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Weddingbee Blog
Happy Monday hive! Please join me in ringing in the new week with our newest bee, Miss Octopus, coming to us from Pittsburgh!
Miss Octopus, Boston, MA/Pittsburgh, PA
Age & Occupation: 25, Grad Student
Fiance’s Age & Occupation: 26, Graphics Operator for TV News
Engagement Date: May 6th, 2009
Wedding Date: September 2010
Venue: Heinz Chapel Ceremony, Museum Reception
About Me: When my best friend dragged me to a toga party in our freshmen year of college, I was not expecting to meet my future husband; but seven years later, here we are. I’m a crazy-organized planner at heart, and I am a great lover of random trivia, books, chocolate, blogs, new and exciting adventures, mockumentary-style television, and anything heavily flavored with bright orange fake cheese powder. We’re planning a festive and fun mini-destination wedding in the place where we met: fabulous Pittsburgh, PA! I can’t wait to marry the man I love!
A romantic and classic foot-popping kiss at Jen and Jake’s wedding.
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 was trying to pay one of my vendors, and my card was declined. Oh no! The result of poor money management? Cutting it too close between a deposit and a payout?
Nope (well, at least not this time)!
It turns out I have a daily “transaction limit” on the card. Who knew? So, I called the bank… best to speak to them and make sure they knew I wasn’t the victim of some scam. They wanted to know why I needed the limit increased, and I told them that I’m planning a wedding and trying to pay deposits.
As I said this, the lady on the phone got *so* excited for me. “Congratulations!” she says, and puts the limit increase through immediately. “Weddings are so exciting! I hope you have a wonderful day!” I thought it was very sweet, especially since her enthusiasm and sincerity came through, even over the phone.
Inadvertently, I’d played the “wedding” card, and received excellent customer service as a result.
Unfair?
Read more…
Wishing you and yours a sunny Easter Sunday! Posting will be light today as Mr. Penguin and I will be dining à deux with a traditional Thanksgiving feast to celebrate. (We’re more into turkey than ham.) 
{Peeps bunting by Made via The Sweetest Occasion}
See you back here bright and early tomorrow morning!
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.”
I am in the thick of making my invitations. I have the letterpress invites. I printed the envelopes. So it was time to make the rest of the suite: the hotel card and the reply card.
I printed the secondary pieces at home to save money. I used the same color of Crane paper as the letterpress invites to maintain consistency. So I printed all of these pieces out, multiple “cards” to a sheet of letter-sized paper.
Then the cutting began. Let’s just say I didn’t enjoy this part.
Read more…
Remember the internal struggle that was my dress-shopping experience? Well hiring (or not hiring) a photographer was even worse. Let me set the scene for you:
We have several amateur photographers coming to the wedding as guests, and SIL Veggie is a professional photographer. We’re trying to keep our budget as low as possible, and literally every cent we don’t spend on the wedding goes straight to the non-profit organization we run.
Also, a brief confessional here: I am a photography snob. After looking at many wedding photography websites, I have come to the realization that the cheaper photographers don’t do much better than I do when I go to weddings. If we are going to pay someone to take photos, we definitely want the photos to be great, not just ho-hum. So it seems like we are left with two choices:
Either spend quite a bit and get someone great.
OR
Spend nothing and get what we get from our guests.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Before coming into this world of “everything wedding”, I had never heard of bouquet preservation. After hearing from a bride who’d had hers done, it only seemed like the perfect answer. Many brides obsess over their bouquet for their wedding (umm… I’m guilty!) and even have a few nightmares over flowers (uhh… that would be me too!), so it only seems fitting to have the awesome bouquet you toted around on this very special day preserved. Now I’m not talking about having it in a little glass dome on your coffee table. There are so many new ways of preserving your bouquet for years to come.
One company that preserves wedding bouquets is Keepsake Florals. A friend of mine used this company to preserve her bouquet and it turned out beautifully! You can choose every little detail in preserving your luscious flowers, it is completely custom. They can do just about anything you want. Check out some of their work below:
When we set up our second registry we wanted to go somewhere practical. After researching different options, we decided on Bed, Bath and Beyond. We realized they have the same items as many of their competitors, but at much cheaper prices!
