Mrs. Hot Wings, Chicago/San Diego
Age and Occupation: 28, Professor
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 32, Instructor
Engagement Date: December 20, 2008
Wedding Date: August 2010
Venue: Ocean View Villas/Jasmine Seafood Restaurant
About Me: I am a psychology grad student living in Chicago and planning my wedding to a fellow psych grad student. I am a Sunny So-Cal bred gal who trudged across the country to follow her love of psychology and ended up finding a partner in the process. I am overly passionate about anything I involve myself with. I am an activist, a foodie, a reality TV watching junkie, an over-analyzer, a photography obsesser, and am utterly cheesy to the core. This is a story of what happens when a boy and a girl meet, fall in love over academic dorkiness, and a shared love for life. We (mostly I) are planning our semi-destination wedding in my hometown of San Diego. We are excited to bring our families and friends together from across our lifespans to celebrate our future in a grand 400+ person culturally blended affair!
So here we go, hive. Pro pics in hand, and I’m ready to retell our story. I hope you’re ready to listen because it’s going to be a doozy of a story. Let me start with an overview—an outline of the recaps, if you will. First, you should know that our wedding festivities started two days before the wedding and ended when our last guests left the day after our wedding. The events go as follows:
- Separate Bridal and Groom Welcome Reception (Thursday)
- Rehearsal (Friday)
- Rehearsal Dinner (Friday)
- Tea Ceremony (Saturday)
- Civil Ceremony (Saturday)
- Reception (Saturday)
- Farewell Brunch (Sunday)
As soon as we were allowed onto our wedding site, we started unloading the cars with snacks, champagne, beer, OOT bags, luggage, and so much more. Look how cute Hottie of Honor arrived looking compared to sloppy ol’ moi. You can probably tell I’m the bride by the exhaustion on from my face and the “Sexy Little Bride” tank I’m wearing.
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Mrs. Knitting, Toronto
Age and Occupation: 24, Student Recruitment Assistant
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 24, Neuroscience PhD Candidate
Engagement Date: October 2009
Wedding Date: December 2010
Venue: University of Toronto Faculty Club
About Me: I'm a pearl wearing, etiquette book reading Toronto girl who loves cooking and baking, museums, charm bracelets, and collecting books on Jackie Kennedy (a lot). I've been known to spend Sunday mornings at the antique market, Wednesday evenings at sister sushi dinners, and any bit of spare time reading. After six and a half years of many late night walks, watching DVDs together in bed, travelling to places like New York, and Tobermory, doing Sudokus together on the couch, lots of Indian food, the occasional yoga class, moving in together and so much more, Mr. Knitting and I are planning a cozy Christmasy (it's a word!), vintage wedding in Toronto complete with many DIY projects (eek!) and lots of help from our amazing group of family and friends.
I mailed our invites!
I took these:
and brought them to the ugliest looking mailbox I could find:
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Classifieds
Feature Launched: April 30, 2008
About: A roundup of the best Weddingbee Classified listings.
Mrs. Lamb is selling the vintage dress and pillbox hat she wore for her trash-the-dress session in Las Vegas. She’s asking $50 for the size small dress and the hat.
Have a wedding item for sale? Post it with a picture in the Weddingbee Classifieds, and you might see it featured on the blog!
Other great items for sale:
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Mrs. Cloud, Richmond
Age and Occupation: 25, Sales Rep
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 26, Customer Service Manager/DJ
Engagement Date: February 14, 2008
Wedding Date: November 2009
Venue: Cathedral of the Sacred Heart & The Jefferson Hotel
About Me: Mr. Cloud and I are Yankees planning a Southern wedding to show our families from Boston and New York our fabulous city. We are complete opposites, resulting in a wedding to include bridesmaids in pearls and groomsmen in Adidas shell toes. I’m a sorority girl at heart with strong addictions to my blackberry, cherry Chapstick, Coach purses, the Boston Red Sox and our fur baby, Bella. I can’t wait to the throw the party of our lives and of course, marry my best friend!
