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Congratulations to our winner, Mrs. Trail Mix!
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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. Today Estilo Wedding is giving away 200 gorgeous Meisha Bird with Cherry Blossom cupcake wrappers, perfect to dress up the desserts at your shower or wedding, to one lucky Weddingbee reader!
You have 2 chances to enter this contest!
Simply visit Estilo Weddings and let us know what your favorite product in the Estilo Weddings shop is. 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 Friday, July 23 at 11:59 PM PST to enter. Good luck!
I know many brides aren’t fans of “non-registry” gifts. After spending hours adding and editing multiple registries and picking out exactly what you want, it can be hard to add something that may not fit your style into the mix. I’ve always gotten gifts from the registry, with the exception of additional gifts… I like to add something fun in addition to the registry item. For example, a cousin registered for popcorn bowls, so I also included some movie items like a “Father of the Bride” DVD, popcorn, and movie passes for a date night.
Our house isn’t huge, so I was hoping that most people would follow the registry since we spent so much time choosing everything. We don’t have a lot of space, so we had to be really picky about what we added.
Well, I was totally surprised when some of my favorite gifts we received didn’t come from our registry!
I looked at multiple stores to find a nice trifle bowl, and although I wasn’t super in love with the one we registered for, I added it because it was the nicest one we found and Mr. Starfish loves trifle, or as he calls it “goop”.
I’m not very exacting. I’m an eyeball-it kind of gal, a how much do you think this weighs, a these two shades of yellow can work together, good enough kinda gal. So you can imagine, I’m not very good at sticking to our budget. My parents told me what they can pitch in and we’re staying in those boundaries, but there are a lot of extras on the peripheral budget that I can’t quite see or keep track of. But I’m trying to get better! Today, I made a tough choice.
This intricate wedding band that complements my e-ring:
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| Tacori 462ET |
Foodie is selling her custom-made flower and feather hairpiece. She’s asking $30.
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:
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.”
Have I mentioned we’re making our cake ourselves (as well as the cupcakes)? No? Well, we are. Firstly, because I love baking and I’m confident I can do it (with some Mum and Grandma help), secondly, to save some moolah, and finally because all the cake inspiration photos I saved in the early stages of planning looked homemade-possible (if that makes any sense).
To demonstrate:
Back in May, we announced that Weddingbee reader sasapok won our invitation suite contest, courtesy of Minted. The lucky winner received 100 fabulous luxury invitation suites—complete with liners, backers, skinny wraps, thank you cards, information cards, return address printing, and Minibooks—valued at over $1500!
Sasapok sent us some lovely photos of her completed prize. Check these babies out!
Read more…
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
I’m gonna be honest right now, and please don’t hate me, but I’m totally not obsessed with music. I don’t spend hours crafting thoughtful playlists. I’m a fan of cliché songs. I do favor indie artists like Lenka and Ingrid Michaelson, but honestly, I wasn’t stressing on what we would be playing at the wedding. Mr. SD is more that person, so I left it up to him, save for the entrance song. It speaks to my soul.
Have you ever heard Little Big Town’s Bring It On Home? If not, you need to check it out here. Here’s a snippet:
You know I know you like the back of my hand,
don’t you know I’m gonna do all that I can right here? Yes I am.
Take your worries and just drop them at the door.
Baby leave it all behind.
When your long day is over,
and you can barely drag your feet,
the weight of the world is on your shoulders,
I know what you need. Bring it on home to me.
It really is my favorite song.
Read more…
When Mr. Husky leaves his office this afternoon, it will be for the last time. He has been working under contract status ever since we moved from the Northwest, almost two years ago. The contract is coming to an end, and will not be renewed. We prepared ourselves for the potentially long bout of unemployment by plugging up our nonessential spending, creating an ”unemployment budget” based on my income, and socking away any money we saved into a savings account. But when it comes to our wedding fund, well, our pockets are feeling a bit on the light side.
(source)
My grandmother always told me not to talk about money, politics or religion in polite society. But if you consider that an antiquated sentiment, or don’t consider yourself polite society, then come on in to the discussion.
By the time Mr. Cardigan and I get married in January, we will have been together for five years. In those five years, we’ve created a ton of traditions and routines for ourselves, all of which I cherish deeply. For example, every year for Valentines’ Day, we make one another gifts rather than buying them—it’s been a great way for us to celebrate the holiday on the cheap, and it’s also shown me that Mr. C can be pretty dang creative when he wants to be.
