- Blog
- Bios
- Boards
- Classifieds
- DIY
- Gallery
- Vendor Reviews
- Shop Weddingbee
Weddingbee Blog
brownies from scratch are so much better than brownies from a box.
So, ’member when I wrote about middle brownies being da bomb, and you all posted a bunch of recipes, and I said I would make every single one? Well, I didn’t do that…yet. But I did make four brownie recipes that The Hive suggested, and two from a box. After I did all that, I wiped my sweaty brow, declared that I hated brownies, and I never wanted to see, much less taste, a brownie again.
Then all my girlfriends came over and we ate the brownies and drank milk and wine. And all was better again.
Also, I made them taste test the six different brownies BLIND. I mean, I didn’t blind them. But I put tiny brownie bites on plates, and a sticky note in front of each plate, so they could write their thoughts and opinions down. [Yeah, I should have taken photos of all this, but after baking six batches of brownies in a row, I was feeling a little bit lazy...sorry.]
It was completely obvious which brownies were made from a box and which were made from scratch, which really impressed me…I felt like they would be more similar, but clearly, I was so wrong. I might never be able to make brownies from a box again!
Guest Amy was the first person to respond to my previous brownie post, and she recommended salted fudge brownies. I was all like “Salt and fudge?!? Yes, please.” So I made them.
Image and Recipe from Tasty Kitchen
Even though I over baked these (oops), they were delicious…definitely a favorite of the ladies!
Coffecake suggested Alton Brown’s Cocoa Powder Brownies…so I made ’em.
Read more…
Wedding dresses. I am nowhere near ready to talk about wedding dresses. I don’t know if I want to have it tailor made or buy it in the store. I don’t know what color I want. I don’t even know if I want to wear a veil! But, as I’m making my way through every other aspect of the planning, it keeps coming up. Yesterday Mr. Warbs and I met with some potential photographers (We LOVED them, but that’s a different post!), and the inevitable question came up: “So…do you have your dress yet?”
This is how I feel whenever people ask me that question:
Image via The Bridal Blog
bluebird615’s wedding featured rustic vases purchased from Etsy
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 can’t say that I’ve dreamed about or had my whole wedding planned since I was a little girl. What I did always know was that I wanted to be married in the winter and I wanted the colors to be navy and silver. The rich, dark navy against fresh, white fallen snow seemed so dreamy!
I can’t pinpoint one thing that drew me to the navy and silver colors. Maybe it is because those were my high school colors? Go Wolves!
Image via PrepSportswear.com
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.”
I’m not a very decisive person. I certainly have my moments where I know right away what I want. That has happened more with this wedding than anything else in my life, which is a relief. However, I do have a problem making firm decisions unless I have a gut reaction.
My gut hasn’t had much to say about what our musical selections should be for the wedding, unfortunately. You’d think that because I’m marrying a musician, the choices would be easier, right? Nope! He and I have complementary, but still quite different tastes in music. We’ve run across a number of options for our wedding music, but we don’t have any choices firmly selected.
I won’t go into overkill and talk about ceremony music and all that (at least not yet), but I will talk about our first dance. It’s a very important moment in the wedding day for Mr. Kettle and I because we break into dance quite often. We were waltzing, literally waltzing, after his gig at the Bucktown Arts Festival last Saturday. Don’t judge us.
Read more…
“So now let all the light that collects on your plants…keep you warm…make you smile”
- Bright Eyes
Hey hey everybody! *Waves* I’m back with a few more planning goodness as we wait for those glorious photos. Are ya ready?
Today’s topic? MAGIC PLANTS.
Our selection of wedding blooms was always super duper tricky, since we had to find uber specific varieties that doesn’t make allergy-plagued Mr. O sneeze up a storm. The flower gods were kind to the Ostriches as a few of our favorite seasonal flowers passed the test and would fill our gazillion multicolored bottles. But {you know where this is going, right?} I couldn’t stop there. I had my heart set on getting my crazy bridal hands on these magic plants I discovered in my early planning days….wanna see?
