Weddingbee Blog

So, after much consideration, I’ve decided to forgo the wedding ring. I’ve never been a ring girl. My fingers are short and rings just make them look shorter and fat. I’ve adjusted to wearing my engagement ring and actually feel naked without it. I thought it would be the same with a wedding band, so I wore a ring with my e-ring and it felt weird. I didn’t get used to it — it just felt like a lot on my finger and I hated the way it hid the details of my e-ring.

the details I didn’t want to cover up

I asked Mr. Joey if he cared if I skipped the wedding ring and just wore my e-ring, and he said he didn’t care. Yay! He didn’t care. I didn’t think he would. Not wearing a wedding ring won’t make us any less married.

But then, I bought a ring.
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I heard this nasty rumor when we first started planning our wedding that you could rent suits at Men’s Wearhouse. I had this vision of Mr Frenchie in a charcoal gray suit and his dudes in a lighter gray. It all looked so pretty in my head. Guess what? You CANNOT rent suits from Men’s Wearhouse. It is NOT that easy. After looking around, it looked like if we were going to have all the groomsmen in matching suits, they were going to have to be purchased.

Why is it so unheard of for groomsmen to purchase their bridal party outfit? Bridesmaids don’t rent their dresses, so why should the groomsmen get off so easy?

As if finding gray suits for the groomsmen wasn’t hard enough, one of our groomsmen is a 52 extra long. Luckily for me however, my 52 XL made it his job to find a gray suit that everyone could wear. After searching high and low, and ordering a suit, only to find out 2 weeks later it only comes in navy blue, we put the great gray suit search to bed this weekend.
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Has anyone else seen adorable photos of girls with fake mustaches? Photos like this one:

Well, I’ve fallen head over heels in love with the idea. And when I get something in my head, I MUST DO IT. So after a fruitless search for little fake mustaches for me and my bridesmaids, I decided that if no one was making these things, then I would make them for myself. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, after all!
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The Dude and I spent a full day at the outlet malls in San Marcos (about a half hour from Austin) looking for wedding day accessories for him. For awhile we were panicked about the suit he had planned to wear. It belonged to my dad (who was super skinny), and we thought the pants weren’t going to fit at first. But the Dude tried them on again, and it turns out that he just needed to pull them up higher; I guess vintage ’70s suits were made to sit a little higher up on your waist. We took them to a tailor, who said she could let out the waist a bit and let out the material at the bottom to make the pants longer. We got lucky, and there’s at least 4 inches of material that can be let out!

With the suit out of the way, we still needed to find the Dude a shirt, shoes, and a tie. We got really lucky with the shoes yesterday. Our first stop at Neiman Marcus Last Call yielded up these beautiful, Italian leather vintage-y kicks. The Dude and I both loved them, so we snatched them up. Don’t you just love how the color darkens at the toe? I think they’ll look perfect with the purple and gray socks we bought.

The shirt was another story altogether.
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I’m not a big makeup wearer (shh… I went all winter long without wearing a single bit of powder or shadow to work!). On top of that, I generally get told that based on my skin tone, brown hair and blue eyes, I can pull off any shades of makeup, hair color, and clothes. While it’s nice to be a chameleon, definitive answers like “you look best in blush tones” or “never wear the color yellow” would be incredibly helpful.

I mean, I don’t want to end up looking like this:

Source

I received great feedback on my recent hair post and think I have settled on “option D” as my inspiration. I didn’t even realize until today that this was the same picture that Mrs. Yorkie used at her trial!

It’s great having hair ideas nailed down, but there’s this whole face of mine to contend with.
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Laura Taylor from The Darling Life Photography shared so many pictures with us from our engagement photo session. I wanted to share some of the outtakes. It is really fun to get to choose from SO MANY! I am lucky to have a generous photographer.

This is my favorite outtake - I love that I am handing him all of the “boy” balloons

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I am trying to wind my evening down by working a bit more on thank you cards for the wonderful guests at my shower (who were so generous, a silly card doesn’t seem to be enough anymore). I decided to go with labels; they would not only be easier, but cuter, and will help them get in the mail earlier. While I was designing the labels for the envelopes and pouring over my favorite font websites, I found a new one! Kevin and Amanda’s Fonts for Peas! (Look familiar? Miss Gloss used one of their fonts on her invites!)

[source]

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As I told you before the wedding, we booked a honeymoon cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Enchantment of the Seas. Because we booked about a month before departure, we got an amazing deal on our 6-day, 5-night stay aboard the ship.

Our wedding was on a Sunday and the ship set sail the following Monday from Fort Lauderdale, FL. As you can imagine, we had to get up pretty early in the morning to catch our 6:44 AM flight. Thankfully, we decided to spend our wedding night at the Pittsburgh Airport Hyatt Regency Hotel, which is on the airport property and walking-distance from the terminals. We woke up at about 5:00 AM to ensure we’d get ready, get checked-in and get through the security checkpoint with a nice cushion of time to spare.
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The honeymoon isn’t something I intended to write about until after our wedding, but I’m in kind of a wedding-planning lull so I figured: why not? I don’t want y’all to forget about little old me.

I know I’ve mentioned before that Mr. MJ and I don’t plan to go on a honeymoon until the summer of 2010. We have several reasons for this, and in this post I intend to outline the major ones.