My absolute favorite tradition, though, is the anniversary love letter. It started on our first anniversary: I wrote Mr. Cardigan a letter that he was not allowed to open until the same day the next year. So, on our second anniversary we got to read that first letter together, and I also gave him a letter for the next year.
It’s been such a fun and special tradition, and both Mr. Cardigan and I look forward to getting to read those letters together every year—it’s so much fun to look back to the last year of our relationship, and to see my predictions for what the year would hold.
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Jamaica, mon! Please join me in welcoming our latest destination bee to the hive: Miss Handbag!
Miss Handbag, Smyrna, DE/Jamaica
Age & Occupation: 25, Administration
Fiance’s Age & Occupation: 27, Sales
Engagement Date: Christmas Night 2008
Wedding Date: March 2011
Venue: Rosehall Resort, Montego Bay, Jamaica
About Me: I am a Type A, emotional Italian fireball, who on a weekly basis must be brought back to reality by my level headed, calm, cool and collected fiance. We are planning an intimate, all white with hints of black, vintage inspired wedding on the old sugar aqueducts of Jamaica, with 30 of our closest friends and family flying in to witness the occasion. We are not traditional by any means and will be doing things very differently. 
Remember when I told you about those nifty woodburned guestbooks/mats and mentioned I had custom-burned a cutting board and a tutorial would be coming? Well, don’t worry. I didn’t forget about my promise. Here it is. (Just in time to create a great bridal shower gift during wedding season, or perhaps even a bridal party gift.)
Personalized Cutting Board Tutorial:
Step 1: Find an image/picture that you’d like to burn onto your board. (You could alternatively hand-draw it too.)
Step 2: Print off your image with a laser printer. (Depending on the picture, e.g., if there is wording you may need to print the mirror image.)
Here’s the image I chose (just because it’s oh so pretty)…I trimmed off the excess paper and decided on placement.
Mr. Lobster and I had our second pre-marital session with Father Mark. To prepare for this session, Father Mark gave us some homework — to construct a genogram:
Example Genogram
A genogram is a family tree with emotional, relationship, and health details. In our session, we used it as a tool to learn more about where each of us was coming from - our background being the foundation of how we would interact with each other as a couple.
We survived our tiny, scary plane ride and arrived in Los Roques Parque Nacional, ready for five days of sun, fun and relaxation and we were not disappointed in any way. In fact, it was pretty damn near perfect.
Our routine went basically like this… wake up, watch the first World Cup game with a bunch of crazy Europeans and eat a delicious, home-cooked breakfast of eggs, bread, arepas, churros, etc. (Breakfast was definitely one of the highlights of my day, it was SO good! And they served Pepsi at breakfast, which may not be the healthiest option to start off one’s day but hey, I was on my honeymoon and Pepsi at 7:30 AM held a slightly trashy appeal. )
After stuffing our faces and gathering up all our beach gear, we would head for the docks in town. Once there, we boarded our posada’s speed boat (posada is the Spanish term for “inn”) and were driven to one of the many, many little islands that form the archipelago of Los Roques.
Since all meals were included in our stay, our posada packed us a yum-a-licious picnic lunch of fruit, sandwiches, salad, cookies, beer, soda, water, etc. to take with us in a cooler and once we got to whichever beach we were visiting on that day, one of the workers on the boat would set up an umbrella and two chairs and ask when we would like to be picked up and brought back to the mainland. It was that simple and yes, it was as amazing as it sounds. Ahhhhhh, heaven…
I cheated and had two bachelorette parties. I wanted to go out of town for a wine-tasting weekend in Paso Robles, but I also wanted to crawl around San Francisco with a larger group and have some cocktails. It was really hard to decide between the two, which is not much of a defense, but it’s the truth and I’m stickin’ to it.
Part 1, the wine weekend, was chock-full of games and resembled more of a sleepover, with some daytime wine tasting via limo and a dip in the hot springs. Bridesmaid Allison hand-painted all the participants’ names on a wine glass with glass paint from the craft store; mine says “Bride”, natch. I was the only one who dropped hers (whoops), so Allison kindly made me a new one.
I wore my “Bride to Be” veil and necklace every chance I got; I can’t wear it anymore in a few weeks, right?
After stuffing ourselves silly at the cocktail hour, our guests were seated and we were ready to make our entrance. I was a little nervous about going down stairs in my dress; I’m quite klutzy, and stairs and I aren’t the best of friends. But luckily I made it down those three steps without mishap:
And we were greeted by our cheering family and friends! Now came the moment that I think Mr. Hamster was most nervous about - more than the vows, were we going to make fools of ourselves at the first dance?
Read more…
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