Weddingbee Blog

I guess the best way to begin my wedding blogging journey is by telling the story of me and Mr. Turtle, (considering that without him there would be no wedding, and therefore no wedding blog!).

I first spotted Mr. Turtle on the first day of our freshman year of high school. He was the class clown and I was the new kid. He was in three of my classes. I thought he was too cool for me and it turns out that he thought I was too cool for him. So we never talked to each other, with the exception of a quick “hello” in passing. (Later on we discovered that we both had a secret crush on each other that entire time.)

Sophomore year came and we shared mutual friends; we even sat at the same lunch table sometimes. We both went on the same choir trip to Hawaii and still didn’t say a word to each other the entire time! At the end of sophomore year, our mutual friends decided to transfer to different high schools. Over the summer, I guess we both realized that we were the only ones left in our group of friends, so hanging out just felt natural. On the first day of junior year, we spotted each other in the hall, gave each other a quick hug, and we’ve been pretty much inseparable ever since!

After graduation, we both went away to college for a year in San Diego and then moved back to our hometown where we are both currently finishing up our bachelors degrees at different universities. Mr. Turtle and I are truly best friends. Our personalities are very different, but our interests and hobbies are similar.

I’ve always thought that older married couples who claim to have married their high school sweethearts have the most wonderful love stories.
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When it came time to organize the “detail” photos from our wedding, I realized that things may be a bit out of order here, so just work with me. Recaps are tough to organize! I shared with you our day-after photos with my talented cousin (and bridesmaid) MB of Design MB Fotografie. She captured some gorgeous shots of my bouquet, so I figured I would continue with some of the ceremony and personal details.

As I mentioned probably a thousand times, I was in love with my bouquet!
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Cookinette is selling her unique modern tiara for $80.

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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Many moons ago (OK, more like a few months ago) I blogged about how I was going to make fabric napkins for all of the guests at our wedding. I even had grand plans to fashion them into a quilt post-wedding. Remember this inspiration picture?

Source

Ahh, yes. Well, then I blogged about how we might change our linens and that the fabric napkin plan might clash with the linens we were going to rent, and that we might not do them after all. And… that was the last I said about this little project.
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We have a curious situation with our ceremony. I was raised Catholic and Ribs was raised… well, sort of Jewish? He had a Bar Mitzvah. That’s about it.

We’re doing a semi-Jewish—in the loosest sense possible—ceremony anyways.

As a writer and deeply observant person, I’ve become completely mystified by the world and, even more, the universe. I won’t go New Age on you, but trust me: it all blows my mind.

Having my mind blown by these things, I’m much more “spiritual” than religious. I think there’s a lot of beautiful things about Catholic mass, but the teachings don’t jive with my worldview. However, most of my family does continue to practice Catholicism. I didn’t want to create some humanist ceremony that’s completely devoid of their familiar text—the Bible. I also knew I literally couldn’t have an outdoor Catholic ceremony in a town where I’m nowhere near a member of the church.
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As I mentioned before, I had trouble deciding how to package our invitations. You’ll see in this post that each suite had a different belly band, and I used a variety of envelope colors. Ridiculous? Um yeah. But our invites looked so pretty bundled in silver and white; and so cheerful and spring-y in yellow and pink. It was like wrapping presents (I love wrapping presents!), and I had fun making each set a little different.

Now onto the eye-candy!

The hard part of the process was choosing the envelopes for each type of bellyband—I still wanted them to match!
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Having read countless posts from fellow bees regarding their amazing weddings and looking at photos from other weddings on the internet, I kinda feel like I could be putting more effort into my wedding, like DIY-ing more stuff and doing my own flowers. But I can’t complain, because to a certain extent, it’s all my fault! And I own it! It’s all due to my modus operandi: Laziness (and DIY inability). Folks, I won’t lie—excited as I have been about planning this wedding, I am a lazy ass.

If I could do this for a living, I would:

I am so pretty.

There are several components from this wedding that I decided from the get-go not to include, or dropped along the way.
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When Mr. Starfish proposed, shortly after I said yes, he just picked me up and started swinging me around on third beach (the beach in Middletown, RI, where we had our proposal picnic). He’s done it many times before then and many times after, but now every time he does it, it brings me back to those exciting few moments shortly after he proposed. The excitement. The happiness. Pure joy. Inexplicable. Undeniable. Most amazing moment of my life. (So far.)

When we were deciding on where to take our engagement pictures, I knew we had to include third beach as a location and I wanted to recreate that moment.

Well, we did, and it brought me back all over again.

