Weddingbee Blog

Well, one of us is off. The car is packed and I’ll be making my way back to the UP tonight after work! My fiance (that’s one of the last times I’ll get to say that word) will be staying for one more night and coming up on Wednesday after work. The rest of the week will be filled with the projects I couldn’t do from afar, mainly packaging the favors and putting together the OOT bags, final meetings with a few vendors, etc. The decorating at the reception site begins tomorrow as well, so I’ll be checking in now and then to see the progress. Maybe I’ll even post the progress if I have time (keyword: IF)!

Until then, I’ll leave you with a picture of the last project I finished yesterday: the escort card display! Sorry for the terrible picture, but the cameras are already packed so I had to resort to using my phone. The escort cards are finished as well, and they will hang from the ribbons going across the board. Thank you to the lovely Mrs. Quiche for the last minute inspiration and escort card cutting assistance!

If you are thinking, ‘that is one huge escort card board,’ you are right…
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Can we be real here? Like, really real? This post has to do with weight, and size, and wedding pressure to look completely perfect at all times.

When I bought my wedding gown, I was in the middle of a super workout frenzy. In my adult life, my weight has fluctuated a lot. On dress buying day, I weighed 155 lbs. I was doing pilates three times a week, running 3 times a week, doing the Shred and other cardio often, as well. My tummy was flat! I could run two miles without stopping (for someone who couldn’t even run half a mile in high school, this was an AWESOME accomplishment)! I felt amazing.

The day I went in for my first dress fitting, over five months later, I had gained ten pounds. As my day to day schedule got more hectic, I didn’t have as much time for exercising. As our wedding budget got bigger, I didn’t have as much money for private pilates and yoga classes. All of these little changes added up. And when I tried on my dress, it showed. The dress fit, but was tight in the thigh area, which happens to be my “problem area”. I have a 28 inch waist and 42 inch hips. It’s ridiculous! But, it’s just the way I am built, and no amount of cardio or weights or dieting will change that ratio. In fact, when I am on a workout kick, my waist gets smaller, yet my thighs get larger and more muscular!

Like I said, my dress was tight in the thighs. Tight enough, apparently, for the alterations person to tell me to stop eating for two weeks. To advise me to start the “walking diet” and walk away the fat on my thighs.
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Finding the Blogosphere…
I didn’t find out about the blogosphere until I found Weddingbee in the spring of 2008. I was recently engaged and in the midst of planning my own wedding. Like many other bees, most of my friends and family were located hundreds of miles away. On top of that, I was the first of my close friends to get married, so I was completely new to the wedding scene. In fact, the last time I was a bridesmaid was when my big brother got married and I was fifteen years old! I was looking for inspiration for planning a destination, eco-friendly, daytime wedding. I found Mrs. Radish and I read every single post. That day, another addict was born…

Deciding to Apply…
When I first found Weddingbee, it didn’t even occur to me that I might apply. I had never blogged before and like so many other brides, I didn’t think that anyone would care about my wedding. I felt like there was nothing ‘special’ about my wedding. I wasn’t on a specifically small or large budget; it would be a small affair, and the destination part of the wedding meant there would be minimal DIY projects. But, the more I read WB, the more I realized there was actually a lot more diversity than my first glance lead me to believe.

A major focus of our wedding was planning a ‘green’ event. But, Mr. Pinot Noir was less concerned with eco-friendly choices and more concerned about the food, the venue, and how much fun our guests could have. The end result was what I called a green wedding in disguise.

Blogging for Weddingbee was a really great part about planning our wedding.
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… the wedding gift edition.

We’re BACK! The wedding day was perfect (a few snafus, but still perfect), and the honeymoon was amazing and relaxing. We got many fabulous gifts from our friends and family: some off our registry, some clever and thoughtful, and some not quite ’us’.

My favorite registry gifts :
1. Pyrex Glass Mixing Bowl (via Macy’s) - I actually got this as a shower gift and use it ALL THE TIME. It’s glass, but it has rubber on the bottom so it doesn’t slide around on the counter. It also has a pouring ’spout’ and ’handle’… both so helpful for clumsy people like me. Love it.
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Ranunculus is another word I didn’t even know a couple months ago, but I seriously do heart ranunculus. I might even consider a full ranunculus bridal bouquet. Just look at their tissue-like petals. The word comes from the latin word frog. I don’t really see the connection, but I used to catch frogs all the time as a kid, so I think it’s fate. Just look at them. How can you not swoon?:

Source

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In one big effort, thanks to some help from a few faithful friends, we managed to finish our menu/programmes in 2 nights (it took 2 because we ran out of ink on the first night, which is pretty impressive on the whole, I think).

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One thing I love about our venue is that the owner strung lights along the beams in the barn. It’s a nice touch, but he chose really small lights so it’s not really as “wow” as we wanted our decorative lighting to be. Here is a picture of our venue while it was still under renovation while the lights were up. There are also two wagon wheel lanterns that will light up the space, but they aren’t very decorative.