{source: 100 layer cake // photographer: Brandon Kidd}
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
When it comes to wedding photography, we Ponies are vain. We want don’t want to look good in our wedding photos, we want to look awesome. Knowing this, we set out very early in our planning process to find the perfect photographer that could make us Ponies look great.
Stylistically, Mr. Pony and I wanted someone that could capture all of the ’must have moments’ in the wedding (e.g. first kiss, walking down the aisle, etc.) as well as the candid moments that we can’t articulate on a shot list.
We also preferred a photographer that focuses on natural looking elements and colors as opposed to vintage-y or heavily Photoshopped coloring and styling. I love the that style, but I want to look back on our pictures and be able to feel the day as we experienced it through our photos, and heavily Photoshopped photos makes me feel like I’m dreaming or something.
Even though we contacted over ten photographers in our area, Mr. Pony and I narrowed down our choices and met with just our top two choices. And they did not disappoint. I was seriously afraid that we would not be able to decide on one photographer because both were incredibly talented with wonderful personalities. But we had to choose one.
Read more…
One of the first things your guests will see is your table decorations. I am so in love with so many different things that I’m afraid our whole wedding is going to look mismatched. :/
Maybe that should be our theme…mismatched, beach-chic. 
Image via Style Me Pretty / Photo by Sarah Yates Photography
Warning: ahead you will find much venting of wedding steam. Proceed at your own risk.
You may have noticed that I’ve been a little more absent lately (so sorry about that!), and I’m sure you can guess that the reason is because our wedding is fast approaching. At this point we are working on the wedding 100% of every waking hour (and when we’re sleeping, we’re both dreaming about the wedding so we can’t even really count that as a break). When we do take breaks, to eat or shower or whatever, we are doing so while we talk about the wedding. In my quiet moments, I am thinking only about the wedding and it never seems I have sufficient thinking time to actually resolve any of the issues I’m thinking about in the first place. There’s no time to see friends or family, and when we do all we can talk about is the wedding. Our tiny, lovely little house is full to the brim of wedding stuff. There’s not a single uncovered surface to be found, and until very recently none of it was organized in the slightest (which, for an overly organized person like myself, is just sheer torture).
It’s. All. Just. Too. Much.
{I can’t believe I’m letting the blogosphere take a tour of my house in such disarray.}
Two years ago we started planning this shindig in earnest, and back then we both thought we’d have plenty of time to take on any and every project we could possibly imagine.
Read more…
So you might be wondering what got us to this day. And I suppose that’s pretty important. Ours is a pretty fun story (or so I tell myself). I had recently graduated from college and was looking to meet new people since I was now on my own in the city with a big-girl job. I had climbed a little bit in college, and I got back in touch with an old climbing friend who suggested I come out with him sometime to climb and meet a bunch of his buddies. I finally went out with them to a boulder field in northwest Georgia on one of the coldest days that season. I’m from Georgia, y’all, and weather like this particular day doesn’t happen often. It maybe got into the 40s that day, and not having been outside for that length of time in that cold of weather, I only wore cords, a long-sleeved shirt, and a hoodie. I was mostly miserable all day.
About midday, one of the guys had the audacity to tease me by throwing my sneakers on top of a rock in an attempt to convince me to climb. (I managed to climb up an easier way and snag them without having to climb up the hard way.) Then that same guy decided to feed my dog the crust off his sandwich after I’d already mentioned that she gets no people food. I thought to myself, “What a jerk!” and decided that I did NOT like this kid. The sun started to go down, and I got even more miserable and started visibly shaking. I attempted to play it cool, and when “the kid” offered me his jacket, I scoffed. Once the group called it a day, I tromped off to my car, not sure what I thought about this whole climbing outside in the cold business, but on the way out I made sure to notice what car “the kid” got into. Sos I could keep a wary eye on him, of course.
We are licensed to wed!
We took a seamless stroll over to the Dallas county courthouse today on our lunch break and picked up our marriage license.
