Weddingbee Blog

Photo heavy post ahead! Some of you guessed it—for my hen’s party (bachelorette) I chose to have a High Tea! Nine friends and I put on our party dresses and headed to The Barista for an afternoon of fine china and elegance (or, in our case, fine china and loud inappropriate conversation, but “elegance” was the general idea ).

Look at us, all civilised-like

Let’s start with the invites. Mr E knows I adore polka dots, so he came up with this design:
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*Doesn’t it look like I have a swagger?*

I spelled out the specifics of a Vietnamese tea ceremony early on in my bee blogging days. Then, throughout my blogging days, I discussed ways that I would attempt a modernized tea ceremony. Everyone even reassured me when I started to lose faith in my vision and felt pressure to be more traditional than I wanted to be. I am so glad you all told me that. I did. I trusted my vision. I did it the way I felt would show respect and honor to everyone and would involve the most people. I’m here to report that it was an utter success. It was so incredibly intimate, heartfelt, and good gosh…it was emotional!
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mrs.pribble is selling an ivory birdcage veil and fascinator. She’s asking $50 for the set.

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:
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A month ago, one our ushers, we’ll call him “Big Bald”, got engaged and text messaged Mr P and me with the news. My response was, “YAY!” My response to good news is almost always, “YAY!”

Found my car keys… “YAY!”

Friends are pregnant… “YAY!”

My Fantasy Football team didn’t suck this week… “YAY!”

So, you might guess that my response to getting married would be, “YAY!” Like Mrs Lollipop and Ms PChips we opted to have our guests wave YAY! flags as we exited the church, but unlike these two, I decided to put my Silhouette Machine to work cutting our flags from paper. You might ask why 4 months after our wedding I’m deciding to blog about this. Quite frankly, I found some funny photos of the night I made our YAY flags and couldn’t resist sharing a tutorial of sorts.

Another way to YAY in 10 short steps
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The hive has spoken! Hive members love Weddingbee Invitations in the Colorful category! Check out Weddingbee Invitations’ Colorful offerings, and take 10% off this specific category of invites all week! Every invitation in the Colorful category is customizable with an array of color choices!

Endless Elegance invitations

To take advantage of the discount, use code WBM05 at checkout on any invitation in the “Colorful” category in the Weddingbee Invitations shop. Hurry, this deal expires on Saturday November 13, 2010!

The Dalai Lama was in Atlanta recently. That’s a pretty big deal. Dahlias are, too. Hence my post title. Ahem. Anyway.

I think I might have mentioned my wedding dress, right? I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty sure I did (joking, joking). Reminder: the style by Amsale is called “Dahlia,” and after I bought it, I looked up dahlias to see what they were like. It turns out they’re AWESOME. They’re big, bold, and colorful—a.k.a. perfect for our wedding! I checked in with our florist (a friend of my mom’s—Bill at De Vars-Philips Florists & Antiques), and he said that dahlias were both affordable and available in July. Oh, hey, guess what our Official Wedding Flower is. Yes!

Please, let me enthrall you with some dahlia images.

Source

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I mentioned before that we would be DIYing our wedding video. Bridesmaid Stacie’s sweet husband Kurt was awesome enough to volunteer to be our videographer. We had a tripod, an HD camera my mom gifted me (for her baby Sand Dollars she is convinced will be along ASAP) and a Macbook to get it done. I used iMovieHD to edit everything, and burned a super cute DVD using iDVD. Seriously, it’s awesome! We have chapters and music and menus, and it’s mega cool!

I was a little worried that it would turn out to be super cheesy, but it really is pretty cute! Yes, it looks like a home video. No, it doesn’t make it any less awesome in my eyes.
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After getting my hair did, I went to the bridal salon to try on my dress. Well, not my actual dress ’cause it wasn’t in yet (bummer!), but the sample of my dress. You know…just to see the whole dress, hair, veil look all together. But before we get to those pics, I have to show you the dress that almost was.

Shortly after getting engaged (way back when), I made a trip to Dallas to help throw a baby shower for one of the members of my bridal party. Since I was in town, I used the time to start looking at venues and to make a trip to my friend’s awesome bridal salon to look at dresses. Honestly, I love the whole wedding dress buying experience. Even when the dresses that don’t look right on me, I can imagine how someone would like them. I even like seeing other brides try on dresses and seeing them decide which dress is right for them for their wedding. I could just hang out at the shop all day long…seriously. I think it’s that much fun.

