Weddingbee Blog

One of the reasons why I picked “Pudding” as my moniker is the fact that pudding is the perfect treat: it comes in many flavors, it’s perfectly sweet, and (as a plus for all of us working hard to lose those last 5 pounds before the wedding) it’s usually very low in calories! In short: It’s the perfect guilty pleasure!

Like pudding, I wanted our invitations to be perfectly sweet without being over the top. I learned from my adventures with our STDs that although I wanted to design our invites, I did not want to bite off more than I could chew!

I began the journey by attempting to learn the basics of GIMP and Inkscape. The programs are really easy to use, and there are tons of tutorials online that will help you master them. For a noobie like me though, it proved to be too much. It took me nearly two months to finally realize that I was in over my head. So, I turned to Etsy and found Ginger from studioGdesigns. She took my idea and ran with it, and the result is more than I would have imagined!

Without further ado, here are the perfectly sweet Pudding invites:

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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 wedding shoes!

Sellers: if you have shoes for sale, please post your item to the Weddingbee Classifieds by adding your item, and then return to this post and add the lindamask 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 shoes 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 new shoes that are being listed for sale in the Weddingbee Classifieds. ***

Here are some items currently for sale (see all shoes for sale here):

Dolphin is selling a pair of Design Your Own ivory Nina Electra heels in size 9. The shoes have a 3.25″ heel. She’s asking $80.
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There was never a question that Mr. Spaniel and I would do a “first look” before the ceremony. We wanted to sign our ketubah together, and we wanted to get all of our formals done before the ceremony so that we could enjoy the cocktail hour with our guests!

But we also wanted to be able to focus on each other and have a special moment the first time we saw each other on our wedding day—I was really worried we wouldn’t have a chance to actually connect, so to speak—so we planned for it to be (mostly) private before heading into group and family pictures.

Mr. Spaniel, waiting and looking handsome…

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I had my hair and makeup trial yesterday and finally realized I’m getting married very very very soon. Something about putting a veil on your head makes it all seem very real and immediate. Hang on, I need to wrap my head around all this.

………

Okay. Onto the pics.

First, I had vague ideas about how I wanted my hair and makeup done. I was thinking a loose curly bun/chignon, maybe to the side.

After seeing my birdcage veil and pics of my dress, both the hairdresser and makeup artist agreed: a curly side bun and red lip! I never thought I could pull off red lipstick, but after trying a bold red and then a softer rose, we decided… bold red it was! Red lipstick is instantly sass-ifying!

Before, on a gloriously humid June day:

And the after, fully made-up and hair-did:
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A few weeks ago we finished up the last of our wedding festivities with our home reception at Vines. We had such a great time partying it up with about 80 people who came out to celebrate. The food was a hit, although I literally got 2 toasted ravioli, 1 coconut shrimp, and zero cake. Everyone else got cake though. Lucky duckies.

It’s OK though, I found out that it’s hard to balance hunger with a dress you can’t breathe in and trying to have a decent conversation with that many people in 3 hours! We started out the evening hanging with Amy and her awesome cake creation…
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I repeat, Pretzel invitations have left the building and have arrived at their destinations. You know what that means? I can finally share with you the labor of love that has consumed months of Mr Pretzel’s and my life!

OK, maybe not months, but with full disclosure I will admit that we spent a LOT of time on this project. Before showing you the invitation p0rn (and who doesn’t love some good old-fashioned paper peeping) Mr P and I want to share a little about the very messy creative process that brought us to our end product.

If you remember we are the proud owners of a PG-10 Super Gocco. We purchased the unit for the express purpose of creating our wedding paper products. We were very smitten with our Pretzel designed and Goccoed Save the dates.

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One thing I’ve been meaning to write about for a while is the way being engaged has changed my ability to/ the necessity of coming out to people on a regular basis. I don’t mean “coming out” in a big huge way, like, “Wow I finally came out to my family and it was big and huge.” I mean coming out in the little ways that happen almost in passing, with people who don’t really matter, like conversations I used to have at work: “Oh, you and your boyfriend are moving in together, and he’s bringing a dog and you’re bringing a cat? Yeah, my girlfriend and I did that, and they get along fine now.” You can substitute “girlfriend” for “partner”, but it still leaves (I think) a pretty distinct impression of who my person is, gender-wise.

