Weddingbee Blog

Guys, I hope you’ve come to know me well enough by now not to expect any great shakes from the “details, details, details!” post. Our wedding had, like, four details, which is perfectly fine with me. Still, I thought you might like to see how everything looked all put together.

For fun, here’s the board I made way back in the day to help me picture the colors I wanted to use:

Top row: 1, 2, 3, 4 Middle row: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bottom row: 1, 2, 3

First up, our venues…

(All photos by Corey Ann Photography, unless noted)

Heinz Chapel, our ceremony site.

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, our reception site. Once in black and white…

…and once in color.

Here’s the museum lobby, where our cocktail hour was held.

Here’s the Grand Hall, all set up for our reception! The only bummer is the way our linens photographed—they were a really pretty shimmery gold/champagne color in person, but showed up pale yellow in all the pictures. They weren’t yellow, I swear!

Look! I made table numbers!

On to the boozier details. Here are our bar menus. You might note that I did indeed decide to name one of our cocktail selections a “Daffodil,” and added a silhouette of my precious pumpkin, to boot.

You’ll note that Dad Octopus’s beer of choice, Labatt Blue, did make the cut. I have to admit, grudgingly, that it was very popular—the only beer of which we had no leftovers.

People, the Daffodil was a SMASH HIT. Our guests were guzzling them. No wonder—it is sooooooo delicious. Serve it at your wedding. Orange juice, ginger ale, vanilla vodka. Thank me later (and the commenters who first suggested it to me).

The “Cranberry Fizz”–cranberry juice, lemon vodka, and seltzer water.

Our most popular cocktail, though, was my grandfather’s whiskey sour recipe. It was the only one we ran out of before the reception ended, a fact that pleased my grandfather to no end!

One of our dinner stations—the carving station. People were RAVING about the turkey at this station…one of the only foods that I didn’t get a bite of! Damn!

Yummy, yummy cupcakes for dessert.

On to some paper details. I had big plans to have our invitation designer create a seating chart display on a poster board, but time got away from me, and the plan was getting expensive and difficult to manage and I just scrapped it and made these folded cards in like, six minutes. It worked out for the best!

For our guestbook, I created a photo album of pictures from our many years together, using MyPublisher. Everyone signed in the margins of the photos and on blank pages I created. I really like how it turned out!

Here’s a shot of the out-of-town bags we distributed to our guests. My mom and I felt it was especially important to do a nice job on these, since nearly all of our guests were coming in from out of town and staying in a hotel. We went for quantity of items over one or two regional specialties, so each of our bags contained a welcome booklet I made, a Pittsburgh visitor’s guide, a map, two bottles of water, cookies, Nature Valley granola bars, fun sized candy bars, and two bags of chips.

(Personal photo)

Would you believe I brought an entire invitation suite, including faux-ligraphed, lined envelope, for Corey to photograph, then COMPLETELY forgot about it? Oh well. Here are my much-less-professional-looking pictures:

Finally, some “us” details. Mostly I just wanted to throw another gratuitous shot of my veil in there. GOD I loved that veil.

Here’s how the “bride’s side” look turned out:

And the groom’s:

And here we are together!

So there you have it! The look of our wedding!

Previously, in the Octopus wedding…

• We did errands all the live-long day.
• We ran late, we got stressed, and we argued.
• We rehearsed and had dinner, and had a great time doing it.
• We got fancy with hair and makeup.
• I got bridal.
• I waited and soaked up the moment in Heinz Chapel.
• We processed up the aisle.
• We made it official.
• We posed our way through our family portraits.
• I had, then recovered from, a minor freak-out.
• We took portraits with our bridal party.
• We took some smoochy pictures.
• We posed for some skyline shots.