The timing sucks.
Mr. Mary Jane and I each have an 8-to-5, 40-hour-per-week job. Lots of couples do, of course, but that ain’t the half of it for this over-scheduled duo. In addition to these jobs, we are both also full-time students. Mr. MJ will have classes five days a week during fall semester, and I have them three days. Since our university is on a semester schedule, our wedding date will fall a few weeks after the fall term starts. We’re pushing it by even taking the time off for our wedding itself. But we’ll make it work. Another week of absence, however, could not be tolerated. We’d fall behind and our grades would suffer. Because of this, we’re not even going to have a mini-moon.

[source]

So why would we even have our wedding during the semester?
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After not finding The Perfect One online or through a friend who’s a jeweler, I decided I would hit up some consignment shops while home in Los Angeles a few weeks back. I’d seen some online consignment shops by Google “Estate Wedding Bands” or “Estate Rings”. Stores like Sylvia’s Antiques, Antique Jewelry Mall, Lang Antique & Estate Jewelry, and many others popped up, but none had anything I liked within my price range (reminder: it’s $300 for my ring and $100 for Mr. CB’s).

My first inkling was to go to a store called The Paper Bag Princess in Los Angeles which has consignment wedding dresses, shoes, clutches, jewelry. You could get outfitted for your whole wedding right there. But, before I ventured in there, I stopped by a consignment shop in San Luis Obispo (while visiting a friend). It was called Hamilton Estate Jewelry.

The cool thing about this shop is that they price the items when they come in. So, say a ring came in at some point in the ’80s, when the price of platinum was low. No matter that the price of platinum is high now, the ring still costs what it did 20 years ago.

I found a ring there that was about the same width of my engagement ring. It was platinum, one-fifteenth of a carat in full, round cut G-color diamonds. Price? $490 plus tax.

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One of the most important things we edit in posts and look for in our bloggers, is the Weddingbee tone. Because of my experience with not-so-nice sites when I was planning my own wedding, it has always been my goal to create a friendly, snark-free wedding community. Inflection doesn’t translate over the world wide web like it does in person, so I’m always hyper vigilant when it comes to tone on our sites. Basically whenever a statement is questionable, I ask myself, “Is this annoying in any way?”

With our Bee bloggers, the two biggest areas we try to be careful around are money and weight. For instance, we would never publish the following statements:

• I can barely purchase anything with this $30,000 flower budget!
• A size 2 girl says, “I’ve put on 3 pounds and I’m so fat I’ll never fit in my wedding dress!”

Of course these are exaggerated, but we’re careful about these topics because they often elicit emotional responses from readers.

When it comes to our PRO bloggers, we try to avoid the expert tone that you typically see in magazines. While it tends to work well for magazines, blogs are interactive so I like to relate to our audience on a much more personal level. I don’t like talking down to our super savvy readers in any way.

The point of this post is that running Weddingbee has permanently altered the way I perceive tone in everything. For instance…
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There’s a new addition to my key chain. Jingling along with the keys to my car and our apartment is a copy of one* for our mailbox. I’m giddy** about this acquisition — and for good reason!

(source)

On Friday, Mr. Bruschetta and I finally (finally!) dropped our invitations in the mail. We were both so relieved to cross this task off our to-do list — especially since we were a bit behind schedule — and now, we’re playing a waiting game, anticipating RSVPs from our family and friends.

You’ll hafta wait for pictures in a future post. (The picture below is not our invitation suite!) For now, though, here’s a question — and a little teaser.
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Chair decor is such a sweet touch. It needn’t be extravagant- just a little something to make the bride and groom feel special as they sit down for their wedding feast.

Photo by Jasmine Star Photography

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Mr. Star and I have been lucky enough to have had exactly zero wedding-related fights throughout our nearly two year engagement. This is probably because, quite frankly, Mr. Star has been the ideal groom: supportive, interested, terribly excited, and willing to let me craft the wedding into pretty much exactly what I’ve been envisioning.

So when he has an idea that he’s really got his little heart set on, I just can’t turn him down.

Enter: Etsy seller FirstComesLove. We were trolling the wedding vendors on Etsy together one night, early on in the planning stages (I did this a lot, in addition to looking at wedding-related blogs, which helped me enormously in creating a vision). We came across FirstComesLove’s ring bearer pillows, which are gorgeous. After a few clicks, Mr. Star pointed to a tiny little doggie-sized ring bearer pillow. The conversation went something like this:

Mr. Star: Aww, look how cute that is! A dog ring bearer would be adorable.

Miss Star: … Seriously?
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Well, hive, I took the plunge and dyed my hair! I went to my stylist for a trim and shape-up (gotta keep growing out those awkward pieces on the sides of my bangs), and she suggested I go ahead and do a trial run of the color I want my hair for the wedding. I was ready for a change, so I said, “Sure!”

Here’s a picture of my “before” hair. It’s actually pretty close to my natural color, although I dyed it from a box last November. It was a lot redder right after I dyed it, but it mellowed out to this brown with reddish undertones.

What you can’t really tell from this picture is that I had about an inch and a half of roots showing. Nothing super noticeable, but I didn’t want that for our wedding.
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