’t hire a videographer for this very reason. Not only that, but videographers aren’t exactly cheap; in fact, they can be a huge expense! At the very most, I was gravitating to delegating wedding videography to a friend or family member, who would use a handheld camera–something other Bees, like Miss Piglet, have talked about doing as well.
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We are nearly two months away from the wedding. As I’ve said many, many times… there’s a lot to do. I am hoping to keep myself so “busy” that I forget to remember that I won’t have a bridal shower.

Several months ago, my lovely maid of honor, N, asked me if I wanted a bridal shower, and even offered to fly to California and host one for me. So sweet! I told her I’d get back to her about it, and left it at that. I procrastinated for weeks, and let a lot of time pass before telling her that the answer was, “No, I won’t be having a shower.” Of course, I thanked her profusely for her kind gesture. She touched my heart with her offer.

I won’t go into too much detail about the reasons behind not having a shower. But I will say that one of the big reasons was that my side of the family is small, and hasn’t always been the picture of perfection. Some people haven’t seen or spoken to one another in years. Awkward. I am mostly okay with my decision to skip the shower, but at times, it hits me and I feel like I am missing out. I also can’t pretend that it doesn’t bother me that no one (meaning my family or Mr. G’s family) seems to care. It’s not like anyone is sitting around wondering if or when I will have a bridal shower. I haven’t gotten one inquiry from the people I hoped would care the most.
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Today’s photo of the day was uploaded by Horseshoe. Check out her awesome DIY “Playbill” save the dates! You can see her cost breakdown and the materials she used to make these here.

Keep on loading your inspirational wedding pictures to the gallery to win this week’s prize: two pairs of each type of false lashes from Revlon’s new Fantasy Lengths collection!