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In January, I got an email saying that our engagement portraits were up. Our engagement shoot happened near the Christmas holidays, in Chicago! There will be a whole post later about why I ended up hiring a photographer from a thousand miles away, but in the meantime, here are the photos.
Of the 90 shots given to us after our session, we marked half of them as our favorites. I’m not sure what we’ll do with these shots. I plan to put at least one or two on our wedding webpage, and I’m going to order a print or two to display at our rehearsal dinner.
Three favorites from the photographer’s blog:
Yep, like so many bees before me, we’re doing out of town boxes, to be handed out when our guests check into the hotel. Our hotel only charges if we want the boxes put in the rooms, so we’re perfectly fine with them being handed out at the front desk for free!
I found some inexpensive 9″ x 9″ x 6″ kraft gable boxes from U.S. Box, but unfortunately they only came in 50 packs, so I have some left over. I’m estimating we’ll need to give out about 24 OOT boxes (one per room), and so I made 5 extra, just in case.
And how will I decorate the boxes, you ask? With layered ribbon and paper, of course!
One of the things our photographer requested was that we put together a list of must-have shots. I mean, ideally, I want to give her as much artistic freedom as possible, but I understand. Heaven forbid grand-poobah-what’s-her-name miss out on her five minutes of paparazzi fame.
“Whaaat?! Leave ME out of a picture? How dare you!”
Just kidding. But let’s compile a list anyway, shall we? I’ll start with the checklist on Real Simple’s website, since it’s fairly comprehensive. I’ll cross off the ones we won’t be needing.
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I am a lifelong nail biter. I’m really serious about the “lifelong”, too—I can’t remember, even waaaayyyy back into my childhood, a time when I didn’t bite my nails. I’m almost embarrassed to describe the severity of it, too. I mean, when I’ve been really bad about it, my nails are STUBS. There’s almost nothing there. It’s NOT just a mild case of biting at the occasional hangnail.
Trust me, it ain’t this cute. (Source)
I’ve never seriously tried to stop before. When I was little, my mom would put that bitter stuff on my fingers, but I’d just pick at them instead. I know my ravaged nails are highly unattractive, but that was never enough to compel me to stop.
However, this past January, I thought our engagement was imminent (which was not actually true; we didn’t get engaged until May!). Knowing that once Mr. Octopus proposed, I would be frequently and prominently displaying my fingers, I finally felt driven enough to force myself to break the habit.
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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.”
Now that my recaps are just about finished, and I have talked on and on about how fun, relaxing, and delicious my wedding day was, I need to be honest and spell out all of the junk that went wrong. I’m not going to lie to you… things will go wrong! You probably won’t even realize most of it until the next day, or the next week, and you just have to not let it bum you out. I let a few things get to me, until I convinced myself it was just a wedding, just one single day, and I made myself move on!
So here it is, my list of what went wrong. Hopefully it is as amusing to you as it is to me:
1. I forgot the photobooth props. Not a big deal at all, and totally my fault. Luckily the items have been passed on to another bride, and I hope she gets use out of them! I got over this pretty quickly.
2. My makeup artist canceled. Three days before the wedding, my makeup artist told me she could no longer make it. Luckily, my amazing hairstylist stepped in and did all the hair and makeup. She rules. I got over this as soon as I had my stylist booked for makeup, too. 
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In March of ’08 BIL Starfish proposed to Sister Starfish, and about 7 months later, Mr. Starfish got down on two knees and asked me to be his wife.
Starfish Dad was ecstatic, so much so that he started coming up with “great” wedding ideas, like the double wedding, which Sister Starfish was totally on board with, but I, on the other hand was not. I didn’t understand how you could make a wedding personal when you were sharing the day with another couple. I joked with Sister Starfish that we’d do the double wedding if the theme was Mr. and Miss Starfish. She didn’t really care for that theme.
I was perfectly happy planning our own wedding, when one day I was looking at our photographer’s website and for the first time ever, I came across a double wedding! It got me thinking about what could have been.
