Weddingbee Blog

The Bio Post-a-Thon was a hit! So many of you continue to update your inspirational bios! As promised, we’ll showcase bios updated this week, all week. Check out today’s featured bios!

twalison

naangel55

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Keep those great bios coming! If you haven’t started yours yet, click on over here to get started! Your bio will appear at the address http://bios.weddingbee.com/profile/YourUserName.

Here’s a peek into how some of the bees transported themselves and their guests to their weddings! Be sure to take a look at the rest of the posts in our Real Bee Budgets series!

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Mrs. Flamingo’s Transportation

Mode: Rental of one Vintage 1957 Bentley to transport Bride and Groom.
Price: $425

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There’s been a lot of talk lately of the PWC (post wedding chop).

I’m torn.

I’ve always had short hair. There’s only one time in my adult life I can remember having hair this long.

Shall we time travel? Let’s…

This picture is so dated… January 2001—I’m a senior in high school. Check my enormous bangs. They are hiding my caterpillar eyebrows (as I did not understand the concept of waxing yet).
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There has been a lot of discussion about day of coordinators on Weddingbee recently, so I want to differentiate between what I call the true DOC (an emerging trend in recent years) and the DOC+.

When I got married four years ago, I hired a coordinator about 2 months out before my wedding. While the services were called day of coordination, they would probably be more appropriately named month of coordination, or day of coordination plus. Not only did my planners oversee the entire wedding day, they referred several of my last minute vendors, accompanied me to meetings, managed all contracts and vendor communication, and most importantly they were prepared to tackle all the unexpected emergencies that arose that day. Traditionally, these services were within the scope of day of coordination packages.

What we’ve been seeing lately is brides who act as their own planners, researching, diy-ing, designing, and planning every aspect of their weddings. But because they’ll be busy on their wedding day getting married, they want someone there to execute and oversee all their hard work on the day of. Many brides these days are looking for a true day of only coordinator, often on a small budget.

I know this can be a contentious topic amongst professional wedding planners because there is no shortage of newcomers to the industry who charge very little and have commensurate experience.
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Reader rmankersen is selling this brand new Casablanca 1900 wedding gown, in a size 10, for $798.

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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Looking for a fun bachelorette alternative, or a great anniversary date? I’ve got your poison, right here…

Last year we were in NYC for Mr. M’s birthday, and partook in the experience that is Accomplice: The Show. This interactive scavenger hunt game/theatre/tour of the city was one of my most memorable NY experiences of all time. Mysterious, silly, quirky, sexy and most of all, FUN. We basically got to pretend to be undercover “accomplices” to a mob heist/getaway… we met up with informants, delivered “packages”, and did fun detective work to get us from drop point to drop point.

If you liked Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, then this will tickle your inner detective fancy juuuuust right. Heck, we did it in a torrential deluge of rain and still had the time of our lives. See?

Yes, we are wearing trash bags that we stole from NYC public trash bins. No shame.

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I spoke a little with FMIL over the weekend, and she’s made some progress on planning the picnic they’re throwing for us the weekend after our wedding. The biggie: She’s booked a caterer, which means we’ve got the beginnings of a menu!

The main courses being served? BBQ ribs and pork roast.

[source]

Yes, we’ll be smearing our faces, hands (and let’s face it: shirts) with sticky, gooey, dark red barbecue sauce as we gnaw on rib bones at our reception.
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I’m in love with flowers at weddings. I’m just putting that out there. I want big, luscious, overflowing centerpieces full of antique hydrangeas and fluffy garden roses. I want a boutique brimming with peonies, ranunculus, and anemones (never mind that those three flowers are out of season in Texas in September). I want the reception table centerpieces to look like they were plucked out of a blooming English garden in Springtime. But let’s face it: fresh-cut flowers are not so great for the environment. They’re going to die in a day’s time, and then they will rot in a landfill (unless my venue composts–maybe they compost!). At any rate, even if the flowers are grown locally, they will have to be transported to our venue, which creates an impact on the environment.

Source

I’m trying to keep our wedding-day flowers down to the bare essentials, but it is hard. And no, I don’t know anyone who has their own organic flower garden in their backyard who would be willing to supply me with “greener” flowers. To make matters worse, I live in Austin, Texas.
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I’ve already shared my something old and my something borrowed, so now it’s time for my something blue.

My something blue is the garter FMIL Joey wore at her wedding. Her Aunt made it for her. It’s very simple and very light blue.

We weren’t sure we were going to do a garter toss, but when FMIL gave me the blue garter, I knew we had to. She wasn’t making us, or anything. I knew we had to because it was the only heirloom or tradition we had from Mr. Joey’s family, and I really wanted to incorporate it into the wedding.

The garter needs a little work.
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Princess Lasertron created this floral headband with soft, hand-dyed wool and vintage buttons and rhinestones. Perfect for a summer wedding!