It had been a long journey for us to get to this point, and finally after one last long walk we were standing in the place where we would become man and wife. I must admit that our entire ceremony was a bit of a blur. You would think with the full Catholic mass happening, it would have seemed like it went on forever (who knows, maybe it did seem that way for guests!) but to us, it flew by. In the hour we were there I had to repeatedly resist the urge to pinch myself to see if this was really happening. I kept looking at Mr. Cloud and thinking over and over in my head, “This is it! We are getting married! He is going to be my HUSBAND! I am about to be a WIFE! All of these people are here for US!”
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Featured on Weddingbee
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
Featured Product: Laura Ashley Delicate Damask Invitation
Ms. Sloth, Philadelphia
Age and Occupation: 35, Account Manager and Fashion Blogger
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 30, Design Admin
Engagement Date: December 25, 2009
Wedding Date: May 2011
Venue: Bartram's Garden
About Me: I'm an internet junkie and music snob with a good eye for a bargain. I couldn't live without thrift store shopping, cheeseburgers, sushi, Coke Zero, websites devoted to silly photos of baby animals, Photoshop, and Mr. Sloth. Speaking of which, he and I are a pair of goofball homebody nerds who love our beagle (the most ridiculously adorable dog EVER) to an embarrassing degree. We're planning a low-key and intimate yet festive and quirky outdoor wedding with DIY details and deeply personal touches, and it's all taking place in the city where we fell in love and call home: Philadelphia.
Now that you’ve seen our amazeballs engagement photos, let’s talk about my face. I used the photo shoot as an opportunity for a makeup trial. There’s a very affordable salon right down the street from me, so I decided to splurge on airbrush makeup.
This is my before—a nakey face and messy hair:
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Mrs. Zebra, Providence, RI
Age and Occupation: 24 Marketing/Costume Designer
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 26 Management/Firefighter
Engagement Date: December 12, 2008
Wedding Date: March 2011
Venue: The Providence Biltmore
About Me: I'm a small town New England girl with an affinity for procrastination, crossing the proverbial line, and putting her foot in her mouth. I'm a lover of history, all seasons, sewing and Incubus. I design costumes on the side for my old high school's theatre department, which is where I met my sexy man. Our motto for our Big Fat Lebanese/Portuguese/Irish near-300 person wedding is "the more the merrier"! We are marrying in a Catholic ceremony and are hammering out the details of our Victorian-inspired reception.
Remember when I teased you last time with my first dress-shopping experience? I’m going to do it again. Hehehe.
Teasey McTeasercat
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Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Ms Seahorse, Boston
Age and Occupation: 25, Veterinary Jane-of-all-trades
Fiancee's Age and Occupation: 36, former non-profit fundraiser in search of something better
Engagement Date: October 17, 2009
Wedding Date: September 2010
Venue: Fort Pond Lodge
About Me: By day I'm a cat-wrangler, vet tech assistant, pet-sitter, receptionist, and pre-vet student, but the rest of the time, I'm a former-roller-derby girl turned dedicated-wedding planner. I love reading, writing, bicycles, animals, roller skating, and antique-y things of all sorts. I'm a vegetarian who likes spicy foods, while Fiancee Seahorse is a meat eater who does not like spices. We live outside Boston with our menagerie: a fifty pound dog, a one-eyed, seventeen-toed, toothless cat, and a perfectly put together cat who has a penchant for pooping near rather than in her litter box. In addition to planning our small lake-side wedding, we enjoy running around with the puppy, playing board games (Scrabble, anyone?), having little adventures, talking about how we should really clean the house more, and maintaining our little garden of vegetables and wedding flowers.
Amazing everything.
This is a picture of combined awesomeness. In this picture, you can see the beautiful table that our amazing caterer set up, and at which our wonderful wedding coordinator (Hi Laurie!) arranged for our pie-cutting to happen. You can see the hair wreath that I had made for my lovely wife, and you can see the hair flower that I purchased from another bee on Etsy. You can see my amazing suit, version 2.0, which fit just right, and you can see our beautiful, beautiful flowers.
