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Okay, okay. So it’s been a week since I left you all wondering whether or not Mr. Doxie and I were able to book our perfect venue.
Well, I was on pins and needles waiting for the owner of Victorian Gardens of Two Sisters to return my call regarding available dates in May. Our venue search hadn’t exactly been smooth up to this point, so I readied myself for disappointment as I was waiting on her call. Would I be sad if she didn’t have a day for us? Of course. But I had to remind myself that it wouldn’t be the end of the world; sometimes I forget that I’ll always have options.
By the time the phone finally rang, I was positive she wouldn’t be able to help us. Murphy isn’t a very nice acquaintance to have, after all, and I’m a pessimist. I was completely taken aback by her response! Not only was there one Saturday available in May, but since it’s during a Canadian three-day weekend, it was our ideal date!
“HOLD IT FOR ME PLEASE!” I made an appointment to see it the next day.
As Daddy Doxie, Step Mom Doxie and I made the drive up to Kingsburg, I could feel the butterflies in my stomach. When we pulled in the driveway I could tell it was just as beautiful in person as it was in the photos; it was April and everything was in bloom. Flowers everywhere you looked! It was absolutely perfect. My family agreed and Daddy Doxie pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check for our deposit.
As she opened her date book to pencil us in, she frowned and looked at us nervously. Tragically, as fate would have it, she had made a terrible mistake…
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Pjuggan is selling a never-worn ivory Pronovias wedding gown. She’s asking $250 for the size 12 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:
You want some whimsy in your pictures? Have you been stalking wedding blogs much? Who does that? Gasp… oh wait. That would be me. Guilty as charged. I find that props really seem to bring whimsy and fun to a photo shoot. They give you something fun to use and the photographer has something besides the two of you to focus on.
Here are some ideas. Try these and let me know what you think.
(1) The Polaroid. So all the rage!
Because I’ll be wearing a new and special piece of jewelry and otherwise covering my hands with ornate designs, I think my hands will be getting a lot more attention than they are used to. I’m addressing that in part by prettying up my nails with polish, but I want to make sure that the nails themselves are healthy. For most of my life, my nails have been pretty strong and healthy (most of the time), so a simple manicure usually does the trick. But lately they’ve become really brittle and split all the time, even when I keep them really short. I don’t want fake nails (just not my thing), so I’ve been hunting for some home solutions for brittle nails, and thought I’d share the three major tips I found to treat cracking nails with the hive.
(source)
Featured on Weddingbee
All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
I was never a girl who planned out her wedding. All I knew was that I wanted to get married in a barn. I didn’t even really care where the barn was, just that it was a barn. I’d mentioned this to Mr. Gingham a few times but was never really being serious about it. Plus, we still had yet to figure out a town to get married in. My hometown was out—it was a great place to grow up but I wasn’t all that attached to it anymore. Mr. Gingham didn’t want to get married in Portland because he didn’t want our wedding guests leaving early and heading home. He (and I) want our guests to stay and celebrate all night long, which meant it would have to be somewhere that required a hotel stay.
We thought about Bend or Sunriver. There were barns and ranches there. Plus, that’s where we said, “I love you,” for the first time, and it’s definitely country out there. But, that seemed too far for guests to travel, especially some of our family who live in Seattle. Then we started thinking about the beach… it made perfect sense. That’s where Mr. Gingham grew up, and coincidentally, my family has a beach house in his hometown. His house and mine are only about a mile apart.
So, back to the beach.
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For a myriad of reasons, there won’t be a whole lot of dancing at the Sewing reception. But we don’t want guests to just eat and leave. We’ll have to provide some alternative entertainment.
And just for the record - there are endless things you can do at weddings besides dancing. Endless.
For starters, we’ll be showing a skit.
A skit, you ask? Like at summer camp? Yeah, something like that. I want to open up the night with a little shock-therapy for those that don’t know us that well. Sort of a statement saying, “This is who we really are. Yes, we are that weird”.
Okay, so it’s kind of hard to explain with just words. Here’s some visual examples I found on YouTube instead:
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Early in our planning I searched for inspiration so I could show Mr. Poodle my ideas for his outfit. We both liked the idea of something really casual, and he decided he would like to wear a vest instead of suspenders (our first choice), so he left the search in my hands. But, I couldn’t find anything I 100% liked. That’s why I decided to make his vest myself!
I wanted to make something for the guys, since I’m making the dresses for all my bridesmaids. 
So this was the perfect project; it’s very simple and *hopefully* cute!
I found the exact fabric I wanted at Jo-Ann’s, and I used an online coupon so in the end the materials were really cheap (about $30.00 for materials to make 5 vests).
And as soon as we got home I started cutting. I used one of Mr. Poodle’s old vests as my pattern for the shape, because I didn’t like the pockets that one had.
First things first: thank you to everyone who participated in the swap this year. You ladies are so talented, I can’t wait for next year to copy everything… kidding, kinda! 
