Weddingbee Blog

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What the heck does Deal or No Deal have to do with wedding planning? Nothing! Until one day last summer when Mr Hot Wings and I were back in San Diego visiting my family. I left the house for 2 hours to run some errands, and I came home to find that Papa Hot Wings, Lil’ Bro Hot Wings, and Mr Hot Wings had been BBQing, drinking beers, and planning our wedding reception entertainment. Brother Hot Wings was convinced that Deal or No Deal would make for great entertainment. He thought it would be fun to watch the newlyweds make their first decisions as a married couple.

Say what?

Are you kidding me? I’ve done all this planning and you think you can just take over our reception entertainment? But Mr Hot Wings thought I was being a square about it and convinced me to just let him try.

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Let’s have a look at the family scales:

First there’s Mr. Veggie’s family. Nice and nuclear. Two parents. One brother. Niece. Nephew.

Notice how we all fit on one couch.

Then there’s my family.
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I have heard over and over again how complicated it is to get married in the Catholic Church. We somewhat experienced this, but later realized, it’s probably only hard if you don’t regularly attend church or are marrying outside your own church.

It literally took us months to find a church in RI that was willing to marry us. We had to agree that our hometown church would sign off on the paperwork, which we were worried about since we no longer attend on a regular basis. We kind of pushed this off for a while. But when we did start the process, we met with the pastor at my childhood parish.

He was so welcoming and friendly. I explained that I had attended the church growing up. He didn’t really ask too many questions. He let us know he’d help with whatever we needed. All he asked was that we start attending regularly and stay for the entire mass. His biggest pet peeve is parishioners leaving after communion, which is about 2 minutes before the whole service ends. That’s a pretty small requirement after all the troubles we were expecting.
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Tesse and Mike’s amazing save-the-dates were inspired by their favorite 1930s WPA National Park posters.

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.

Mr. Turtle and I have known since early in our dating relationship that we would get married someday. Although we had already made this lifetime commitment to each other in our hearts, back in the summer of 2008 I did not see a proposal or a wedding anywhere in our near future. This was mostly due to the fact that we are young and due to my nature as an obsessive planner. I felt that the timing had to be just right. It wasn’t part of my “life plan” to get married before I graduated from college, so the very earliest we could get married would be the summer of 2010.

Meanwhile, Mr. Turtle had a different plan. In June, while I was off in Hawaii on vacation with my family, Mr. Turtle had a conversation with his parents about our plans to get married sometime after graduation. They urged him to propose in plenty of time for me to enjoy planning the wedding. So while I was off in Hawaii, totally oblivious, he decided to go ring shopping. By the time I got home from Hawaii, he had purchased a ring and come up with a plot to propose in December.

He knew that my favorite time of the year is Christmas, so he decided to do it then.
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How about a honeymoon?

Mr. Sew and I plan on leaving the day after our wedding, on a Sunday. I’ve heard a few questions of why I wouldn’t want to wait around in Hawaii for a little while to hang out with everyone, but honestly I don’t want to. Part of me thinks it’s utterly romantic to be whisked away right after the wedding. But most of me doesn’t want to be embarrassed around friends and family members after my first night as a married lady.

It was never a question of where we would go, of course. The nation of all things cute and amazing. Robot-Capital-of-the-World. Otaku-mecca. Anime-Heaven. Call it what you will, we’re going to Japan.

(source)

And with three weeks of precious saved-up vacation time, we’ll be going all over Japan.
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This is by no means a new issue in the wonderful world of planning a wedding. Figuring out The Plus One Situation is difficult for a lot of couples when building their guest lists. And while we finished our guest list a while back, The Plus One Situation has lingered on my mind.

We started with a blanket rule - any of our friends that were dating someone seriously who we’d met before, were invited with guests. We addressed their invitations to Friend & Friend’s SO by name so that there would be no confusion. As in, if Friend’s SO couldn’t make it, they should come alone.

We handled friends who didn’t fit those criteria on a case by case basis. Generally, we did not give single friends guests because we were already over our ballroom’s capacity. However, in certain situations we made some exceptions. For people who we really wanted to come, but who didn’t know many other people (or anyone, for that matter) that were invited, we allowed an “& guest”. In these cases, our friends were extremely gracious and appreciative, which made us very happy with our decision.
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Sorry, I sat here for 10 minutes trying to come up with a clever title to this post with no luck, so that one pretty much sums up the last 10 minutes of my life I won’t get back.