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

Like any girl, I was dreaming of engagement rings long before I met Mr. Cloud (all girls do that, right?). Well, I take that back. I wasn’t so much looking or dreaming about different rings as much as I was obsessing over this beauty: the classic Tiffany engagement ring.

[Source]

Then I met Mr. C, and when things started to get serious, I started to be realistic about what a ring like that actually costs. I wanted something similar in setting, of course, but I realized the multi-carat ring of my dreams with “Tiffany” engraved on the band might just not happen.

Let me get one thing straight right off: we live on a budget. Mr. Cloud and I are pretty comfortable as far as things go, but the kind of moolah a ring like the one above costs was not just hanging out in our bank accounts. So, I decided to be patient while Mr. C slowly started to save… until we went to a wedding in October of 2007. My wonderful shower hostess Mrs. B’s daughter actually was the bride, and poor shy Mr. C caught the garter. We all loved it, and he turned bright red. My dad muttered something to him that I missed, and when we got back to my parents’ house, Mama Cloud said she had something to show me.
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So while our invites are just being sent out this week and I can’t yet share those with you, I would love to share a little piece of their DIY goodness: the outer envelopes.

When I first started dreaming about our wedding invitations, visions of letterpress and professional calligraphy danced through my head. Then, reality set in. We didn’t have the budget to splurge on every detail, and invitations ended up getting bumped further down the priority list, behind my dress and our gorgeous loft.

I decided to take on the enormous task of making our invitations and got this crazy idea to learn calligraphy and address the outer envelopes myself. I love learning new things, and as you might have noticed by now, I never shy away from a challenge. The question was, how to start? In the big, wide world of calligraphy, people take things very seriously and it can be a little overwhelming for a newcomer. So, I started with a how-to book:

(Photo credit)

This was a great book for someone just learning to do calligraphy. I put a lot of research into picking a Calligraphy 101-type book because there were a lot to choose from. It shows you what you need to buy, teaches you the letters, and gives you lines to photocopy and practice on. I’m glad I splurged and spent a whopping $4 buying this used off of Amazon, instead of trying to learn off a website.

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Last I left you, I had one month left to find my bridal glow. I had been working on my Plan of Action for four months. I was doing pretty well; I hadn’t lost that much weight, but I felt strong and lean. And more importantly than weight, my pants were falling off me. Literally. I could pull most my pants off without unbuttoning them. WOO HOO!

Yet with 30 days to go, my search for my bridal glow changed dramatically.

First, after my second fitting, I was told not to lose or gain an ounce of weight. Okay—that was not not really what a bride trying to lose weight wants to hear, but from that moment on, in order for my dress to look good, I had to maintain, maintain, maintain. Which in my mind also meant tone, tone, tone.

Second, I took a good look in the mirror, and let me tell ya, I was looking shabby. Not shabby chic, but  rough-around-the-edges shabby.

While I never really had acne, I have been prone to ’woman related’ breakouts my entire adult life. Basically, I get one to two craters a month that last about 2 weeks. I thought I was taking care of my skin, but honestly, the only time in my life I was ever on a skincare regimen was when I was 14, and that was when Mama Peep bought me the Clinique Skincare Line with my first introduction to real makeup!! Since then, I have been washing my face once a day with some sort of acne skin wash with salicylic acid. I have really dry skin and washing my face always dried my skin out so much that my skin could never handle any more than that.

Yet, after reading about what all the other bees were doing to get their bridal glow on, I decided that there had to be something better out there.
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We’re going all night long!  The Post-a-Thon ends at midnight PST!

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Weddingbee bios have been picking up steam, and we wanted to find a way for you all to simultaneously create and show off your bios! All day today we’ll be hosting a Weddingbee Bio Post-A-Thon, and we encourage you to participate! We’ll be posting some of the most inspirational bios created throughout the week, so this is your chance to shine and possibly see yourself on the blog! For some great inspiration to get your bio-creating-juices flowing, check out reader csbenson’s recently created bio! I can’t help but smile seeing the couple’s young daughter as their flower girl. Click on over and check it out!

Join us all day today in updating or creating your Weddingbee bio! Bios created or updated this week will be featured right here on the front page throughout the week. Even I’m guilty of not updating my bio in a while… this is a great excuse to spruce it up!

And so… the recaps begin!

[all images courtesy of Frank Amodo, unless otherwise noted]

Above photos were taken by bestie Bear.

Mr. Sushi and I had a fairly busy morning. After a well rested night together (we both crashed fairly early the night before), we had gotten up around 7AM and ran down to Watanabe Floral to pick out leis for our wedding ceremony. Talk about waiting ’til the last minute on that one. Luckily they had what we were looking for: a white jasmine lei and a maile lei. Then we remembered that we were supposed to turn the rental car in… the day before. So after a quick trip to drop off our rental car and an even quicker breakfast, we said our goodbyes for the first half of the day, and Mr. Sushi left to relax in my ’rent’s room.

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