Look how happy this dad is—and the brides are happy, too!
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Goinggreen212 is selling an unworn, unaltered Jim Hjelm 8904 gown. The size 10 dress is ivory lace over champagne. Inquire as to price.
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:
This past weekend I was up in the Casper/Glenrock area and decided to take the opportunity to help the Hot Dog Step(sister)s find their junior BM dresses! We decided to take the easy route and hit the mall.
Going in, I wanted to make sure that my Steps picked a dress that they both loved and would feel good in. I didn’t care if it was a print or solid, strapless or halter, long or short. As long as it went well with the color(ish) palette, it was an option!
Up first, JC Penney.
Meet LitteStep.
You may recall that recently I was struggling with what dress to wear for our engagement pictures. The day that post went up, I ordered what I thought would be the perfect fun, flirty e-pics dress — a sure hit! I anxiously awaited its arrival at our humble abode. When it arrived, I raced home to try it on. I should have known when I opened the package and saw that it was from the store’s “petites” section that it had FAIL written all over it. If you know me, you know that my long torso and giraffe legs do not spell petite.
Are you tired of my shoe saga yet? Yeah, I am too. This is the end, I promise.
As a reminder, I first fell for the wrong type of shoe and got over that by traipsing around with some other prospects. Then, I just fell. So now, I’m left looking for a shoe that doesn’t clash, makes me look like the woman I am, and reduces the fall-on-your-face hazard.
After resigning myself to the fact that I’d likely be a sensible-shoe bride for the ceremony, I decided to check out these babies:
They were cute enough. I guess.
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As I try to taper off my search for inspiration, I couldn’t help but notice this picture in the Weddingbee DIY section:
Source via Weddingbee DIY
There is something so simple and sweet about the little hanging ampersand between the two chairs. And, it would match perfectly with our table numbers. We aren’t having a bride and groom sign on our chairs, so I thought it would be a new way to still designate our chairs, but without having to make the signs, since we all know the crafting gene escaped me.
The invites are officially finished. I have pretty mixed feelings about the whole process: I love that I was able to incorporate my fonts and colors, but I hate how much time I spent on them. They’re done though, so I’ll stop complaining.
Because I’m so pro, I did an official photo shoot on a wrinkled sheet. Like I said, pro.
By the time our guest list was finalized and all of the response cards had been sent back to us, it was clear that my obsession with what to do for our out of town baskets was not for nothing. A whopping 80% of our guests would be coming in from other cities and states, and staying in the hotel blocks we had reserved. While I may have never even heard of an out of town basket (or OOT, as I prefer to call them since it’s way more fun to say) before we were engaged and I fell into the land of wedding blog goodness, I quickly had a million ideas for ours and Mr. Cloud quickly became concerned that I was losing touch with reality.
At one point I planned on baking homemade cookies and cupcakes to put in these things; looking back, the Mr. clearly had reason to be concerned. But I scaled things way back, and ABSOLUTELY LOVE what we gave out. I have been D-Y-I-N-G to share these with you (remember this post? I was giddy even then, and I didn’t have them close to being together yet)! So without further ado, our Virginia themed OOTs!!
Hive, I cannot lie to you. This picture makes it look like in the middle of all of our last minute wedding preparations I stopped to have a little photo shoot with our OOTs.
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The groomsmen at Ragtop1’s wedding braved Central Virginia’s deep snow.
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.
source Somee Cards
I work very hard to not become a Bridezilla… but I do have my moments. There have been times through the planning process (and through our two year engagement) where I have fully unleashed my inner Bridezilla and later realized that I was being a little unreasonable… okay maybe a lot unreasonable.
Case 1: Trying to convince Mr. Dolphin that $700 shoes for our wedding was something I absolutely needed.
Case 2: Arguing with Mr. Dolphin that we can’t just have a honeymoon registry, we still need to have a registry at a store. I think I won this one but when I look back I think… why did I care so much? Wouldn’t I rather have money for our honeymoon then place settings for 12? I barely have a table that can seat 4.
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