Weddingbee Blog

A while back, Mr. Sew and I made a bunch of cranes for no real purpose other than to fulfill tradition. They are technicolored, and while I thought about re-folding or spray painting them, I decided to take the sage advice given last time, and just leave them as-is.

Now: what will we do with them?
Read more…

Many many bees have had success using photo sharing cards like Mrs. Lemon, Mrs. Cream Puff, and Miss Cheeseburger to name a few.

There are many services that allow you to share pictures including Facebook, Flickr, and Shutterfly. I considered Flickr and Shutterfly. Ultimately, I ended up choosing Shutterfly for the following reasons:

1. They create a website with a web address (e.g., http://hotwings.shutterfly.com)
2. Unlimited uploads daily
3. Free!
4. Full size download of all images
5. Guests do not need to register for an account
6. Owner can control privacy, guest ability to download, edit, or delete photos
7. Includes video service

Following after the lead of other bees, I created this using aspects from our invitations:
Read more…

Congratulations to our winners - the $100 gift certificate goes to charismaclassic and the two $50 gift certificates go to soon2Bstephens and violete!

~~~

We have a great giveaway today! Blumeboxes are an alternative to pricey vases, and are a great way to add an eco-friendly touch to your centerpieces. They’re reusable, recyclable and come in all kinds of colors, patterns, sizes and coordinating ribbons, and Blumebuds make great escort cards, too! Today Blumebox is giving away 3 gift certificates to 3 lucky Weddingbee readers—1 $100 gift certificate and 2 valued at $50.

To enter this contest, check out Blumebox’s line of products and tell us what you’d choose if you won a gift certificate! You have until Wednesday, March 24th at midnight PST to enter. Good luck!

So… remember our venue? If you recall, Mr. Buttons and I will be holding our wedding ceremony in front of Carlouel’s huge stone fireplace…

(personal photo)

It is gorgeous on its own, clearly… but something was missing. Mommy Buttons and I were a bit perplexed as to why their fireplaces don’t have mantles (there is a matching fireplace opposite the one we will be standing in front of for the ceremony)! I mean, that is pretty standard, right? And… there are such beautiful possibilities for decor with one!
Read more…

Miss Hamster is selling a brand-new gown from Emerald Bridal (Style 8009). She’s asking $400 for the size 6 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:

Read more…

And maybe it’s time to get a little bit personal.

I think I need some help remembering that my wedding was a happy occasion.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m happy I got married. I’m happy about the life I have with Mr. DD. And I’m pretty happy about the wedding itself too–about how things went, about how we got to catch up with people we never get to see, about how my niece and nephew got to meet their great-grandparents for the first time, about how awesome it felt to say my wedding vows in front of our friends and family.

But I’m really unhappy about how several people acted during the wedding. Actually, unhappy is an understatement. We still haven’t quite figured out what to say to them. And, yes, you’re correct—our wedding was six months ago.

I guess what I really feel is sad and insecure and self-conscious.
Read more…

It’s time to reveal our invitations, which will be going out in early April. They’ve actually been done for a couple weeks (DIY win!), thanks to help from my family and the fact that these are scaled back versions.

Yes, I had to scale back my invitations design. Partly because Mr. Cola wasn’t happy about spending so much time at his office laser cutting, partly because, well, they were going to be crazily time consuming. But don’t worry, I’ll still show them to you, after I detail the ones that will actually be going out to our guests!

If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m pretty into my paper products for this wedding, and I love everything to all tie together. I wanted our invitations to have a similar feel to our Save The Dates, so I used the same paper, and made a similar-but-different pocketfold, to go with our STD pocketfolds.

Here is how I made these pocketfolds, if anyone else would like to give them a try. To start, I printed out my outline on the back of my 11″ x 17″ paper. You can find the template to print the outline for the 5″ x 7″ pocketfold in the DIY Section of Weddingbee here.

I then cut the pocketfold out with my X-Acto knife, and repeated 85 times:
Read more…

I wrote about my hair trial already, but only had one photo to show you. Now I’m back with the rest of the pictures, courtesy of Papa Paisley’s camera and photo emailing skills!

Here are a couple of my inspiration photos to show what I was hopin’ for:

And:
Read more…

As promised, I wanted to report our final guest list statistics. I’ve always found these kind of posts helpful, even if just for finding some peace of mind while planning your list.

You might recall, I mentioned that our final guest list was 297. Yeah, well, that was before the week that I like to call “Guest List Goes Wild Week”.

