Weddingbee Blog

One advantage of getting married in our hometown was being able to take photos at locations that sparked memories of our dating days. One such spot was right next to the chapel where we were getting married, and also the spot I chose for our first look.

On one of our earliest dates, for some reason Mr. Sunbeam and I ended up strolling through the college in town late at night, only to be caught in a thunderstorm. We took cover underneath a patch of trees that hung over a few benches (psssst, see the benches above?). Eventually a little orange kitty found us and waited out  the storm on our laps. I named him Orville Redenbacher, because it was fun to say! We must have been there for hours, and the storm only got worse. It was getting late and we knew we were out past our curfew, so we made a muddy run through the rain to my parents’ house. We were soaking wet, muddy, and I’m pretty sure we were in trouble for being out late. Now we were back again to celebrate our marriage, and hopefully stave off the rain for at least a few more hours.
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Chocobritt is selling a Marisa 754 wedding dress. She’s asking $1500 for the size-6 dress alencon lace dress.

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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For the longest time (okay, for the last few months, and only since deciding I wanted to be a hennaed bride, really), I’ve had a fascination with all things paisley:

(source)

Since paisley on my dress is obviously not an option, I got the bright idea that we should incorporate it into the men’s attire. (And maybe the cake, but I digress.) I mentioned it to Mr. Spaniel, who seemed receptive, but “couldn’t imagine what it would look like.”
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We had taken a few trips in the beginning of the year to Robbins Brothers and Zales to get an idea of price and design. I loved trying on all the different kinds of rings they had to offer, but I didn’t have a specific design in mind. All I knew is that I wanted something simple but sparkly. I also knew I was going to be getting married with my late grandmother’s ring and I wanted something to complement it, and it had to lay flat against the band.

I looked everywhere online for ideas—celebrity rings, Google images, eBay, and my favorite that I came across was the Tiffany Novo. But, I wanted a princess cut.

(source)

We decided to have my ring custom made, and we found a jeweler that came highly recommended by a friend. We gave them pictures of my grandma’s band…

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Because you know you didn’t drink enough on Thanksgiving and you need a little sumptin-sumptin to get you to Friday. Am I right?

Join Boston-area bees for martinis and wedding talk! This time, we’re rockin’ the suburbs.

Where: Venetian Moon

680 Main St. Reading, MA

When: Wednesday, Dec. 2, around 8:00 in the downstairs bar

Come one, come all!

Image source

Some of you may remember my recent Cricut purchase, and the save-the-date mockup that I made as my first cutting project. Well, it’s been two months since I’ve acquired my favorite new toy and I’ve definitely been using it enough to get my money’s worth! So far, completing our save-the-dates has been my Cricut’s biggest project. With only six months left on our countdown, marking this project off our to-do list couldn’t have come soon enough!

I’m thrilled with how they turned out! But, before I reveal them completely, I need to fill you all in:

Do you remember my mock-up? Cute (if I do say so myself), but there was a big empty space on top that needed filling!

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I was inspired by a board thread a couple of weeks ago to write a post about my living situation. For the last 2 months, Mr. Pudding and I have been living with his parents. Initially, we were planning on making this a short term situation, but are now thinking of staying until after our wedding in July.

I have always been 100% behind the idea of living with his family. Mr. Pudding, on the other hand, has been more hesitant.

When we lived apart, I lived with Tata Pudding, and Mr. P lived with his parents. It just didn’t make much sense for us to be renting two separate apartments, one in Ontario and one in Vermont, when we knew that our living situation was temporary. I was never ashamed of telling people that I lived with Mama Pudding, but I was extremely proud of the fact that I was able to pay off my student debt in a year and a half. Mr. P, however, has admitted to purposefully omitting his living situation from conversation for fear that he would be judged as a slacker. I think the fact that I have moved in puts even more pressure on him. He promised to provide for me if I moved here, and I think that he feels like he is not doing that as long as we are living with his parents.

In the Polish culture, it is very common for a young married couple to live with their parents.
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Hi, I’m Mrs. Crab Cake and I used to blog here. I know, it’s been a really long time since I had anything wedding related to say. Well, it’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s just that I am (was) totally over our wedding. After 14 months of engagement, I had no desire to think about, or write about, the wedding. That, and I had an unbelievable number of pictures to sort through. I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of photos our photographer took. But, I think I’ve gotten over the hump and I’m ready to share our day with y’all! So, I’m promising to finish my recaps, but only at one per week, because that’s all I can handle. I hope y’all will forgive me for being so quiet these last few months.

Our day broke clear and hot. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and I was beside myself with excitement. Surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous or jittery or uptight about any thing. I guess I just figured that if it wasn’t done, it wasn’t going to get done. And, all I wanted to do was marry Mr. CC and go to the beach.

