Weddingbee Blog

On day two of our honeymoon cruise we woke up with the boat already docked in Key West, FL. (I think waking up in a different place is one of the coolest things about cruising!)

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Do you GOOP? If you haven’t heard of GOOP yet, it’s a weekly lifestyle newsletter sent out by Gwyneth Paltrow. She writes about all kinds of things; each week focuses on a specific topic, like her favorite restaurants in LA, NY, and London, to her favorite cookie recipes, to gift ideas, to an extended discussion of “frenemies”. Some of it is fascinating, some of it I totally can’t relate to, but all in all, I love receiving the GOOP newsletter in my inbox once a week. A few weeks ago, the newsletter’s topic was a 1 week detox program that focused on resting your digestive system and expelling toxins from your body, while not actually starving yourself.

Ever since Mrs. Canary did the Blueprint Cleanse, I’ve wanted to participate in a detox program. Now that I’ve moved away from my parents’ house, I’ve also moved away from my gym, and eating with my 30 year old husband is very different from eating with my 60 year old parents who are hell bent on watching their cholesterol. After a nasty bout with E.Coli a few years back, my kidneys and bladder are a little bit damaged, and I find myself having to go pee 3-4 times a night, which is horrible for my sleeping patterns. Between my change in diet, leaving my gym, and my pee habits, I knew I wanted to give my insides a jump start. But the price tag of Blueprint was hard to swallow, and while I was ready to get on board and do it, Mr. Penguin refused to participate with the $85 a day price tag per person. And I knew I couldn’t go through a cleanse without a partner… especially if my partner was eating normal foods while I was cleansing. So, when GOOP’s detox newsletter came out, I showed the plan and recipes to Mr. Penguin, and he said he’d definitely get on board with this one.

As a disclaimer, you should discuss any sort of detox program you start with your doctor!

Last night, we purchased the food needed for the first 5 days of the program, using the recipes provided. It was an epic shopping trip. Check out our loot:
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I am not channeling the artist sorta known as Prince, but this one little punctuation mark—the hyphen—is playing a little bit of a role in my name change situation. There have been a variety of posts on name changing from bees both current and past, so I know that this is not a new topic here on Weddingbee land. There have been many creative takes on the name change debate—from keeping your name; to taking your fiance’s name; to making your maiden name your middle name. I like to do things my own way and often that results in some difficulty. You see, I’ve decided to hyphenate my last name.

Yeah, I know that this shouldn’t be such a big deal, but I have a bit of wrinkle in all of this name change business: My first name is already HYPHENATED!!! That’s right. Here’s what my name is now:

First Name-First Name Middle Name Last Name.

I can’t believe I want to hyphenate my LAST name! I just can’t get enough of super long names!

After researching this a bit, I’ve learned that while I can change my last name quite easily, my first name is another whole topic. I was able to choose a new surname on our marriage license application. I find it interesting that Mr. Swan was not given the option to change his on the form, but I digress…

To change my first name, I would be required to go through a judicial proceeding.
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I’ve posted about the ins and outs of our invitations… we’ve had them in our house since about February, but actually taking the final step—addressing these suckers—took some planning. We have these fabulous outer envelopes, but I just didn’t know what to do in order to stay in line with the integrity of the design. Oh yeah, and in line with that pesky budget.

Source: Plush Paper

Along with many others, I fell in love with this easy way to mimic calligraphy, as posted on Project Wedding. I’m sure many others have hopped on board with this great project, including Miss Piglet (her invitations are fabulous!).
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Having a polka dot motif certainly opened us up to a lot of cool options for everything — from cake, to bow details, to pretty paper, to bridesmaid attire! The struggle for me has been to balance my concern about having too few polka dots versus having too many. The perfect polka dot balance is a tough one to strike.

So when I first started thinking about bridesmaid dresses, I was up in the air. There are some totally awesome options like this gorgeous dress with a purple sash:

(Photo Credit)

I love, love, love this dress, but decided that it would be way too much on five girls. Maybe just on my MOH, I then pondered. But I quickly rejected that idea, too, because I was worried that she would look too different from the other bridesmaids and me.

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Our compass placecards were recently featured in a Brides.com story on summer/beach/nautical-themed weddings. The compasses actually work, so they function as a favor, not just a placecard and also are available in larger sizes that you can use for table numbers (compasses shown here are 1.7″ in diameter). We had matching menu cards used with these compasses as well.

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Because Fourth of July weekend was pretty much my last hurrah before bar exam studying hit in full force, I convinced the Dude that we needed to take a day trip to celebrate. We decided on Fredericksburg, a charming little German-Texan town about two hours west of Austin.

Central Texas is home to several smaller communities that were originally settled by German immigrants in the 1800s, including Fredericksburg and New Braunfels.

At any rate, Fredericksburg today is a thriving tourist community, filled with museums, incredible antique shops, biergardens, wineries, bed and breakfasts, and historical monuments. It’s also teeming with gorgeous wedding ceremony locales, which I couldn’t help but scope out during our day trip.
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Take a cHill pill.

Around mid-May, despite my best efforts, planning snafus starting coming out of the woodwork. Our super cute cake toppers arrived, but the bridal birdie needed some TLC before she could stand up on her own again. Wording drama ensued after our late-to-mail invitations dropped. I developed the unfortunate habit of writing notes to myself, only to promptly misplace them. The successful second sangria recipe notwithstanding, my bad luck in the kitchen continued to haunt me with several disastrous attempts at wedding-related sweets. One step forward, two steps back. Panic ensued as I fretted how we’d ever be ready by the end of August. (Please tell me I’m not the only one feeling like this as the countdown continues!)