For example, when we were considering china, I fell in love with Lenox’s Opal Innocence. At Macy’s it is typically $172.00 per place setting, but often goes on sale for $119.99. At Bed Bath and Beyond it is always $119.99 and they always have 20% off coupons, so if guests are coupon savvy, they can get the place setting at $95.99!
After learning the price differences, we were completely on board with BB&B.
Read more…
We’ve always loved these internet hearts:
<3
We watched Teen Girl Squad early in our courtship after a very academic and philosophical discussion on the merits of Homestar Runner. In one episode, one of the gals referred to the text and email luv symbol as “less-than-three,” which still makes me laugh. After we decided along the way to get matching tattoos, we figured this was perfect, especially since a lot of our professional and personal writing and editing these days is in the online world. A lot of our midday emails are peppered with <3, also, and it always makes me happy.
After 15 minutes each being tattooed the hard way (by a pro buddy, but with just a needle and ink) we were less-than-three’d.
A trend I’ve noticed growing in wedding photography over the past year and a half is the use of props. I really like this movement because it reminds me of fashion photography, which I’m pretty obsessed with. I’ve been trying to decide if there’s a prop or two that would be fun to use in our engagement photos. I really like the whimsy that props can add to photo shoots, yet they can also be too trendy for my taste. For our engagement pictures, I was tempted to just keep it simple, but here are a few of the props that really stuck out to me!
Books:
If I had to choose a prop that really fits us as a couple and would feel natural, I would definitely have to choose books. In school, Mr. Turtle is an English Literature major, and I’m an English Literature minor. We met in high school freshman English class, and Mr. Turtle plans on becoming an English professor. Between the two of us, we have a pretty cool collection of books! For example, check out Mr. Turtle’s bookcase at home:
Doesn’t it look straight out of a library in an old movie? It reminds me of Professor Higgins’ from My Fair Lady! This is just a small section of it, and he’s not even a professor yet! I was thinking it would be fun to pick out just a few of our favorite books and play around with something along these lines:
Check out these great projects hive members have uploaded to Weddingbee’s DIY section! Click on the title of each project for tutorials!
Vanilla Extract Favors by lilnipper
The only time I’ve ever tolerated looking at bugs on TV was to see how silk is made. I remember a couple years ago watching a documentary about it, and I found this cool blog with pictures and explanations.
When choosing fabric for my dress, I looked everywhere for a glossary of fabrics, and I found this *wonderful* glossary from J. Crew. Here it is:
Our cotton cady comes from a premier Japanese mill. This fabric has a compact weave and a crisp cotton hand, making it ideal for structured silhouettes that fit the body perfectly without drape. Our designers love the juxtaposition of simple cotton with a very elegant shimmer.
Cotton organdy: an ethereal, semi-sheer fabric with a stiff, crisp finish that seems to float on air. Ours is covered with gently swaying, embroidered flowers and comes from the same Japanese house that makes our very best eyelet laces.
When I first started the hunt for bridesmaid’s dresses, I was 100% set on short (knee-length) bridesmaid’s dresses. Lately, however, I’ve been more open to the idea of long bridesmaids dresses. It all kind of happened when I went on my second bridesmaid’s dress shopping trip with BM Lindsay and came across these three dresses from the Belsoie by Jasmine line:
Belsoie Style L2064
From day one, making the invitations was the part I was most excited about in all of wedding planning. I must have designed 15 different invitation suites before I decided on a design, and still I questioned myself. When there’s an endless amount of amazing wedding invitations on the internet, it was hard to believe that anything I could make would live up to my inspiration.
Anyway, after about eight months of designing, second guessing and redesigning, I came up with a design that I think conveys the feeling of our wedding and our personalities pretty well. They’re not perfect, and if I had more time I would have added a few more details, but they are what they are, and I think the turned out well enough!
So let’s begin with the outside and work our way in. That’s how our guests will experience them, after all!
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