Weddingbee Blog

Mrs. Penguin here! Flower costs were, by far, the biggest mystery to me. We hope that by seeing the bees’ flowers and their costs, you can get a better idea for floral pricing for your own wedding! A big thank you to all the bees that continue to contribute to our Real Bee Budget series… you guys are the best!

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Mrs. Hot Cocoas’ Flowers

Florist: Kate Baker Florals, Southern California

Total floral cost: $6750
Included:

• Chuppah
• Bride’s Bouquet
• 6 Bridesmaid Bouquets
• 4 Small Posies for mothers and grandmothers
• 10 Boutonnieres
• 21 High/Low Centerpieces
• 2 VIP table vignettes
• 1 Head table vignette
• Miscellaneous arrangements for cocktail tables

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Sarah and John wanted to include two rituals I had never done before into their wedding ceremony -a Sapling Planting and a Circle of Love.

They got the idea for the Circle of Love from John & Kate Plus 8, when they had their vow renewal in Hawaii (side note: watching that episode last week for research made me a little sad with the Gosselin’s recent news).

source

It’s a traditional Hawaiian ritual, but I couldn’t find a lot of information online. Most of what I found was about using the Circle of Love as more of a floral decoration (i.e., creating the altar where they would get married, with perhaps a brief mention in the ceremony itself - like a decorative chuppah) than a ritual. But Sarah and John wanted to incorporate their family into it, having them place the flowers to create the Circle of Love during the processional, in lieu of having a traditional bridal party.
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There’s been a lot of talk around the hive about name changing, so I thought I’d throw in my own little name conundrum.

I have a very interesting last name. Unless you’re Sri-Lankan or spent some time near a large Sri-Lankan community, it’s not a name that you’d probably be familiar with or be comfortable attempting to say. On the first day of 2nd grade, my art teacher, Mrs. Lundeen, told me that over the summer she learned to spell my last name from memory. I remember how proud she was of herself. It’s a big accomplishment. It took me months to learn to spell it myself.

I like my last name but I’m not THAT attached to it. Apparently it’s not my Dad’s last name at all. I’m told that our real last name is Fernando, but the British made my grandfather change it. I’m not sure on the details of the story, though.

I always felt like I’d be happy to take my husband’s name. I wasn’t worried about my last name dying out — I have 4 male cousins who will ensure it will live on. Notice I said, “felt.” I’m not sure I feel that way now.
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Bridebella and her fiance took this beautiful engagement photo with vibrant fall foliage to go along with their plans for a fall wedding.

Keep on loading your inspirational wedding pics to the gallery to see them featured here on the blog! Remember, your images must be under 1MB in size, or they won’t load.

Let me introduce you to the newest wedding related word in my vocabulary:

Snackrifice - giving up snacks to fit into that perfect (yet unforgiving) white dress.

image

I’ve been trying to cut back on the snacking habits as of late but I’m SO bad at it.
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I know, I know. This was supposed to be Part IV of my invitation series but I needed a breather from all of that design-speak. In lieu of all things paper, I’m going to talk about something completely different: flower girl accessories.

One of the things I want to gift my flower girls with is cute hair accessories to go with their eyelet dresses. Where did I turn first? Where else, but J. Crew’s crewcuts accessory section. The bridesmaids are wearing dresses from there—or at least dresses that match their colors—so I figured I could get cute, chiffon-y headbands or hair clips that match.

I thought it might be cute if they all wore different ones, especially since they all have different hair. My cousin has Annie-like red curls while the other two have soft, blond waves.

These are the ones I ordered:

(source)

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Marsting87 is selling her Casablanca 1900 wedding dress. There is champagne satin under 3 layers of ivory lace. The dress has a train that has already been altered so it’s ready for bustling. The asking price is $650.

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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Yesterday, was quite a busy day. After work I met my trainer at the gym, went home, rinsed off, grabbed Paigely and Mama Frenchie, went to visit Mahtab, came home, made dinner, ate dinner, and then went to dance lessons with Papa Frenchie. At the end of the day I was exhausted, but it wasn’t in vain, because now I FINALLY have pictures of me in my dress to share. YAY!

First off, let me just say that Mahtab is the sweetest lady I’ve ever met and she definitely knows what she is doing. She taught Mama Frenchie how to properly lace up my dress so that is makes a lovely “V” in the back. Unlike the girl at the salon who, when I picked up the dress, laced me up so tight I looked like a sausage coming out of its casing. She then took in the sides of the top a little so the sweetheart neckline laid nicely and covered my girls. Once she was done with the hem, we were finished with the front.

