Wedding Blog

Helloooooo lovahs! I know I’ve been gone for quite some time and I’m not going to give you any excuses. I mean, I have been really busy with work, and I have been helping a few friends with wedding projects, and I have been trying to figure out what to do with all of these unedited notsogreat wedding photos, but seriously, I won’t give you any excuses. I’m just sayin’.

In all honesty, the reason I haven’t posted about our wedding is because I wasn’t sure what to do with our photos.

Choosing our photographer was one of the first decisions I made, and it proved to be one I should have reconsidered. I won’t really go into too many details, but I did try to get some photos edited by our own Mrs. Shortcake! I’ll post about those soon, but unfortunately the photos were just too difficult to edit because of poor quality and formatting, and we could only afford to fix a select few. So I did what I could with them, and I’ll do my best to share with you “our version” of the best day of my life.

First, I wanted to give you a little recap of what my time in Vail was like the week before the wedding. I traveled home a week before the wedding to do some last minute projects, and it really put things into perspective for me. Sure, people would notice the out-of-town guest bags, and sure they would appreciate the water bottle labels, but this stuff didn’t seem as important as I thought it would seem a week before our wedding. Instead, I spent a lot of the time putting together a surprise slide show for Champ that highlighted some of our fun moments as children and pictures of the growth in our relationship. It was so fun to go through old photo albums with my mom, and I’ll always remember the laughs we shared the week before the wedding. It was such a special time between the two of us and it brought us closer than we have ever been. Being apart from Champ the week before the wedding was unexpectedly wonderful! It gave me a chance to reflect on all the reasons I love him and the many reasons I would be his wife.

Don’t get me wrong- it wasn’t all about emotional moments and special times with my family. In fact, I probably drove them crazy with the last minute errands and to-dos. Our first project was the out of town bags. I posted a while back about how I wanted to do a themed “hot hot hot” bag, to provide our guests with items that might help with the cold weather and high altitude. So my mom and I gathered hand warmers, vitamin C packets, Kleenex, Chapstick, and other mountain goodies. We packaged the items in these black gift bags (highly recommend these!). For $5.99 per package of 10, they looked and felt high quality. I taped our monogram onto each bag with mounting tape (the same tape I used on our invitation belly band) and I Goccoed our monogram onto some Stardream paper, which we used as a welcome letter.

Our welcome letter included a little note to our guests explaining the shuttle process and what events were included in the weekend festivities. On the back, we gave some suggestions of places our guests may want to visit. We included some of our favorite restaurants and some fun little details they may not have known:

After a day of skiing or shopping, most visitors will enjoy “après ski” drinks at one of our local bars. We suggest The Red Lion (live entertainment and good bar food), Pepi’s (a true Austrian experience), Los Amigos (sit on the deck, sip a margarita, and watch skiers fall down the infamous icy “Pepi’s face”), and Mickey’s Piano Bar (well known and wonderful!) all in Vail Village for après ski. For later nightlife, check out The Tap Room, The Club, Ski Bar, Vendettas, and Samanas. In Lionshead Village, Garfinkels has a great sunny deck overlooking the slopes with pool tables. If you want to grab a slice of pizza, try Vendettas or Pazzo’s Pizza - Kate’s first job was here as a pizza delivery girl! Have a great time, and explore the beautiful Rocky Mountains!

Many of our guests took our suggestions,and they loved the personal recommendations.

We also included a few bottles of water with our monogram. I purchased plain labels online and printed our monograms on them. We had extra, so we brought them to the reception and drank them (and some champagne!) while we were getting ready.

I, like many bees before me, included a photo sharing website for our guests to upload photos. We used Flickr, and because our professional photographer didn’t capture everything (to say the least), I was really hoping our guests would upload photos. We included the information in the OOT bags and in the CD place card favors.

So that was the OOT bag. Our next project was the unity candle. I left this one for the last minute because 1. I thought it would be easy to find a large ivory pillar candle, and 2. I didn’t really care what it looked like. Wellll, even though we do have a Walmart in Vail, it’s not necessarily what you would expect. I couldn’t find a candle that would work, so we headed to some local shops. I found this pillar candle that actually looks like the branches of aspen leaves. It was pretty alone, but earlier in the week I ran across the extra lace my seamstress had left in my dress bag. It worked PERFECTLY, and I attached the lace around both the pillar and the taper candles.

The next item on my agenda was my hair trial. You may remember that in November I came to Vail for some tastings and trials, and I had a horrific hair trial. It looked nothing like I imagined, and I had to change stylists. So I spoke with my new hairstylist via email and phone, and we scheduled a hair trial for the Wednesday before the wedding. I’m so glad that we did, because although it was closer to what I wanted, the curls were still a bit too tight and it gave me a chance to really share with the stylist what I wanted. Lesson learned—trial, trial, and trial again if you must—it’s worth it in the end!

I thought the curls were just a bit too much, and we opted for a more “relaxed” look for the wedding day.

So, after a whirlwind few days of errands and projects, it was time for the groom to arrive!

Next up- the Champs go to jail! Well, not really—we just follow some really bad directions!