And some of my fellow bees really weren’t helping to ease my stress. (Sorry, ladies!)
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Two months after our engagement I had my first wedding dress shopping experience with my mom in PA. The trip was unsuccessful, except that I learned more about what I was looking for and what looked good on me, because my mom encouraged me to try on every shape and size imaginable! I also figured out what I liked was not what my mother wanted to see me in. Ack! The realization that the dress you want will not be one that your mother swoons over is a hard hit.

I also had a secret. In the back of my mind I was coveting a certain dress. It was one I had seen online, and I was fully aware that none of the stores we were visiting had it. This was the dress keeping me from loving all the others. It was my first “dream dress”, a Claire Pettibone:

(source)

Mr. Sunbeam, if you are reading this you have hit the red tape! Go no further! I know where you live!
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Check out the intricate blue peacock theme on these invitations by Saima Says Design!

Don’t forget to check out all the professional inspiration from the top wedding vendors in the industry in the PRO Folio!

When I started looking for veil inspiration, I wasn’t sure what I really wanted. I had tried on a few veils while dress shopping, but nothing really caught my eye (and at $$$, I wasn’t really into buying a veil, anyways). While I was shopping at Jo-Ann’s one afternoon, I decided to stop by the pattern section to look for veils. It turned out that the patterns were on sale for $1.99, and I ended up finding one that I thought looked okay.

“F” is the pattern I decided to use, minus the bow. I also decided I wanted a two-tiered veil instead of just one-tier, and that I wanted to add lace trim. Before I go into the details of sewing a veil, this is a list of supplies I bought (from Jo-Ann’s, all on sale):
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Isn’t almost every girl a fan of Sex and the City? I think the appeal of the show is that everyone who watches it sees a little of themselves in one or more of the characters. One of the things I share in common with Carrie Bradshaw is a love of shoes. Although I’ve never spent more than about $40 on a pair of heels (while Carrie claimed in one episode that she has spent $40,000 on them), I still have a great appreciation for all the expensive shoe designers and their fabulous creations. I consider one designer in particular to be no less than an absolute genius:

Christian Louboutin

Louboutin is to me what Manolo Blahnik is to Carrie (although she is occasionally seen prancing around in Loubies). I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I’ve lusted over his designs. But I could never bring myself to justify the purchase of a pair because of the sky high price tag that is always attached to them.

But then I got engaged and started planning my wedding.
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First of all, I KNOW that our invites should have gone out much earlier than now. I cannot believe it didn’t really hit me until this past week that—HELLO—our RSVP date is at the end of this month, and our guests have yet to receive the invitation! Bad bride! Maybe I was just too sad to part with them because I am so in love with them. Mr Frenchie is lucky I met him before these invitations (or I met these invites because of him) because it would be hard to choose between the two. (Honey, I am kidding, of course.)

This Sunday, Mr Frenchie, Mama Frenchie, Sister Frenchie, and I sat around Mama Frenchie’s dining room table and knocked these puppies out. (As a Bulldog I’m not sure I should be using that saying.)

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Several people have asked us about the application time frame, and the ideal amount of time before your wedding when applying to blog for Weddingbee. As a general rule, you’re welcome to apply if you’re within 8 months of your wedding date. Bees of current and past generations have chosen to apply to blog at various points in their wedding planning process: some applied at the 8-month mark to the date, and some have applied with less than 2 months to go! But the average bee at the time of their acceptance seems to be around the 6 month mark of their wedding.

There are a couple of reasons why 6 months is one of the magical numbers when we’re evaluating applications:

• Bees write an average of 3-4 posts a week, so having a couple of months of planning already under their belt gives them an archive of topics that they can readily write about.  We’ve also found that blogging for longer than 6 months often causes a bee to burn out.  Writing 3-4 posts/week on any topic is not an easy task, and our bees like to keep it fresh and interesting.  We salute them for contributing so much to the hive!
• With 6 months until their weddings, bees still have plenty of planning left to do, and they take us all along for a front row ride!
• After booking some of the big things like the venue, brides don’t start their projects and the meat of their planning until they’re about 6 months out or so. When we’re reviewing applications, one of the things we like to see is evidence of your actual wedding plans and details. While inspiration boards and pictures are gorgeous, we like to see how you’ve taken your inspiration and translated it and made it your own. But, this is not to say that we don’t accept bees that are 8 months out! Some people are incredibly on top of their planning, and DIY brides especially seem to have a lot of projects brewing even a year before their wedding.

So that’s a little glimpse into how we came up with the application time frame!

We’ve mentioned this before, and we’ll say it again:

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I have been working pretty steadily the past few days on a little surprise project for my bridesmaids that I am waiting to share until it is absolutely completed. But my ADD took over and I had to take a quick break to work on something else. This happens way too often and is the number one reason I now have about ten half-completed projects taking over my home.

I ordered this adorable birdcage from Save on Crafts a few months back and it has been staring at me looking ugly and naked ever since (mine is 17”, which they don’t seem to sell alone anymore). Don’t get me wrong, it is super cute, but every time I look at it I think of the potential it could have. So, in about 30 minutes today, I printed a cute little card sign, played with some beautiful PaperSource ribbon, and our little birdcage is now gorgeous and ready for the wedding!

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