After trying on several different styles of gowns, I quickly learned that ball gowns were not for me.
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I know Halloween has just come and gone, but I love Christmas, so you’ll have to bear with me. This Christmas, I really want to send cheesy “Hey, we got married!” holiday cards. So, we are definitely doing some type of photo card. I was tempted to go the DIY route, but when I looked at our list it seemed a bit long, I also think just making and writing out about 100 thank you cards didn’t help the DIY Christmas card cause either. Sometimes, it’s just better to buy.

So, I was super excited to find a piece on holiday cards in the most recent issue of Real Simple magazine. They list out places to buy digital holiday cards, photo cards, newsletters, etc. It was the perfect list for me. After a few clicks of the mouse, I’ve already found a few I like.

I love this one from Minted. I’m so indecisive and know it will be hard to choose a photo, so being able to include four works for me.
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How adorable is Smashley’s just married banner?

Keep on loading your inspirational wedding pics to the Weddingbee Gallery to see them featured here on the blog! Remember, your images must be under 1MB in size, or they won’t load.

If your photo is featured as the Gallery of the Day, you’re eligible for a special Weddingbee badge for your blog or website! Check out instructions on how to grab the badge here!

I’ve been dating the guy for almost eight years. I can feel any shift, even a minor one, in the tectonics of our relationship. He had been a little off—I could feel it in my bones. I asked him a few times if he was holding something back. I’m not sure what I thought it was—nothing serious. Maybe his work research wasn’t going the way he had hoped. He shrugged it off with careful wording.

One night a few weeks later, he looked over at me and asked, “Do you know how you asked if I’m keeping something from you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I have been.”

Wow. SO NOT the way to start this conversation. While I am lightheaded in panic, he continues:

“For the past few weeks, I’ve been designing a ring for you.”

…
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So, though it felt like the party had just started, I got the word from our coordinator, Lisa, that it was almost time for our last dance. Boo! The day seriously flew!

Well, Mr. Fro Yo is not a big dancer, but I pulled him out onto the dance floor for this last moment. We danced to “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey.

We started things off as happy newlyweds:

But, shortly after, we had someone cut in:
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I know I’m not the only one who’s faced a whole stack of random comments and opinions during the process of getting engaged and subsequently being engaged, right? Sometimes people can just be so quick to get up in your case, fire a million questions at you without blinking and don’t seem to have a filter from their brains to their mouths!

Most mean well, but you’ll always have the odd person who says something that really hits home. Like the time a “friend” from work used my engagement ring as inspiration to send to her man, got engaged a few months later, and proceeded to tell me that, ha! Her ring is so much bigger than mine. {Um, really? Did that just happen?}

Rings are just so personal, you know? They’re so different for everyone—there’s no one perfect ring. The important bit is what goes into the purchasing, creating or handing-down of the ring, and that’s why they mean what they mean. But then there’s the creation itself: what style, what size, what colour, what cost? For some, it’s a whopping piece of bling. For others, it’s a simple gold wedding band. Maybe it’s both? Maybe it’s neither.

I remember the first ring that Mr. Jaguar gave me: an anniversary present a good few years back.
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To be eligible to win a Avery/Zazzle Wedding Organizer, review your favorite wedding vendors in the Weddingbee Vendors section and submit them to us here to be featured on the blog! Check out this post for more info on our great weekly prizes!

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Today’s review comes from Ms. Library of her baker, Nothing Bakes like a Parrott in Maine!

Jessica of Nothing Bakes Like a Parrott was fun, easy to work with, and a fantastic baker. She was the first baker we decided to try during our wedding planning process, and she set the bar very high. For the tasting, we met at her apartment in Portland.

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When it comes to planning the wedding, I think that I’m more of a “big picture” person that the type that gets lost in the details. That may sound funny coming from someone who has dedicated entire blog posts to DIY table numbers, brooch bouquets, and random squares of fabric, but it’s true. I enjoy planning out these little details, but I don’t think I’ll lose much sleep if they don’t turn out perfectly, or even if they don’t happen at all.

More and more, I’m realizing that as long as the day is festive, colorful, laid-back, romantic, and casual, I don’t really care too much about the little details. As long as our guests are well fed, adequately liquored up, and happy, I’ll be happy too.

But sometimes I do get bogged down in the little details. Allow me to show you this random train of thought that I had in the shower this morning, while trying my damnedest to wake the hell up. Keep in mind that this transcription is much more coherent than the actual thoughts!
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