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Mrs. Pretzel, Seattle
Age and Occupation: 32 Learning, Training, and Development Specialist
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 28 Manufacturing Engineer
Engagement Date: September 2, 2009
Wedding Date: July 2010
Venue: Catholic Church & The Engine Room at Georgetown Studios
About Me: I’m just a thirty-something girl who never dreamed of weddings, poofy dresses, or ritzy receptions. I am a rabid knitter, except recently, wedding projects have replaced my yarn and needles. I’ve been fiercely independent since the age of 2 and 30 years later I think my family and friends had given up on me settling down and getting married.
Ironically, I had to go all the way to Seattle to find a boy from Purdue. We fell in love over Seattle Beers and cooking together. I love NASCAR, he loves Legos. I can talk like a Muppet and he can fit a whole McDonald’s cheeseburger in his mouth. We are a two reception couple, currently planning a brewery inspired bash.
I love that my loved ones, co-workers, and friends read the ‘Bee and follow my blogging. But this is a post where if you know me IRL and haven’t seen me in my skivvies you probably should stop reading—Yes MOH Tigs Pal—that means you, too! OK, I guess I should add that if I was in a diaper the last time you saw me in my skivvies, you should stop reading: Aunties, that means you! I guess you might consider the following images NSFW ‘cause they contain a little boob and booty.
Wedding blogs introduced me to the idea of boudoir photos and from the moment I heard of them I knew I wanted to give Mr P a special little book just for him. Early on I even told him about boudoir photos and he seemed to like the idea. Then I did something I never do: I STFU about boudoir photos. I didn’t breathe a word about them again to him. You see, I am horrible about keeping secrets; I almost always spill the beans. I signed up to receive notifications of “marathon” boudoir sessions from a couple local photographers but I wasn’t ever “set” on one. Then fate intervened.
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Mrs. Penguin, Northern California
Age and Occupation: 27, Weddingbee Editor in Chief
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 30, Doctor of Physical Therapy
Engagement Date: January 29, 2007
Wedding Date: June 7, 2008
Blogging Since: September 14, 2007
Venue: Winery in the Gold Country
About Me: I love the Spice Girls, dogs with underbites, bean burritos, making messes, high fives, avoiding showers, crossword puzzles, blogs, weddings, and blogs about weddings!
Say hello to our newest bee from the Windy City: Miss Giraffe!
Miss Giraffe, Chicago
Age & Occupation: 23, Graphic Designer
Fiance’s Age & Occupation: 24, Music Student Teacher
Engagement Date: October 23, 2008
Wedding Date: May 2011
Venue: Trinity Lutheran Church & Idlewild Country Club
About Me: Coming from the suburbs of the Windy City, you’ll often find me with my foot in my mouth while laughing for no reason or telling bad knock knock jokes. I’ve been crafty for as long as I can remember, and will DIY something twice over before I have someone do it for me. I’m a semi-awkward, typeface obsessed, design junkie and have been know to break out my dance moves for no reason as well as try my best to be ridiculous at all times. My love of pop culture, wordplay, and graph paper almost rivals my love of Mr. Giraffe (who is just the bee’s knees). After a 2.5 year engagement, we’re planning a modern-in-disguise traditional wedding, and cannot wait!
Mrs. Meerkat, Kalamazoo, MI/Riviera Maya
Age and Occupation: 30, Application Engineer
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 23, IT Consultant
Engagement Date: July 26, 2008
Wedding Date: December 2010
Venue: Al Cielo / La Laguna
About Me: I’m a tech-savvy tomboy with an affinity for hot tea and good sushi. Us Meerkats are just a couple fun lovin’ geeks from Michigan. We love anything having to do with movies, books, video games or technology and we hold a special place in our hearts for our two very spoiled shih-tzus, Wicket and Bravo. We also LOVE to travel. We love it so much it only took us 12 hours after we got engaged to decide to have a destination wedding. We are working our little Meerkat tails off planning a rustic-chic, travel themed destination wedding in the Riviera Maya with a semi-formal, vintage-turned-modern, outdoor at home reception back here in Michigan.