Since we had so many participants in this year’s swap (about twice as many as last year) I’m going to break this up into a couple posts. I want to give everyone a chance to shine!
afbacher’s Martha Stewart inspired garland with frames
Hey lovelies! I’m so sorry to disappear like that—I had a few scares this past weekend! First F Stripes decided we were gonna watch the Super Bowl!! Waaa? Excuse my blatant sexism here, but isn’t this why I’m marrying a girl? Of course I’m kidding… well kinda, I mean, we’ll just leave it at “Go Saints!” Our second scare of the weekend came when the notorious r.i.n.g. (eater) Oscar ingested something toxic and had a series of seizures forcing us to spend Sunday night in the doggy ER. The drive to the ER was seriously terrifying—F Stripes did great with the precision driving, and I held/comforted our near unconscious and twitchy pup. Tears were shed, dollars were spent, and many sleepless hours later we were able to spring him from the ER, tail a-waggin’! A very happy ending indeed.
And now thanks to the dog-who-lived we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming and talk about the super rad new-school traditions we wanna rock on our wedding day!
Here goes:
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With an emphasis on the “slightly”, people—don’t get carried away. I’m 33—by no means the youngest or the oldest of brides out there. However, I am above the average age of a bride, both nationally (26.9 years) and locally (NYC–29 years).
I’ve been trying to think of how my age and all that comes with it have affected my wedding planning. It’s a tough call, since the impetus for any wedding-related decision is usually multi-fold—my choices are influenced not just by my age, but also by budget, personal priorities, and so on.
But one thing I felt did demonstrate my age more than other details is our registry.
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Back in early Summer, I sort of took a hiatus from planning. Many local vendors were not booking over a year out, so we had some down time. It gave me PLENTY of time to catch up on wedding blogs, and at least brainstorm.
I had been snooping around on Style Me Pretty and came across this fantabulous candy buffet set-up. I have tossed around the idea of having a candy buffet at the wedding with Mr. Argyle a few times and we both really like the idea of it as a wedding favor. We just have yet to really find a set up that we like. On top of that, we both really LOVE the idea of a photo booth. So, we keep going back and forth on which we want.
Back to the candy buffet. I found this:
We will have a lot of out of town guests at our wedding. In fact, “out of town” is probably an understatement - I should say “out of country”. Approximately 50% of our guest list will be crossing the US/Canada border to attend the celebration, and another 10-15% will travel for more than an hour to join us. Because of this, arranging for hotel accommodations was a very important task, one that we knew had to be taken care of early.
It dawned on me this morning that I’ve never told you about our great accommodations find! We have informed our guests about the reserved hotels via our STDs and website, and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback! I think that I have heard at least twice as many “great choice on the hotel, guys” than “Wow! Your STDs are beautiful and amazing and must have taken so much hard work!”
On to the goods! After checking out many of your standard hotel chains in our area, including the Holiday Inn, the Comfort Inn, and the Marriott Residence Inn, we were just not impressed. Even with a group discount, the hotel rooms were expensive (averaging around $120.00), and they were mostly located about 30 minutes from our venue, right next to Highway 401.
OK, so you may know that I love Amazon. If you don’t, now you know. I’m registered there, I bought my wedding ring there and I even bought the groomsmen’s ties there. So, it was inevitable that I would likely find my wedding jewelry from there, too. Yet another thing I love about Amazon is that they constantly have sales. Recently, the sale was on all things jewelry in preparation for Valentine’s Day.
After browsing about 1,000 pairs of earrings (no joke, seriously that many, apparently I’m picky) I found 2 pairs that I absolutely loved. I put them both in my cart and figured I’d choose the right one by staring at them for a really long time. Well, I stared at them for a long time and the internal dialogue went something like this:
“Wow, those dangly ones are gorgeous, I think they’ll go perfectly with my dress”
“Oh, but wait, those other guys have diamonds around the diamond and that’s sort of like my engagement ring. Maybe I should get those instead.”
“But those dangly ones are so classic, I could see myself wearing those a lot more often after the wedding and feeling special every time I put them on.”
“Oh man, but those other guys are so pretty and diamond-y.”
“OK, what if I got both?”
And then it was decided, I would get both.
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I needed small air pillows to package the little Valentines for mailing, so I did some recycling and made my own:
Left over from all my online holiday shopping were tons of these air pillows too big for this application:
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This edition is full of advice to help the lovable couple that gets uncomfortable in front of the camera. You don’t have to prove your love to anyone but your partner, but it’s still nice to be able to capture some moments of that love on camera. It’s probably true that each couple has their own unique love moments that capture the uniqueness of their love, but sometimes you just need some fall backs to ensure that you have enough fun variety in your photo sets.
It sometimes just seems odd to me that images on your wedding day and engagement picture sessions are all about public displays of affection (PDA). Oh PDA… ewwww… or is it? Personally, I feel pretty comfortable with the basics of kissing, hugging, and holding hands. But during our 2 engagement photo sessions, I found myself feeling a tad uptight because we were sometimes asked for some serious PDA. Toughy friends… toughy!
So here we go folks… more tips for modeling your love in front of the camera.
(1) The almost kiss. This is the moment right before the kiss. Sometimes it’s sweeter than the actual kiss itself. So go in for the kiss… then stop and hover. Sense each other being right there… so close, yet so far away. The lingering will likely bring on a slight smile and create this picture, below. I liken this type of photo to the first kiss that happens in the slowest way where couples are kind of teasing one another. So romantic.
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