This week Father Sunbeam will visit our reception venue in the evening, to help us decide how we can use decorative lighting in the space. After considering ideas far and wide, we thought a good place to start would be to see how many outlets we’ll have access to and what the hanging possibilities are. Below are some lighting inspirations I’ve gathered over the past few months that we are mulling over.
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I want to start by saying that I still absolutely adore ourinvitations. They turned out just the way I had hoped, and the response from our guests over them has been better than I could have imagined. With that being said however, hindsight is always 20/20. I started looking at invites before I had even found Weddingbee, or the endless supply of wedding blogs and their invite inspiration. I didn’t know what Etsy was, and had only browsed on The Knot a few times before giving up hope and thinking I would need to look at and feel things before ordering. Even after discovering all these things, I still went ahead with my final order. I wanted Mama Cloud to be involved in the process and sitting in a store doing it made it possible. It actually wasn’t until Miss Gloss posted about her gorgeous DIY invites that I started to have second thoughts. Up until those bad boys went into the mail and I received such great feedback, I borderline hated them (talk about needing reassurance from others). So what would I have done a bit differently if I could go back?

I would have at least considered going the DIY or partial DIY route
I’m making all of the other paper products for the wedding and I own a Gocco, so why didn’t I even entertain this idea? I don’t know; honestly it really never seemed like an option, mostly because I was so set on letterpress. But if I had done my homework I would have known that I could have tried to find an Etsy seller to press my own design (and would have saved a small fortune). I also might have found out sooner that the incredibly amazing art school here in Richmond also has an incredibly amazing letterpress studio in it and sometimes students can be commissioned to print things (which would have also saved some moolah). Time is normally a factor in DIY of course, but for real, I was still a year and a half out. I had nothing but time.
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We went through a million ideas for our guestbook - from an adorable “wish tree” to a typewriter tell-all, to everything in between. We finally settled on the Polaroid guestbook. It incorporates Mr. S’s love of photography and it’s an interactive element with our guests.

Since we knew we wanted to do one of these:

Source

We went on Amazon and got one of these (and later picked up a second at a garage sale for $5, and it works!):
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I had my hair trial the other day and, though I wasn’t sure about it at first, I can definitely say now that I am in love!

I knew that I wanted big curls and my hair up, but low on my head. I also wanted some visual interest in the front to avoid just having my hair pulled straight back. That’s about all I knew! I brought in a ton of inspiration pictures and let him play!

This is how it turned out!

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Hi hive! Mrs. Candy Corn has a slew of wedding goodies for sale in the Classifieds right now! Check them all out below, and if you’re interested in anything, click on over to the corresponding ad and leave her a comment!

- A slightly used Xyron model 900 in the original box, including some sticker paper, the paper cutter, instructional CD & booklet that came with it. $100 (includes shipping).

image source

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I was introduced to the wide world of blogging back in 2003. All my college friends at the time had LiveJournal accounts, and I wanted in on the action. Finally, I got my invite and I began blogging! Mainly, my LiveJournal blog was a series of inside jokes between my roommates and me—accounts of our drunken shenanigans, from Michael Jackson dance parties to sneaking into bars with fake IDs. I eventually lost interest in my account once we all graduated and moved on to the next phase of our lives.

Once in law school, I started to obsess over blogs like Go Fug Yourself and Cute Overload. I had not yet been bitten by the wedding bug. Then, one fateful day in Constitutional Law class, my good friend Mrs. Kitten (at the time not yet a bee) introduced me to Weddingbee. I was instantly hooked! I can even remember the first post I read—it was all about hand-canceling stamps. Of course, I had no idea what that was, but pretty soon I was down with all the wedding lingo, from chivari chairs to Goccos to FMILs.

Witnessing my addiction firsthand, the future Mrs. Kitten suggested a few days later that I apply to be a bee. I was like, “No way, I’ll never have time to start a blog. And even if I did, why would they pick me?” But the seed of the idea was planted, and it continued to grow and grow.

A few months later, Mrs. Kitten became a bee, and I was so excited for her that I almost felt like *I* had become one!

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So here’s how I remember it.

One day I was minding my own business; the next day complete obsession had set in.

I had become a bona-fide Flickr stalker.

It all started when we had our engagement shoot with our super talented photographer Erica Berger. A day or so later, I saw on Facebook that Erica had posted some of our pictures on her Flickr stream. I scrambled on over there as fast as I could. (Luckily, all I had to do was click a link.)

And here’s what I found:

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I have a big soft spot for owls because they are the mascots for Rice University, the school Mr. Chick and I attended.

Wouldn’t these be darling for our farm wedding? We could have two owls perched on top of the tree! My friend Lulu and I are going to attempt to make this some time soon…

Found from the Etsy shop of Intres:

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Reader LP2121 gifted her bridal party matching Ray Bans and caught this great shot of her bridal party in them:

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.