Apparently, since we were a few (THREE) people under capacity and feeling really laid back about it, everyone - my parents, Burger’s parents, and Burger and I - padded their lists a little bit. That padding bumped our overall guest list from 297 to 321. THREE HUNDRED TWENTY ONE.

Enter Cheeseburger meltdown.

After some frantic phone calls, a few tears, and a mild panic attack, the six of us were attempting to cut our lists down.

The majority of the problem was my fault. You see, I included Burger’s brother & sister and their dates as part of Burger’s Family’s list and my brother & sister and their dates as part of my parents’ list - and our parents included them in ours because our siblings are in the bridal party. Whoops. It might not sound like a lot, but 9 people is almost half of the unaccounted for additions to the original 297! I felt terrible.

After a few days of meticulous cuts, we had our final number. 306. Only six people over. I could live with that (nervously… very nervously).
Read more…

For the civil ceremony, I decided that I wanted to make my own birdcage veil and fascinator. I ended up spending over 3 hours trying to make a birdcage veil and finally gave up in frustration. Then Mr. Jelly admitted that he doesn’t even like birdcage veils, so I scrapped the idea completely. The fascinator, on the other hand, was much easier to make.

Here’s how I did it:

1) Go to Michaels or other craft store and find a flower in the color you want. I chose this ivory (magnolia?) flower:

Read more…

Hive, I did it. I went all the way. And my first time was with a girl named Brandi.

I have to say for my first pedicure – I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. It was a little weird having someone clipping my toenails. Ew, it even sounds gross in my head even though it’s already happened. OK, I’m not gonna lie, it was a lot weird having someone rubbing lotion between my toes. But I’m determined to make my toadies look their best for the wedding.

Read more…

So once I had chosen the perfect dress for me, I began searching for the perfect dress for my bridesmaids! I kept putting off this decision because I could not decide for the life of me what color I wanted them to wear! Originally, when I chose our wedding colors (pink, brown, silver, and white), I was all about dark brown bridesmaid’s dresses. But as our wedding style developed, I began to feel like this might be too dark for the otherwise light, romantic, garden feel. This left pink, silver/grey, and a lighter shade of brown as options. I was more particular about the dress fitting the overall style of the wedding than finding a particular color.

When in search for a stylish bridesmaid dress, there were a few different options that stood out to me:

1. Bridesmaid’s dresses ordered through bridal boutiques
2. Bridesmaid’s dresses available for online purchase
3. Non-Bridesmaid’s dresses purchased off-the-rack from a “normal”/non-bridal store

Option 1: There are a ridiculous amount of bridal designers in existence. I didn’t even have the time to look through all of them, but I found the photo galleries on www.theknot.com and www.brides.com very helpful because they allow you to sort the dresses into categories like price, silhouette, neckline, color, and designer. These were my top contenders in the bridal designer category:
Read more…

A big red barn adds country charm to BenJerrysBride’s Vermont wedding photos.

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.

I’ll take one. Or 12 (of the stripey thing that also comes in a vast array of solid colors; note: not the chivari chair, to which I still ask, “what’s the big deal?”).

K, our caterer/linens diva at Miraglia Catering in San Leandro, CA, turned me on to these beanbag dealies over at LaTavola, a linen company with a warehouse in the Laurel Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. I had already checked out the linens and napkin samples from Miraglia’s book o’ goodies, so I didn’t think the store would be that big of a deal. It turned out to be a lot of fun, especially because I’m a tactile, touchy kinda person.
Read more…

Running of the Brides was quite the experience. It was crazy, hectic, insane, and totally fun. I was planning to go to Filene’s Basement’s Annual Running of the Brides (it’s actually bi-annual in Boston) for my wedding gown. We had done it for Sister Starfish’s gown and she wasn’t just successful in finding the dress, she was successful in finding the dress(es). The prices were so great that she ended up getting two styles, one for the ceremony and photos, and a second for the reception.

When deciding on whether or not to do ROTB, I ended up having my decision made for me. When I was starting to look for dresses, Filene’s had been bought out and there was a pretty big rumor going around that there would be no ROTB in 2009. With that in mind, I headed to another bridal shop, fell in love and put down a deposit, only to find out a few months later that the August Running of the Brides was still on. For a while I debated on whether to lose my deposit and go for it, but I figured I already found “the dress” and didn’t want to feel pressured into getting a dress I may not love as much.

Despite my decision to skip on my own ROTB Experience, I thought I’d share my experience from a supporter’s side.
Read more…