** Again, Mr Frenchie, love of my life, if for some reason you’ve decided to check out Weddingbee today, this post is not intended for your eyes… NO LOOKIE.**
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When looking for my perfect wedding shoes, I had a few criteria that I was pretty firm on:

1. Ivory, to match my dress, of course
2. Heel can’t be taller than 2.5″
3. Pointy toes, because they make my legs look less stumpy
4. Less than $175
5. Some sort of interesting detail, because I love shoes and don’t want them to be boring!

Apparently, having five bullet points that you’re not really willing to budge on makes shoe shopping ridiculously hard. Yeah, I’m picky…

In my everyday life, I almost always turn to Zappos to solve my shoes crises. They have almost everything and their shipping and return policy can’t be beat. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find what I was looking for in wedding shoes on Zappos. The closest I came was a pair of Stuart Weitzmans that fit 4 out of 5 of my needs, but the shoes weren’t particularly interesting on their own. I tossed around the idea of buying them:

(Photo credit)

To give ’em some razzle-dazzle, I would have bought some crystal brooches from M&J Trimming like these:
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I went back and forth, back and forth on whether or not we needed a day of coordinator (DOC) for our wedding. I even went so far as to contact some coordinators last year to find out pricing. But then I allowed our budget to rear its ugly head and decided that this was an extra cost we

just couldn’t justify.

Fast forward to this past January. I started to worry more and more about the actual events of the wedding day and who would do what. It was these babies that really started to have me worried:

Source

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Thank you notes. They have to be the most dreaded post-wedding task. (I hear you moaning and groaning right along with me.) I confess that I even gave some thought during the honeymoon in regards to how unappealing the job seemed. Even with the wedding a month behind us, I feel like I just finished writing thank you notes for the shower. Looking at the calendar, I had those finished over seven weeks ago, but, as I stare at the list of names on my wedding thank you list, it seems like it was just yesterday when I was writing notes to most of them in appreciation for the wonderful kitchen tools, bedding, towels and other gifts I was grateful to receive. And now, I have close to 100 notes to write, and I just have no motivation to check this task off of my to-do list.

Regardless, I need to get my butt in gear and get these hand-written messages of gratitude to the people who shared our day with us and/or were thoughtful enough to give us a gift. I really am thankful for all of the generosity, but just not so thrilled about the process of expressing all of that on paper.

Unfortunately for me, Mr. DE has the worst handwriting. I think he could probably do a better job if he put the pen in is toes and tried to write that way.
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I may have mentioned before that the Dude is into music. It’s one of his three favorite things (besides me!); his list goes: music, college football, and Microsoft Excel, in no particular order. He not only plays guitar and bass but also has great taste in music. Over the past five years, he has introduced me to all sorts of artists that I would’ve never thought twice about–a lot of them indie, local, and even a bit avant garde. He’s turned me into a total music snob, though I will never stop jamming to Beyonce and ABBA in my car.

One of the main reasons we want to have an iPod reception is so that we can hand-pick each song on our playlist. (Can you say, “control freaks”?) We’re picking the music together, but the Dude gets veto power, just in case I pick something too cheesy for his taste. For the reception music, we are going for songs that capture a dreamy, bittersweet, subtle mood. We’re not so much concerned with lyrics, though it would be nice not to have too many songs that explicitly criticize love or marriage. We’d also like to play a lot of music from local artists, since we are living in the Live Music Capitol of the World. There are tons of Austin bands that I’d like to give links to, but unfortunately a lot of them do not have videos on YouTube—or the ones there are are of poor quality.

At any rate, I’d like to share a few videos so you all can get an idea for the type of mood we’d like to create during our reception—some of these may even make the cut!

The album version has pretty strings, too!
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Mr. Mary Jane and I wanted to send thanks to a few people who really helped us out in the home-buying process. So when I ordered our “Semi-DIY” address change photo cards from Shutterfly, I added a couple of custom photo cards to the shipment.

For the front of these cards, I chose a similar (but not the same) shot to the main one used on the address cards. I ordered five 5″x7″ cards with the image printed on them and custom text inside. Here are the results:

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I recently received an exciting piece of mail! No, it wasn’t another bachelor party postcard (although I’ll be sure to report on those as I get them). The mail I received was the invitation to my second (and final) bridal shower! This one’s hosted by a family friend with help from my mother, and will consist of mostly guests from my side of the family, along with some friends and bridesmaids that couldn’t make it to the first one.

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… Ms. Joey will solve the table number problem.

We thought we figured out the whole table number thing a few weeks ago. Remember? I blogged about it.

We were really excited until reality set in. We have almost 26 tables that seat anywhere between 4-10 people. That’s a lot of wine bottles to have on tables and at the bar.

We have a few families of 4 we’d like to put in booths who wouldn’t drink a bottle of wine. We also have groups of 4 who would go through a bottle in no time flat. Plus, do we put red out or white? There were too many questions and too many things to figure out.

So I hunted around again, and of course, Martha provided the perfect solution.
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