Me, totally disheveled, and my Godmother, getting our mimosas on. That’s my sister and Maid of Honor, Amy, at the table.

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The nine months that Mr. DD and I were engaged were quite the time of transition for me. For one thing, I had a few identity-related issues surrounding getting married that I needed to deal with.

But I thought I was done with transitioning by the time our wedding day rolled around. Marriage wasn’t really supposed to change anything, right? Weren’t we already in a committed relationship? Wasn’t marriage just a public declaration of things we had already said in private and had felt for a long time?

Yeah, as with all things wedding, things didn’t really turn out that way.

We got married, and sometimes I am just dumbfounded by how that changed things for me. Maybe it was the amazing experience of saying our vows in front of our family and friends, maybe it was the extraordinary effort it seemed to take to get there, but things really do feel different post-wedding. I feel more of a lot of things. More connected. More permanent. More of a team. And it’s not that we weren’t any of those things before the wedding. It’s not that our relationship meant less to me. But we’re a family unit now, and that’s something we chose to be. It’s thrilling and confusing all at the same time. I loved our relationship before, but I love it more now.
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We have THE BEST friends and families. Like, seriously, the best. So I am continually in search of ways to make their time at our wedding weekend as comfortable, fun, and filling (as in food, lots and lots of food) as possible!

To begin, when guests check in at their hotels, they will be greeted by this, which is basically a total rip-off of these bad boys by the lovely Mrs. Bell Pepper:

Inside will be lots of regional goodies from both of our hometowns; here’s what we’ve got so far:

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The time has come for me to officially start training for the Boston Marathon. It’s not until the middle of April but I’ve been pretty lax on my running for the last month or so, therefore necessitating a longer training period than I normally do since I have a lot of miles to log.

People generally tend to be impressed when I tell them I’m running a marathon and I often get comments like, “I could never do that,” or “Good for you! I can’t imagine running for that long.” I’m here to tell you that anyone can run a marathon. ANY. ONE. My philosophy on marathons is this: If you can run a mile, you can run a marathon. Seriously. All it takes is one foot in front of the other, step by step, as you cover those miles. It may seem intimidating but it’s a slow and gradual build-up of mileage that if done properly, can get anybody over the finish line after 26.2 miles.

When I’m marathon training, I start pretty small and every week add one or two miles to my long run. So if you can run 3 miles comfortably, the next week you would push yourself to run 4, then the next week 5 and so on.
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In my last post I showed you some mock-ups of what our smaller centerpieces will look like. Well, next on the list is to figure out what to do for the table numbers. I’ve been struggling with these a lot.

At first I was thinking I would get cheap 4 x 6 frames from IKEA, stain them, and put 4 together in a square, with a candle in the center. I was then going to print the numbers on vellum or parchment paper, making little luminaries. Something like this (yes, of course, more Photoshop!):

But my mom shot that idea down because they were going to be too big compared to the centerpieces she mocked up. And I agreed; I was just bummed to be back at square one. I then found these luminaries on Etsy, which were also along the lines of what I was thinking of:
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Philly’s skyline is the perfect backdrop for Jennygirl’s Louboutins.

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.

When Mr. Spaniel and I first got engaged, we intended to make a lot of the wedding components ourselves. I was most looking forward to making our wedding invitations, but my love affair with letterpress, combined with a good deal on invitations, dashed that hope. Dashed, I tell you!

Well, it looks like I may have my chance to make the invitations, after all. Guess who didn’t order enough invitations? That’s right, me! I didn’t! I’m not sure I can totally be blamed, though. Papa Spaniel told me that he would need twenty invitations: ten for people at work that he wanted to invite, and ten for family members spread across the globe. But his list of invites has grown pretty significantly. We had 86 of 100 invitations accounted for, and now we’re at 98. It’s simply too close for comfort.

I am getting in touch with our printer to see what they can do about printing 10 or 25 more invites (either letterpress or digital), but the automatically generated price from the website is not promising (in fact, it’s nearly what we paid for 100 invites in the first place to order another 25, and it’s only digital printing!). But if nothing can be done, I have choices.
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For the last 4 months, we have been trying to figure out the whole registry situation. When Mr. N and I moved in together this time last year, we used every possible nook and cranny in our 1300 square foot apartment to put stuff. We literally had 2 of everything - 2 irons, 2 vacuums, 2 sets of kitchen everything. Now tell me, who in the world needs 2 George Foreman grills when neither person cooks?

I’ve talked to a bunch of people about what we could possibly register for, and the answer is usually the same – use the registry to redecorate.

“Get new towels and get rid of the old ones.”

“Get a nice set of matching plates and donate the 4 mismatched sets you have.”

“People are going to get you presents so you might as well pick the things you want instead of getting a bunch of stuff you don’t.”

Hmmm.
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