Once we became “officially” engaged, Fancee was no longer my girlfriend, but my fiancee. Interestingly, when spoken, fiancee (for a woman) sounds exactly like fiance (for a man). It’s a fun little temporary game where I know I’m not coming out every time I mention Fancee, as long as I avoid pronouns… or just mutter them. In fact, sometimes I’ll just skip over them.

“Oh yeah, my fiancèe is currently unemployed.”
“Oh, what does he do for work?”

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Just the two of them. SabrinaR424 and her hubby moments after the ceremony.

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.

After we packed up our picnic, we headed over to the fishing dock where the mister got some kissy-kissy.

Can you believe we’re not actually models? I know, me neither!
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As soon as I had the ring on my finger back in August 2008, three basic questions were asked (over… and over…) of me as a bride-to-be. And my answers to these early questions have helped guide the rest of the planning process:

1. When will we get married:

This is a 2 or 3-parter. We first looked at the timeline of our immediate future and where we saw ourselves in the next couple years. We were definitely in a time of transition—so we thought it best to take our time. Mr. T would finish school and get a job first, so we looked toward 2010.

Then it was on to what time of year: I value delicious, seasonal food over fluffy, beautiful seasonal flowers. So Autumn won, with a brief debate over late summer so we could savor ripe peaches and tomatoes—my fave. The argument about the extreme heat of August convinced me otherwise.

(source) (source)

Not to rush summer… but I can’t wait for peaches’n'tomatoes season.

Finally, a specific date.
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And we walked, slowly, I was smiling an uncontrollable smile…

Mr. P looked nervous and shy—he could barely look at me…

And there we were. Finally, at the altar…
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With a few weeks left until the wedding, I was still crazy enough to tackle a DIY project. I didn’t want to have a traditional guestbook because I knew that I would never look at that again. I either want something sentimental, something that can be displayed or something that’s useful. There are tons of good ideas, but I really liked the idea of the address book box, and what better time to start one than when all your closest friends and family are gathered in one place?

On kraft paper, I printed the alphabet using our wedding stationery font and then used my handy dandy 1″ circle punch and punched them all out.
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alaud41

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I’m 97.6% sure that I spent more time finding my wedding dress than I did on anything else in the wedding planning process. How did I accomplish this feat? It required a grueling regime of: 1) a general lack of wedding dress research; 2) poor organizational skills (like not charging your camera, so you have to try on the same dresses twice because you can’t remember what they look like); and 3) doing things willy-nilly (which ensures you will do things in the least efficient way possible).

I followed this system for about 2 months. I tried on approximately 71.5 dresses (that 0.5 dress I got on half way and knew it was going to be a disaster). I visited 8 bridal stores on both coasts. I visited 3 peoples’ homes to try on their used gowns. I searched online. My mom sent me listings from Craigslist.

And it wasn’t until mid-search that I finally developed a list of criteria I was looking for (a tactic which also helps prolong the dress search by a month of so). My hope was to find a dress that: didn’t have rouching or beading, wasn’t satin or super fancy schmancy, had a sweetheart neckline and wouldn’t break the bank (I didn’t want to to know I could feed a small village with the money spent on my dress).

Rather than discuss every… single… stop along the way (which would take me 115 posts), I’ll just inundate you with photos of myself in dresses (many of which are not too cute [note to self-try to comb hair and wear makeup sometimes]). I guarantee you’ll be sick of looking at me by the time I finally get to the dress that I bought.
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First off, we are not doing the garter toss or bouquet toss. I originally did not plan on wearing a garter at all, but found myself swooning over a lot of the awesomely designed garters from Florrie Mitton and Julianne Smith. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a garter when I knew we weren’t partaking in the tossing tradition (of which really bothers me – the tradition, that is).

On a whim I entered a blog contest expecting to not win. Lets be honest, I never win anything. Ever. Not the lottery, nothing on the radio, zilch.

One sunny morning (we can pretend it was sunny, okay?), I got a lovely little surprise announcing that I had one the contest. Score!

So, what did I win?

Source

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