Weddingbee Blog

As I pretty much always having wedding stuff floating in the back of my mind, I’m almost always keeping an eye out for items for the wedding. While I haven’t actually gone Veil Shopping (that’s right—capital letters), there are a few places I drop by every so often to see if they have anything suitable.

The List:

Joy’s Theatricals

I love this place. The owner (Joy) is a former costume designer and she sells and rents evening wear as well as custom designs wedding dresses. I didn’t actually learn about her until after I found my dress, otherwise I definitely would have been interested in working with her. She also does custom designed veils, so if I don’t end up finding what I want anywhere else, this is where I’ll be looking.

One of Joy’s lovely dresses:

Source

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After our engagement and a few frightening experiences in planning the wedding that left me in tears, I began to cling to the idea that our wedding needed a philosophy. From the pages of 2000 Dollar Wedding and A Practical Wedding, I borrowed aspects with which I identified and built my own philosophy. I would love to say that we had an amazingly transcendent family sit down where every one understood the importance of having a wedding philosophy and participated in building one. However, I was the lone crusader on the warpath of defining it. Others thought it was overkill, granola, heady, unnecessary, etc. From the perspective of being on the other side, having a wedding philosophy, even just one that I adhered to, was pivotal to keeping me sane and freeing me to truly enjoy our wedding.

When I got down/upset, it seemed like everything was out of budget, or every craft was failing, I thought of the most important thing about our wedding: It was the beginning of our marriage. In the grand scheme of starting a marriage, finding the perfect wrapping paper to line envelopes could be put into its proper category of “not that important, after all”. Stemming from this main philosophy, I focused on a few sub-principles that I thought would enhance the intimacy, ease the coordination, or decrease costs. For fun, I labeled these principles with a catch all phrase: High on Style, Low on Budget - Just how Mother Likes it. In the following paragraphs, I highlight a few of the principles and the application to our wedding planning.

Principle 1 - Reuse/Recycle
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Have I ever told you how much I adore cloudy, calm beach days?

And scooter rides?
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Now, I haven’t even told you about my first dress (THE dress) yet but right now my mind is on that other dress. You know, the one some brides have for the reception and/or going away. It usually seems to be characterised by being cute, short, flirty and oh-so-perfect for dancing.

Anyway. I won’t be having one of those dresses (*sigh*) for two reasons:

1. I spent half an arm and a leg on the actual wedding dress and dang it if I don’t force as many hours out of it as I possibly can.
2. I’m a student. Student = poor and starving. OK not so starving. But poor.

But I’m allowed to hypothesize what the second dress would like it if I happened to get one, right? Indulge me anyway. ‘Cause I’m digging these beauties:

This one is sweet and simple without being TOO simple, if you know what I mean:

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Miss Swiss to Bee and her long-distance fiance discovered that an engagement pic outtake was their favorite shot of the day.

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.

Yep. One week left until the wedding. You know what that means? I am flipping the heck out. I’m a “OMG don’t mess with me or I’ll cry” stressed-out ball of mess. But that comes and goes in waves, because there’s also the “OMG WE ARE GETTING MARRIED” breaking through. I have an incredible amount of things to do, but whatever happens happens. I’m working noon to night on wedding projects, and having a strange amount of fun doing that. Hey, what can I say, I’m an art kid, love deadlines, but also love working myself to the bone and UP TO THE LAST SECOND.

How do I do it? With a little help from Freddie, of course.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about Mrs. Penguin’s recent post on life lessons reinforced at an early age: never depend on your partner to live. Always be able to pay your own way. There are exceptions, sure, including school for one, or layoffs for another.

But the post got me thinking about partnership and independence. Namely, that being married or being parents are easy scapegoats on which we blame our own shortcomings or bad decisions. I’ve done it plenty of times. You have too, I’m sure. But I’m really trying not to, because I’ve seen it go mega-wrong in some cases, in marriages ranging from zero years old to 30 years old.

For example:

“He made me be a stay-at-home mom, now I don’t have any skills to re-enter the workforce.”
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When we left off, Mr. Parfait and I had just arrived in Maui and driven the long and winding Road to Hana. We spent the rest of the week falling in love with Maui. The mountains, beaches, and skies were breathtaking, and we kept stopping to take photos like these:

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At the moment I’m still in Providence. I’m here with Mr. Seashell, my future in-laws, parents and sister. And I’m still soaking in what an absolutely fantastic weekend we’ve had. It has been so full of love and joy and celebration, I just couldn’t feel luckier. If our wedding feels anything like this weekend, it will be simply perfect.

Living in Chicago, it seemed silly to attempt a surprise bridal shower. To get me here, I have to travel, and I’d be generally suspicious of no talk of a bridal shower or of random boxes arriving at our condo. Ultimately, the long distance factor gets in the way of surprises.

However, even though I knew I was flying home for a bridal shower this weekend, there were plenty of surprises in store.
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Planning a destination wedding? Well, there’s one thing they always tell you - be prepared for many “declines”. Obviously, it’s not easy for people to just jump on a plane and romp on some island for a week.

