Congratulations to our winner: bookworm88!
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Whether or not you’re knee deep in wedding busy season or just starting your planning now, it’s critical for brides to stay organized. Research shows that being disorganized leads to over-spending and miscalculations, resulting in wasted money, time, and resources. Here’s where Microsoft OneNote 2010 comes to the rescue. It’s the perfect digital “catch-all” for capturing and organizing wedding research, notes, and ideas. And it gets better - there’s a free, downloadable OneNote wedding planning template with section tabs for every category the big day requires - reception sites, flower designs, and wedding cake masterpieces. It’s a brides best personal assistant! Pricing details for Microsoft Office, including OneNote, can be found here.
To celebrate wedding season and help brides everywhere, we’re giving away Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 to one lucky Weddingbee reader. You not only get the great OneNote program, but Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, too!
To enter, simply visit these simple tips for using Microsoft OneNote for wedding organization. Then, come back here and let us know in comments what part of wedding planning is driving you crazy that OneNote can help you organize. To double your chances to win, follow Weddingbee on Twitter and retweet (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 July 12, 2011 at 11:59PM to enter. Good luck!
This post could also be titled “Reason #5782 why Sister Lioness was an awesome MOH.”
Mr. Lion and I spent our wedding night at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead.
One thing I’ve seen other brides do, and felt curious to try myself, is taking a look at how the actual wedding compares to the original inspiration board. Our goal for our wedding style was part Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and part Father of the Bride. We wanted the whole evening to feel more like an elegant backyard dinner party than a wedding. Here’s our inspiration board, or what I liked to call our “reality check board,” at the time:
Photo credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) 1. Personal photo, 2. Personal photo, 3. Domino Magazine, 4. Style Me Pretty, 5. The Photo booth Experience, 6. Watters, 7. Style Me Pretty, 8. Classic Party Rentals, 9. Style Me Pretty, 10. Style Me Pretty, 11. A Boxed Event, 12. Style Me Pretty, 13. Jose Villa, 14. Evrim Icoz Photography, 15. Martha Stewart Weddings, 16. Style Me Pretty, 17. Martha Stewart Weddings, 18. Style Me Pretty, 19. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, 20. Personal photo of backyard, 21. Martha Stewart Weddings, 22. Style Me Pretty, 23. Personal photo of veil
And here’s how it all came together in real life:
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There are plenty of dicey family dynamics that can muddy up the wedding-planning process. I just (like, literally JUST as in five minutes ago) finished watching an episode of Bridezillas where the girl’s crackhead dad reappeared after years and the alcoholic mom decided she didn’t want to go to the wedding if he was going to be there, and then went anyway and tried to make out with her daughter’s gay friend. This is why I watch Bridezillas: It *always* makes me feel better.
So what came up for us? Pretty tame stuff, comparatively speaking. We’re in no way worried about anybody causing a scene, being difficult, or making us cry. But we did have some decisions to make on details here and there.
The invitations
Invitation wording seems to be one of the more controversial wedding issues. For us, it was a non-issue simply because we didn’t ask anybody to “approve” the wording. We’re paying for 85% of the wedding ourselves, with each of our dads kicking in a sum. I hammered out the wording in about two minutes with Designer Mama, she designed and printed up the invitations, we showed our parents the final product. Done.
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WTOOBridetoBe’s hot pink bouquet popped against her white dress!
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After we finished dancing with our moms, our reception became a full on dance party. Brother-In-Law Meerkat started his own version of a train and went around the tables snagging people as we made our way back out to the dance floor.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Having now shown you our ribbon boutonnières, I have a confession to make: I’m conflicted about the way we’ve gendered the floral elements for our wedding party. By this I mean the tradition of those in dresses carrying bouquets and those not in dresses wearing boutonnières. Even though this is exactly what we’ve chosen to do, I gotta say that the assumed gender segregation of this situation really irks me. (I say ’assumed’ gender segregation because our wedding party doesn’t actually break down into women = dresses and men = pants.)
Any time there’s a tradition or common assumption about the way something “should be” done or the way it’s “usually done,” I’m the kind of person who’s going to question the hell out of that assumption before I make a decision for myself. (True in life, true for the wedding.) Just what is it that bothers me about flowers? It’s the way they get equated with femininity. It’s the expectation/assumption that women are supposed to like flowers and men are not. It’s my awareness that every time I, as a feminine person, appreciate the beauty of flowers I am simultaneously reifying the assumed gender binary. (”She is feminine and she likes flowers. Further proof that flowers are feminine.”) I think the social construction that says women can be gifted bouquets and men probably shouldn’t is the same thinking that creates a wedding world where women carry bouquets down the aisle and men go down empty-handed, sporting only a small hint of a flower on their lapel. When I really think about it, that seems like a relatively arbitrary distinction.
