Weddingbee Blog

Reader LMO uploaded this adorable picture of her and her fiance!

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.

You might remember my post about the first part of my veil saga where I told you all how I made my own birdcage veil. If you don’t, that’s okay. It was so long ago! It took me a bit longer than anticipated to finish my second veil, so you’ll have to excuse the gap between parts one and two of this story!

Anyways, I promised I’d show you a picture of me wearing the birdcage that I made:

I’m still working on the placement, which makes a shockingly big difference in how the veil looks. I’m thinking I might need to bobby pin it to my head in a place or two, as well.

I also showed you the vintage French lace that I bought from Etsy in my post about my somethings. As it turns out, hand stitching that lace to the bottom of my veil took several weeks of painstaking effort. But I’m very pleased with the end result!
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Date: June 6, 2009
City, State: Philadelphia, PA
Budget: $50,000
# of Guests: 115
Planning Time: 11 months

Wedding Day Costs
Ceremony/Reception Site: A tall ship turned into a restaurant on Penn’s Landing

The Moshulu really “made” our wedding.  We weren’t too keen on having a “ballroom” wedding, but were overwhelmed by the work of a “tent” wedding.  The Moshulu is a great restaurant with a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces.

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Although we’ve only been married for a little over nine months, I’ve noticed that being a wife also means being thrown into a culture obsessed with babies. There’s a lot of pressure to pull off parenthood while trying to juggle married life and a career. Not to mention trying to be able to afford a house somewhere in the mix (since that’s the next “step”, after all).

I think that too many newly married couples believe they need to have a child to complete that next phase in their relationship, while not really paying attention to whether or not they are doing what’s best for the child. I don’t think that’s the way it is in the hive, but out here in the non-bee world I am seeing this happening more often than not.
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Today will be inspiration day. I strongly think that an image is worth a thousand words, so ENJOY!

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Entreat me not to leave you, or to return from following after you, For where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. And where you die, I will die and there I will be buried. May the Lord do with me and more if anything but death parts you from me.

-Ruth 1:16

My grandfather died around this time last year, and I was fortunate enough to be there and be given the opportunity to speak at his funeral. While I was drafting my notes, I got to thinking about what I was looking for in a relationship, and I finally realized that it was in front of me my whole life.

Photo from my personal collection

That man would be a lot like my grandpa: loyal and devoted, honest and direct, and a silly smart ass. He was always willing to lighten the mood with a joke or a funny face, and he told it like it was and when the rubber hit the road, he was there. My husband is all of that.

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I have to say when we started planning, videography didn’t even make it on to the list of things we were concerned about or wanted to spend money on. A large majority of the wedding videos I had seen up to that point had been pretty boring—think single camera fixed on the bride and groom set to Enya’s greatest hits. Something like that was not something I would cherish or want to watch repeatedly. To give those videos a bit of credit, I’m pretty sure they were all from the ’80s and early ’90s, but I still just wasn’t interested.

Mr. Cloud had other ideas, however. Not only had he studied video production in school for a while, but for a time before we were engaged had been helping a few friends out with their own wedding video business. So he really wanted our wedding on tape to look back on. And he didn’t want it shot by just a friend with a personal camcorder hiding in the corner of the church; he wanted the full-blown real deal. And as Mama Cloud reminded me, Mr. C hadn’t insisted on much about the wedding at that point so the least I could do was look into it.

So I kept an eye out, not really seeing any sample videos by people in the Richmond area that amazed me, or that I thought were worth the money they were charging. Then I saw a small mention on a blog somewhere for humanstory films. I watched a few video clips and was crying; they were so beautifully shot and edited.
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As much as I think our wedding is the next to last thing on Mr. Sunbeam’s mind at times, I was surprised one night to find that he bought a little something for our wedding without me even asking!

Alright, it’s not really a “little” something. This 1.5 L bottle of wine is our guestbook! I had been stressing over the fact that I hadn’t scanned in even one of the pictures I’d meticulously sorted out to create a photo guestbook. We started tossing around new guestbook ideas and Mr. Sunbeam went into action!
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photo: Inspiring Brides

Carly of Inspiring Brides was nice enough to make us this amazing inspiration board. It is lovely and perfect and showcases our colors beautifully.