Anywho, on to the subject at hand: wedding reception slide shows.

Have you ever gone to a wedding reception where the couple plays the longest slide show they could have possibly put together? You know the one - unless you are in at least half of said pictures, you <yawn> start wondering if anyone would notice if you made a bee-line for the bar.

Well…

I’m actually making one of those slide shows. But it’s OK! We aren’t going to make everyone sit and face a screen in a dark room to watch for 3 hours, it’ll be playing on the TVs overhead throughout the whole party. Yep, 3 whole hours of slide show. If people want to glance up at it once in a while and see some smiling faces, then great! If they’d rather talk to the bartender all night, that’s fine, too. (Ahem, cough, losers, cough.)
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I first saw this photo in a post from Mrs. Apple Cider about her guestbook/bench:

(Address file from Lovely Designs)

The address file was suggested as a way to organize seating cards by the Brooklyn Bride, but I really loved the idea of using it as a guest book - have people write notes to you and file it under their last name! Perhaps I like being organized a bit too much? The only thing I didn’t like was the price of this super cute set, but I kept it in the back of my mind while sifting through guestbook options and considered making one myself, following this Ruffled tutorial.

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Our newest bee is a city-loving and budget-savvy bride planning her August nuptials in the City by the Bay! Please join me in welcoming Miss Taco to the hive!

Miss Taco, San Francisco
Age & Occupation: 28, writer/editor
Fiance’s Age & Occupation: 36, editor
Engagement Date: May 13, 2009
Wedding Date: August 2010
Venue: The Green Room at the War Memorial Veterans Building
About Me: I laugh and talk often, quieting down only to eat delicious food, have a cocktail, or write and edit things for fun and profit. My favorite things include my husband-to-be, socializing, my doggie, San Francisco, the internets, and the Roaring ’20s. We’ve been planning our wedding (kind of) since roughly 2006, when I discovered a show on the WE network called “Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?” I’m running and not looking back with a theme we’re calling “urban vintage.”

My thoughts on sweets? Go big or go home. If I am going to eat a big white flour/sugar/fat mess, I want it to taste amazing, and I probably want to eat a lot of it. Don’t you?!

Remember when I said I was going to make all of my own cupcakes for the wedding? Well, I pulled it off. I also made just about a million cookies. I was smart enough to hire someone to make a couple of cakes and a pie (for some reason I can bake a mean cupcake, but whenever I try to make a full size cake it ends up being a huge kitchen disaster!), and one of our friends made an apple crisp. Lets just say we had a lot of yummy desserts.

The following food porn is all vegan and all delicious:

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

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I’ve always known that I was never going to be a veiled bride. It’s really just not my style. So, right off the bat, I started looking at alternative hair accessories. Enter the hair flower.

Source

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Mama Hot Wings is a sassy and glamorous woman. And dang it, the woman is picky. She had a long “No” list:

• No “stiff” material
• No jackets
• No strapless
• Nothing too fussy
• Nothing too expensive
• No a long formal dress

I had only 2 requirements.

• Gold/champagne/blue to match our colors
• I insisted her dress suit her sass-factor.

When we first started trying on dresses, she liked more traditional dresses like this one.

Montage 15980

I insisted these dresses didn’t show off her fun personality enough. So, we kept trying.

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I am a non-crafter in a family of crafters.

Veggie Sis K - quilter and sewer extraordinaire. She made us this quilt as a house-truck warming gift.

MIL Veggie - knitter and sewer. She makes us each something warm and cozy every Christmas and has taken on the flower girl dresses as her special wedding project.
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At the end of last year, I wrote about my nutrition overhaul - well, I’m back for the update! For the past 2 months, I’ve been eating (relatively) healthier and regularly seeing a nutritionist. And here are the results!

My results aren’t majorly dramatic - but that was my danger. I don’t have a lot of weight to lose, so I usually hide behind my soft and squishy figure. But thanks to healthier eating habits, portion control, and semi-sporadic working out, I’m 5 lbs lighter and much firmer. I see the most dramatic results in my arms - my usual “problem spot”. Yay!

Here’s what I did for the past 2 months:
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