For a while I was pretty stumped on what to do for place cards. Then my friend Jax suggested I use the favor boxes we had as place cards, too. It was a stroke of brilliance! (Another post to come soon about the favors themselves,I promise.)
First let me show you the inspiration for our favor boxes that will sit at each persons’ seat:
hgtv.com
The photo is the finished product from a DIY tutorial over on HGTV’s website. Are these not perfect? I decided to give it a shot and see if I could duplicate something similar using the large round circle in the middle as the place “card.” (I purchased the 1.5″ tall, natural kraft paper candy boxes from boxandwrap.com for .80 each but any box will do.)
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Mrs. Lamb, Norfolk
Age and Occupation: 25, Homeland Security Consultant
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 27, Graduate Student
Engagement Date: January 2009
Wedding Date: January 2010
Venue: Trinity Presbyterian Church/Harrison Opera House
About Me: I’m a Homeland Security Consultant with a tendency towards pulling office pranks, taking lunch breaks, and drinking Wawa shakes. I’m also an English major with a serious obsession with alliteration and rhymes. While I’m not keeping America safe, I’m training for half marathons and the Escape from Alcatraz swim. Or moving for the third time this year. Or baking. Or wedding crafting. Or crying about wedding planning. All the while, I’m getting myself into Lucille Ball-esque scrapes and making Jim Carey-esque faces. Our big fat Czech/Baptist/Jewish/Italian wedding is a combination of vintage eclectic, DIY, and little spoonful of sugar from our Event Coordinator. It’s going to be a Norfolk flavored wedding with the verve of an only-daughter-blow-out bash!
This is the story of how we ended up with 3 wedding albums. It all started by wanting to save money.
While many albums are absolutely gorgeous (and drool worthy, believe me, I’ve drooled), we weren’t sold on the idea of spending $1000+ for our wedding album. I searched a lot of sites, I looked at Adorama based on recommendations, and I just wasn’t feeling anything. I didn’t want to start from scratch and design pages in InDesign. I didn’t care about the book laying flat. Long story short, I just about gave up on getting an album.
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Mrs. Locket, Ithaca, NY
Age and Occupation: 25, Research Technician
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 28, former Banker hoping to become an Officer of the Law
Engagement Date: June 15, 2009
Wedding Date: September 2010
Venue: Heron Hill Winery
About Me: I am a little bit of everything all rolled into one: A girly gal with rough edges---I love to get dolled up just as much as I enjoy throwing on some sneaks to toss a ball with Mr. Locket. My love for crafting and creating is quite apparent and I've been referred to as a Wonder Woman/Martha Stewart/Stepford Wife hybrid (yup, I'll take that as a compliment). I adore sewing, photography, sculpture, good eats (mmm tapas), baking, snugging and oh, pretty much everything in between (there's not much I dislike). I am super excited to be planning our vineyard wedding and couldn't be happier to be marrying Mr. Locket. We are a quirky, fun-loving couple residing in our college town with our two pups Maple and Molly. We love to go on hikes, visit our local dog park and to bask in the beauty of many of the local falls and gorges. We are an indecisive pair, but together we somehow manage to make up our minds (it's the easy stuff that's tricky).
As you may have guessed from my last post as a Miss, the week (days, and hours too) before the wedding were a wee bit hectic. As I had mentioned, our apartment looked like a bomb stuffed full of crafty goodness went off and took no mercy on any corner.
The left corner of our apartment living room looked like this:
While the right corner looked like this:
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Mrs. Cardigan, Austin
Age and Occupation: 21, Student/Soon-to-be Special Education Teacher
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 20, Student/Soon-to-be Accounting Systems Analyst
Engagement Date: August 16, 2009
Wedding Date: January 2011
Venue: Vintage Villas
About Me: I'm a native Austinite who was raised as a die-hard Aggie. Luckily, I'm a pretty persuasive girl because I managed to convince my high school boyfriend (now fiance!), Mr. Cardigan, to ditch his hardcore Longhorn ways and join me up at A&M, where we currently reside with our adorable dogs, Cullen & Ranger. We're currently planning a bright, cheery wedding with a ridiculous amount of DIY projects that I can't wait to tackle! I love crafting in any form, reading, and margaritas (I think I love them the most!). Organization is what keeps me sane and I love helping others, which is probably why I ended up as an education major. It gets a little chaotic sometimes when you're planning a wedding among all of the papers, projects, finals, and certification exams, but we're having the time of our lives and we can't wait to get started on our journey as husband and wife - and we're so excited to share our wedding with the hive!
