Weddingbee Blog

Congratulations to our winner, Miss Dachshund!

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We have a great giveaway today! From ring pillows to place cards, cupcake liners and favors, Estilo Weddings has everything you need for your wedding day, all in bold colors and styles. Check out their gorgeous new spring collection of products! Today Estilo Wedding is giving away a $200 gift certificate to one lucky Weddingbee reader.

Also, Estilo Weddings is currently also offering a 5% discount to our readers! Simply enter the code BEE0310 at checkout.

You have 2 chances to enter this contest!

Simply visit Estilo Weddings and let us know what you’d choose if you won this prize. For a second chance to win, follow Weddingbee on Twitter and retweet this contest (if you’re already a follower, simply retweet by clicking here!). Then come back here and let us know that you followed/retweeted. You have until Saturday, March 27 at midnight PST to enter. Good luck!

Continuing with the “follow my instincts” approach to wedding planning, I believe my fiancé and I have chosen our invitations!

By the time we found our invitations last spring, I’d seen hundreds of invites online and spent some time with my maid of honor looking at books. For weeks, I hadn’t seen any I truly loved, and I certainly don’t want to pay to have something “flat-printed” when it looks identical to something I could do with some creativity and my HP inkjet.

So just for fun, my fiancé and I stopped in at Paper & Chocolate, surely one of the prettiest stores in Dallas. They do wedding invites, and we spent a while looking at books. Mr. Oyster picked a letterpress book, and voila! We found our invites. It was love at first sight! Check it out (click to see it customized many different ways):
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After four consultations with DJs throughout RI, we finally found THE ONE! I was so excited because by the time we went on our drive to the fourth consultation, I was starting to think we would never find the perfect DJ, but we did.

We met with Larry from Engagements D.J. Entertainment, out of East Greenwich, RI. He was absolutely perfect for us. We were looking for someone who is low key, has experience, will work with us on the playlist, has a great personality and who has decent prices. He has the whole package. He will even play the Cha Cha Slide, which I never thought would be an issue, until a consultation with another DJ.

We had met with four DJs total—the most vendors we had met with for anything. I know four isn’t too many (I think 3-4 is a good number), but we originally thought we would need to find more people to look at before making a decision, since the first 3 consultations didn’t work out so well.
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Over a three day weekend in January, Mr. Turtle, my parents, my MOH, and I were able to go over to the coast and check a few big items off of our to-do list! We were very happy to check off the tasty little task of hiring our baker!

Meet Eclair Bakery, located in the charming downtown area of Arroyo Grande, California:

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Mr. Swan didn’t make too many demands during the planning process except for one: Piano Man. You mean the Billy Joel song, Mr. Swan? Yepper doo. Can I just say that I was happy to even know this song ’cause sometimes Mr. Swan whips out names of songs, and I give him a blank stare? Mr. Swan lucked out this time because I am very familiar with and like Billy Joel. Besides, Billy is a New Yorker.

For those who aren’t familiar with the song, here’s a clip from 1975 of Billy Joel singing Piano Man.”\ I’m happy to say that this clip is older than I am.

I’m sure you’re asking, “’Piano Man’, but why?”

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My preliminary exams (otherwise known as: a gate-keeping mechanism, a necessary evil, an unnecessary evil, hazing for first year students who hold Master’s) are one week from today. All hands are on deck. Eyelids are being propped open by toothpicks at midnight, so they might read one more critical essay. Books are being consumed like Oreos. Alternate Plan B careers are being rapidly brainstormed by colleagues (culinary school? reality TV? baby-maker? brewmaster? cheesemonger? librarian?). Facebook, blogging, and television are out. Reminders to shower, exercise, and eat meals are in. But really, exercise is out. Let’s be serious here.

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Miss Navy Blue and her future hubby pose for their engagement photos in sunny Loudonville, New York.

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’m not much of a jewelry person. The only thing I’ve worn consistently at any point in my life has been my e-ring. So it doesn’t really make sense for me to buy new pretties that I’ll probably only wear once!

Instead, I’m wearing jewelry Mr. Hot Dog has bought for me.

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Today, while I was surrounded by scraps of fabric, thread and beads galore, I got an IM from Mr. Lace. Now, he’s not really the romantic type, but I am, so that’s always been a struggle for us; for me, to not expect picture perfection like in chick flicks, and for him, to find opportunities to offer romantic gestures that are completely out of his comfort zone. So, amidst my frustration and stress in finishing up the hair flowers for my BMs so I could move onto the next project, his IM made me stop and take a moment.

I poured hours into our wedding website and although he liked it, he never said much about it. But his IM today said, “I just wanted to let you know that the wedding website is really great. You did such a good job on it. You made a good choice for the music and every time I come back and reread the stories, all these moments come to life again.”

Sigh.
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Mr. Jelly and I have a huge bridal party. He’s having 8 groomsmen, and I’m having 8 bridesmaids. My bridesmaids are all so special to me, and I’ve known them from different stages of my life. For example, I’ve been best friends with my MOH and cousin practically since I was a baby, and my college roommates and besties are all there, too! So when it came to asking my bridesmaids, I wanted to do something special. I found inspiration from several wedding blogs, and combined a few ideas to make my own cards with a little poem inside:

The front of the card. I bought plain cards from Michaels and cut out dresses out of coral paper. I calligraphed the name of each bridesmaid on the front and drew a little hanger. Then I glued the dress onto the hanger and glued on accent crystals.

Inside each card was this poem, which I found online:

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Here’s a southern-hemisphere Kiwi-Chilean shindig that we went to last week celebrating the marriage of our friends Matt and Claudia. (How gorgeous are they?)

They got married at a venue called “The Red Barn” in Matamata. Take note, all you kiwi brides. If we were getting married in New Zealand, this is where we would go. It was amazing. It featured a huge outdoor fireplace, and beautiful indoor/outdoor reception area.
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And I am one good fiance.

Mr. Nachos knew he found the perfect wedding duds the moment he tried them on – all white, crisp linen pants and a button down shirt. The pants were about 437 inches too long, but he planned to take them to the cleaners eventually and get them altered. In the mean time, he bought these to wear on the wedding day…

Comfy and cute and they looked just fine. Fast forward to yesterday – he picked up his freshly altered pants from the cleaners and they did a fantastic job. But when he put it all together, more of the dark shoes showed and they looked like a big poop stain on a fresh layer of fluffy snow.

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MV92867 is selling 24 pomanders (or “kissing balls”) and shepherd’s hooks. She’s asking $5 for each pomander and $5 for each hook. She will sell them together or individually.

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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Mr. Oyster and I actually got engaged in January of last year (the ring arrived a couple months later), so I had a while to think about our wedding without doing anything about it.

My plan for designing our wedding was to think “outside in”. Choose the overall effect you want, and create it. Then, work inward from there. It makes sense to me! A great book for this is Michelle Rago’s Signature Weddings.

I’m a big believer in “following your instincts,” so I decided to close my eyes, imagine our wedding, and write down what immediately came to mind. Over the next several months, this would change many times in many different ways, each change reflecting some revelation or something new I’d discovered about myself or about us.

Introspection aside, initially I loved the idea of getting married outdoors somewhere and having a classically romantic indoor reception. I love the whole “inspiration board” trend, and I decided to create one myself! Do these stylistic elements match?
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My search for wedding shoes started when I saw this photo on a magazine cover:

Source

I loved everything about this look—the simple veil, the puffy skirt, the sparkly cuff, the pink bouquet. But today, I’m only talking about the shoes. Let’s zoom in on those kickers, shall we?
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