I guess it’s good advice, since our wedding is no exception to the general rule. Here are the numbers:

Egads! Only 40% of our loved ones are actually coming!

At first, I was irrationally upset. Every “no” RSVP depressed me, and it got to the point where Mr. Sew would have to open the envelopes - I couldn’t stand to see the bad news. Some of the declines, in conjunction with the “why are you having your wedding there” statements, felt like personal “I don’t care about you” messages. And it hurt.
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When we first began planning this wedding, we had a very different vision. Here’s the first inspiration board I created, nearly a year ago.

Bouquet from Michael Norwood Photography, garden wedding by Stacy Reeves, dress by Lazaro (3701), earrings by Tejani. Chocolate favor from oncewed.com, invites & iced tea from theknot.com.

We wanted an indoor/outdoor wedding, maybe in a beautiful garden or in a rented bed and breakfast. We thought it would be great to have our families stay all together for a day or two before the wedding; we could go swimming, play with the kids, and then have our wedding. Something family-oriented, elegant, and “summery”.

You may have noticed that our wedding is in July… JULY. In Texas.
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A little while back, I had hit a lull in the planning process when Bridesmaid E surprised me with this hilarious book: Porn for the Bride. It currently graces our coffee table, inspiring perturbed glances (mainly from my dad) and uncontrolled giggles (from my girlfriends). The book is part of a series of “Porn for Women” books, created by The Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative. According to Amazon.com, “The Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative is a secret society of women working to redefine the way we look at pornography. They understand that sometimes a clean kitchen is hotter than a guy in a muscle shirt.”

You can buy it here.

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Ahem, hi! Sorry, I get a little zealous sometimes.

Let’s try that again.

Howdy, hive! I’m Miss Cardigan, and if you can’t tell, I’m just a little bit excited to “bee” here! (I know, I know. I just couldn’t resist!) I’ve been reading the ’bee (and actively participating!) for close to a year now and I’ve been dreaming of being a bee ever since I got engaged. I’m so incredibly honored to be here, and I am thrilled I get to share my wedding with such an awesome community!

When I got the email from Pengy saying that I had been accepted, I didn’t even know what to do with myself. I only got far enough in the email to see “think you’d be a great addition to the Weddingbee team” and then I started jumping up and down and immediately called Mr. Cardigan and started screaming some nonsense at him about bees and cardigans. When he finally deciphered what I was saying, he first told me that he was excited for me, and then let me know that “Mr. Cardigan” is not a very manly name. I think he was hoping for “Mr. Tool Belt” or something. After I told him (and everyone else I could think of) I went back to work babysitting (I’m a part time nanny this summer). I did my best to focus, but I couldn’t stop myself from doing some random victory dances every few minutes. I’m pretty sure the kids thought I had lost my mind.

I went through the rest of my day in a cloud of excitement and couldn’t get my mind off my new status as a bee. I was so excited, in fact, that on the way home from work I wasn’t paying attention to how fast I was driving and I got a speeding ticket. Awesome.
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Guess what everyone? I’m freakin’ married!!!

And guess what else? Everything everyone said about weddings was true. It WASN’T the details that made the day (although everything looked amazing, thanks to my mom, family, wedding party and amazing DOC, Sara Gorski. Seriously, if you haven’t budgeted for a DOC, go do it right now!).

We had the U-Haul truck with all the decor stuck in traffic from a wreck, we were running late from our first look, and I was mobbed by about 4 people to quickly clean my dirty dress minutes before the ceremony. But none of that mattered at all.

What did matter was the overwhelming love and support from every single one of our guests. There wasn’t anyone who wasn’t grinning from ear to ear all night, and Mr. Cola and I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Love, happiness and joy from family and friends—that is what made our day perfect, and I wouldn’t change a thing! It was seriously the most loved I’ve ever felt, and it was wonderful.

My fingers are getting tired of typing this on my phone, but I didn’t want to head off on our honeymoon without a quick touch base about our wedding.
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Hi hive! Thank you for your continued suggestions for Weddingbee Spring Cleaning categories. To find out more about Spring Cleaning, click here!

Today’s featured item of the day is table overlays!

Sellers: if you have candy buffet items for sale, please post your item to the Weddingbee Classifieds by adding your item, and then return to this post and add the link to the item you’re selling in the comments, along with a quick description. Also pay attention to the comments in this ad to see if any buyers are searching for the item you’re selling by subscribing to the comments.

Buyers: if you’re looking for table overlays for sale, you can do a couple things:

• Identify yourself in the comments as LOOKING FOR (type of item you’re looking for, and quantity).
• Subscribe to this thread, so you’re informed of table overlays that are being listed for sale in the Weddingbee Classifieds. ***

Here are some items currently for sale (see all “decor” items for sale here):

Sarahopal is selling 25 pink and silver overlays. They are made of baby pink cotton fabric overlaid with a white organza with a silver glitter swirl. She’s asking $20 each for the 60″ x 60″ overlays.
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