I’ve had my fair share of wedding nightmares over the past few months, but nothing too ridiculous so far. It’s been the typical things—forgetting all of our decor, getting to the venue late, not being ready to walk down the aisle, etc.
But last night I had what was, to me, the wedding nightmare to end all wedding nightmares. I woke up in a complete panic, and I can’t even describe how big the feeling of relief was when I realized it was all just a dream.
The dream started off simply enough: it was our wedding ceremony! It wasn’t in our actual venue (it was in the church I grew up in) but that wasn’t really a big deal. Things didn’t start going downhill until Mr. Cardigan and I made our way back down the aisle and had our first moments alone together as a married couple. We snuck away to a corner to bask in the excitement of being married, and what was the first thing he said to me? “What’s up with this veil? It’s really weird.”
…
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Mrs. Jaguar, Sydney
Age and Occupation: 27, Primary School Teacher
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 29, IT Consultant
Engagement Date: August 8, 2009
Wedding Date: June 2011
Venue: Curzon Hall
About Me: I'm an Australian girl who is a self-proclaimed nerd, loves all things stationery and would be lost without books, music and the internet. Mr. Jaguar and I have been together for the past eight years and he finally popped the question last August. Hurrah! We currently live in Sydney, Australia with our adorable cat who thinks he's a person. We're a couple who likes to multi-task: we've been planning a wedding abroad, a permanent move from London to Sydney, and preparing to build our own home all at the same time. Travelling makes me giddy...as does Mr. Jaguar, of course!
If there is one thing I would potentially change about our engagement before it happened, it would be giving Mr. Jaguar my ring size. Sometimes I wish I had gone and tried on a ring, any ring, just to give him an idea about what size I wore—but then I feel that it might have spoiled the complete surprise that came with his planned proposal weekend away.
So what do you do when the engagement ring you’ve just been presented with is too small? You go and get it resized! I think Mr. Jaguar thought I was joking when I said I wanted to go straight from the airport to the jewelery store to get the ring fitted to my fingers…but I wasn’t. We hoofed it from Heathrow airport to the Tiffany store in the gorgeous Westfield London shopping centre. Actually, I’m going to go ahead and add in one more thing I would potentially change if I could: the outfit (a tank top, jeans, and trainers) I wore inside one of the flashiest stores in the centre. Hindsight! 
It was then that we got the bad news: the ring had a channel-set band of diamonds on either side of the stone, and it was too delicate for them to resize in their UK stores. My ring was to be sent back to New York City for a complete resizing—and could be gone for 10-12 weeks!
Tell me you said 10–12 days, not weeks?
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Mrs. Ostrich, San Francisco/Hawaii
Age and Occupation: 30, Fashion Buyer
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 38, Copywriter
Engagement Date: October 4, 2009
Wedding Date: April 2011
Venue: Sweet ceremony by the sea and sunset celebration on the North Shore of Hawaii
About Me: Born in the city of angels and residing in the city by the bay, I’m a fearless fashion buyer by day, a passionate blog author by night and a dreamy bride-to-be in between. I thank my lucky stars to live in such a stunning city that gives me gifts like organic honey lavender ice cream, movie nights in the park, tucked away beaches, legendary record stores, '80s dance parties, awesome sports teams, stellar flea markets, and vintage bookshops. Oh, and I love to dance! We always find every excuse to escape to the beach, and decided a little seaside wedding in Hawaii is our idea of bliss. Full of our favorite people, music, food and sparkly lights, this is one sunset celebration we will always remember.
“I don’t design clothes. I design dreams”
- Ralph Lauren
{via Utterly Engaged}
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All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