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I’m wrapping up my DIY projects… I mean, there were so many of them. Who am I kidding: you know I’m not a DIYer. But this last one was by far the easiest. I needed to make 2 hanging lanterns for our ceremony decor. I went to Crate and Barrel first to find appropriate containers. But, once I saw that it would cost about $9 each, I decided that Goodwill would also have pretty containers. So, with my new idea of finding glassware, I headed to Goodwill and found 2 perfect containers:

(Pretend you don’t see the wire on the sides, I forgot to take ‘before’ pictures. Also pretend you don’t notice the crooked paint line, m’kay, thanks.)

Grab crafting material from previous DIY project that you have not finished yet:
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Remember my plan to pull all the flowers off of the plastic garland for our centerpieces? Here, I’ll refresh your memory…

And ‘member how I mentioned that the flowers were floating just under the candles which made me nervous? ‘Member?
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Looming on our to-do list was picking out tuxes for Mr. Lace and the groomsmen. It seemed easy enough. I knew it wouldn’t be as hard as picking out a wedding dress or bridesmaid’s dresses, and both of those were completed a while ago. So, how hard could this really be? I pestered Mr. Lace and we finally set aside some time one weekend to visit Men’s Wearhouse and Friar Tux.

Around 5:30 PM one sunny afternoon, we headed out to Friar Tux. On the way there, we decided to call and make sure it was okay that we dropped in. Easy peasy, right? Yup, they were closed already. We called Men’s Wearhouse and luckily they were open until 9 PM.

We walked into Men’s Wearhouse and found a lot of commotion. A family of men were there buying suits and trying things on and they were super loud. No bother, though. Someone quickly welcomed us and asked what we were looking for. When we mentioned that we were looking for tux rentals, he brought us back to a desk with a catalog and explained how the tux rentals worked. They’d be ready for pick up two days beforehand. They’d fix anything for us within that two days if something didn’t fit correctly. There was a fee for dry cleaning and damages that’d be added onto your package. He let us look through the catalog in peace. After eliminating the white tuxes, zoot suits, pinstriped tuxes, one and three-button tuxes and any tuxedo that wasn’t black, we had two choices. I guess I was right—the decision wasn’t going to be terribly difficult if we only had two choices.
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Congratulations to Keladry: You’ve won the $100 gift certificate!

Additional congratulations to libra5979 and Mrs. Quiche who’ve won $50 gift certificates!

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We have a great giveaway from Shapeways! Shapeways makes absolutely unique 3D printed gifts for your wedding party or wedding day decor—from table decor to custom cufflinks and jewelry, keepsakes and more. Today they’re giving away gift certificates to three lucky Weddingbee readers—1 valued at $100 and 2 valued at $50.

To enter this contest, simply visit Shapeways’ wedding section and tell us what you’d customize if you won a gift certificate! You have until Wednesday, March 17 at midnight PST to enter. Good luck!

Look what I got in the mail this past weekend!

It’s the super-cute invitation for my upcoming bridal shower! Pretty, isn’t it? This got me super excited for several reasons:
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Dearest hive,

I cannot possibly express how excited I am to be Miss Turtle!!

I came across this fabulously creative and genuinely friendly community shortly after getting engaged way back in August of 2008. My first impression was, ‘Who are all of these insects and desserts planning weddings? And how am I supposed to remember the difference between Miss Cookie and Miss Cupcake?’ But like the rest of you, I quickly became addicted and developed some serious bee crushes on girls like Avocado, Perfume, and Cowboy Boot.

Of course I had a secret desire to become one of these “bees”. (I mean, really, who wouldn’t?) But the closer the eight-month mark came, which meant I’d be eligible to apply, the more nervous I became. I didn’t think I had what it takes. A few months later, I realized there was nothing to lose, so I decided to go for it! I submitted my blog, crossed my fingers, and promised myself I wouldn’t get my hopes up! And today, I came home from work and discovered an email from Mrs. Penguin waiting in my inbox! I was prepared for rejection, my mouse already hovering over the delete button, when I reread the first line. “… think you’d be a great addition to the Weddingbee team!” Wait. What? Me??? Well I am still in shock, and writing this post is so surreal that I keep having to remind myself that I am not some awkward turtle rehearsing in front of the mirror. This is for real!!
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I love the idea of displaying photographs of our parents’ and grandparents’ weddings at our wedding. I think it’s a really sweet way to honor the two families coming together and to give a face to those who can only be with us in spirit.

I’m in the process of tracking down the pictures from each of our grandparents’ wedding days as well as both of our parents’. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get all six, but I’m going to try my hardest. My FMIL emailed me the scanned versions of two out of the three I had requested and she is still on the hunt for the third (Mr Trail Mix’s paternal grandparents’ pic seems to have gone AWOL).

Here are the two she sent me:

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