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I could have just bought them a panini press. But I had to go and design invites instead.

I went a little nutzos when I heard that Gocco supplies were dwindling, and gobbled up enough flashbulbs to last me into the next century. But of course, this means I should actually DO Gocco projects. So when my very good friend Robin asked me to make her wedding invitations, I was more than happy to do so! I just forgot how time consuming the printing process is… but how rewarding it is to create something from scratch. She only wanted a 1 color print, in copper (which is a discontinued color, but luckily, I snatched up a few tubes) so I figured it’d be easy peasy. It was actually really fun, and Robin didn’t have many preferences on anything, other than the fact that we incorporate a small “logo” of sorts: birds looking at a star. This is adorable because her name is Robin, and her husband’s last name is the name of a constellation. Robins looking at a star… how symbolic!

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I have been searching for a dress for our rehearsal dinner for a few months now. I originally wanted to take advantage of the fact that, as the bride, it is perfectly acceptable for me to wear a white dress. Alas, I don’t think that is in the cards for me. I have searched and searched and searched and cannot find a white dress that is semi-casual (since our rehearsal dinner is being held outside at Mr. M’s parents’ home) and that you cannot see through. I don’t think those two criteria are very stringent, but apparently they are.

Exhibit #1.

Oh yeah, I can’t even show it to you. I fell in love with this cute strapless white and metallic silver BCBG dress at Lord & Taylor months ago, but they didn’t have my size. Anywhere in the US. I looked all over the internet for it as well and couldn’t find so much as a picture of it. Sad.

Exhibit #2. This dress made me swoon from the second I laid eyes on it.
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… to help Miss Lab create her invitations!

I’m stumped, hive. I’m closing in fast on the recommended two month mark to send out invitations and all I have are a few scrapbook papers that caught my eye while I was killing time in a Michaels. I’m slowly starting down the short path to full-blown wedding freak-out mode. *gulp!* Help?

Okay, here’s what I’ve got:

All my Michaels finds in our wedding colors.

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I recently received an email from a reader asking me about how I found our photographer and I realized I never shared the story with the hive!

Source

I started stalking photography blogs after the very talented Jessica Claire photographed my friend Tiffany’s wedding 3 years ago.

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I shared a while back the story of where Mr. S bought my engagement ring, and the style of wedding band I wanted. Simple. A few diamonds evenly spaced around the band.

Well, a couple of weeks ago Mr. S and I took a trip back to Chicago’s jewelers’ row to seek out our weddings bands. I brought along pictures of what exactly I thought I wanted and we tried on ring after ring. When I finally tried on the ring that I’d thought I had to have, it just didn’t do anything for me as a wedding band (as a ring on the other hand? Perfect, sign me up! But not with my e-ring).

I ended up finding an AMAZINGLY sparkly ring with prong-set round cut diamonds. Swoon. But it would have put us at the top of our ring budget (we’d been looking to spend $1,200 max for both bands). Hmm. I put on my budget hat and tried on another happily sparkly band with round cut channel set diamonds over the top half of the band that was SO freaking under budget, there wasn’t a question which ring I’d choose. I love me a bargain.
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After getting super relaxed at the spa, the ladies and I were ready to get our grub on. We walked a few blocks away to Luz, a Pan Latin restaurant. I’ve been to Luz before and really enjoyed the meal, so I was definitely excited to go back. We started off with some great appetizers consisting of amazing arepas (sweet corn and cheese cakes—more like fritters), a trio of ceviches (my favorite being the langosta passion: lobster, passion fruit, mango citrus sauce and aji amarillo). Between those and a great caipirinha (Brazilian rum, muddled limes and sugar), I was feeling pretty darn good.

We had a great time over dinner. The wonderful thing about my group of friends is that they got along and had lively, engaging conversation even though they didn’t all know each other well. It was so nice to catch up with them since a couple in the group actually don’t live in NYC. I was so grateful that they’d made the trip. One thing my bachelorette made me realize is that while I have a small group of friends, they are an amazing group of women. Our time together that night made me appreciate them even more for the interesting, sweet women they are. I guess the quality versus quantity saying is pretty true.

Here’s Ike and Mitts (not their real names and I wish they both lived in NYC)

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