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I have actually done quite a few DIYs, but most of them I want to wait to show until it gets a little closer to the wedding or when they are finished. (For example, the invitations and programs are designed but not printed out yet.) I did manage to finish a small DIY this morning and wanted to share it. It honestly isn’t anything much, but I thought it was cute.
I bought a plain wooden sign from Dollar Tree like this:
Image via Dollar Tree
Way back when, even before I came up with my Mad Hatter idea, I knew I wanted a Mad Hatter cake. I had seen it years ago on some cake show and thought to myself, “Wow. That’s the coolest cake ever. I must have this at my wedding.” Sure, I had other ideas about my future wedding to Mr. Someone-I-Haven’t-Met-Yet (OK, let’s be honest, Mr. Guy-in-middle-school-who-didn’t-know-my-name), but that cake was the only thing that stuck into my adult life. And that’s a good thing. If not, our wedding may have looked like Lisa Frank ate some bad clams and vomited all over the room. Well, it may look like that anyway, but at least we’ll refrain from having rainbow kittens riding on unicorns. I swear.
Everyone in my family has been on board with my Topsy Turvy/Mad Hatter cake decision. It was one of the elements of the wedding Mr. Biscuit was super excited about. However, no decision could be that simple for the Biscuits. Of course not.
I started thinking about how to design the cake and got nervous. As our “wedding journey” (wow, how pretentious do I sound, huh?) progressed, we began wanting the reception to have a slightly more elegant feel than we had originally envisioned. It also didn’t help that I was looking at old pictures of my parents and saw their monstrosity of a cake that was really “hip” in 1975. They had not one, but two staircases coming off their cake. And turrets.
Invitation inspiration! We have taken the advice of the divine Mrs. Brooch and contacted Kyndal about designing our wedding invitations. We are going the semi-DIY route and are having the invitations designed by someone else but printed by us. Hopefully that will save us a little bit of moolah that can be used somewhere else (like my shoes!). Of course we needed to send Kyndal some of our inspiration.
Here was my first love:
Image and design by Cursive by Kyndal
As soon as all the guests were seated for the ceremony, our officiant came out to explain the ring warming ceremony. Two members of the house party were designated as pseudo ring bearers, and they helped orchestrate the passing of the rings from row to row—my rings were passed on one side of the aisle; King Hippo’s ring was passed on the other—while Ryan Adams’ version of “Wonderwall” played over the gallery’s awesome sound system.
Go ahead and play it while you read…. C’mon. You know you want to!
Our officiant came to the front and said:
So remember that time back in June when we got married?
Image via Amy Nelson-Blaine Wedding Cinematography
You may have had a sneak peek of our wedding through our fabulous video trailer, but it’s time to get down into the nitty gritty details of the big day. Our professional photographs have arrived from the folks at Follan Photography, and I’m so excited to share the story of our wedding day with you all.
My FMIL and I worked on our guest list this weekend and boy howdy (yes, Boy. Howdy.) we have a lot of people on our list. A fair amount of them are acquaintances, distant elderly family, and friends who probably won’t be able to attend, but we wanted to make them feel included in the celebrations anyway.
I’m estimating that our ultimate attendance will be somewhere in the 150 arena. But, we are inviting around 400 people. This won’t blow up in our face right?!
So, what if every single person we invite winds up attending? Our reception tent has a maximum capacity of 400, and our venue and caterer both allow for increases to the original contract. We’ll have to pay more, obviously, but we’ll be able to accommodate all of those people, if we need to.
Speaking of inviting people, our amazing graphic designer finished our invites and we ordered them today. Care to take a peek?
Oh, I just love them. I’d marry these invites if I could.
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I had exactly two requirements for our honeymoon:
With this criteria, we had a whole slew of options available to us. So, I started dreaming about all the wonderful places we could relax and relish in our newly married status, including:
Germany / Photo via City Pictures
I could never pull off a giant yellow ballgown, but I do love myself a guy with some unruly facial hair. The Baconator decided to give himself a mustache last week; I’m charmed, clearly. That is neither here nor there.
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| Image via Images Disney / Fairytale brought to life by Disney Studios |
When I chronicled through the quest to find all of our wedding vendors, I left out the very special vendor that would make sure that I looked beautiful for the whole wedding day. That’s pretty much because I was torn and not quite sure what direction I wanted to go in.
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