All we needed was $71 cash and our driver’s licenses. We filled out a little form on the computer, lifted up our right hand and swore that we weren’t related (yeehaw) or currently married to each other or anyone else. Bing, bang, boom, here’s your marriage license. It is good for 30 days however there’s a 72 hour waiting period starting today.
Read more…
Not that kind of role-playing, my fellow creepers. Budget role-playing.
Mr. Warbler and I are lazy by nature. So it’s no surprise that we’ve never really sat down and made an official budget. I found a sample budget in a wedding-planning book and adjusted it according to what I thought we should spend on vendors, and Mr. Warbler basically said, “That sounds good.”
The one thing we did agree on was that we didn’t want to start our marriage off in debt and that we would try to stick to the budget as closely as possible. For a while we were doing pretty well: I would fall in love with something we couldn’t afford, and Mr. Warbs would gently remind me of the budget. We had a nice good cop/bad cop situation working for us.
Then something began to change. Mr. Warbs started giving in. Out of nowhere we switched roles. “Remember the budget” turned into “Well, we’re only getting married once.” And instead of reminding him of the budget I said, “OK!” We had never really considered a videographer before, but after I fell in love with my boss’s wedding video, I felt like we had to have one, too. But, the videographer was too expensive so I was ready to let it go. Mr. Warbs’s “We’re only getting married once” mantra kicked in, and he decided there was no reason we couldn’t up the budget a bit to include the videographer, a photo booth, and a string quartet.
Jessica + Non :: Orange County, CA - 6.5.10 from Lighthouse Studios on Vimeo
Hello, my name is Miss Ticket and I am an indecisive font monster. Yes it’s true. There’s no hiding it. I spent so much time staring at and changing fonts that they all became one giant blur to me. I said I was done with invitations and yet somehow I still sat down in front of my computer to AGAIN revamp the RSVPs (while watching one of the worst movies ever made please don’t watch Skyline…. save yourself, just say no!). I printed out another 8 options of different fonts and wording and continuously asked opinions of Mr. Ticket. I think even his eyes grew confused after all the different fonts.
It was shortly after this point that I decided to give up. It’s not normally in me to do that, but I’m afraid it was the healthiest course of action for my sanity. What I had was good enough. They would have to do. It was time to finish the little monsters and move on with my life. I knew I had hit my limit when I begged Mr. Ticket to redo our RSVPs and he said, “Only if I get to include a picture of a Starcraft Zealot ripping a Disney Princess’ head off.” (Since of course he knew I would never agree to this.) I agreed…we were definitely done with the invitations!
After making Mr. Ticket, Mama Ticket, and Daddy Ticket double…triple… and quadruple check spelling, grammar, directions, etc. It was time to print these babies out!
Read more…
Registering for wedding gifts was not as fun as I thought it would be. Whew! There—I said it out loud. What a relief!
I understand that everyone has their own opinions on the whole registry thing, but in my circle of family and friends, a registry is expected and almost demanded! It isn’t frowned upon and is the norm for an engaged couple in these parts. I have already had numerous requests from people to have the right to an early sneak peek or to have “first dibs” on choosing our gifts!
Mr. Ball Cap and I decided on Bed Bath & Beyond, Macy’s, and MyRegistry.com. MyRegistry.com allows you to add items from any website onto one universal gift registry. It is free to set up, and it also allows you to sync other existing registries you may have out there (from Macy’s, for example) all to one page. This site fit our needs well. As Mr. Ball Cap and I are well into our 30s, we have accumulated quite a bit of household things during our lives. While we do need to replace quite a bit, there are other items that would be more practical for us. We’d love to be able to register at Lowe’s or Menard’s but, sadly, they do not offer registries. By using MyRegistry.com, we can add any item from these stores (or any other online store) to our registry and our guests can go to one site to see it all.
Read more…
In general, I had (and have) very little gastronomic interest in cake that looks like art. I think: wow, that’s beautiful, not wow that looks so delicious that I’m probably going to continue eating leftovers for two weeks after the wedding. (Yes, that happened. Not to PDog- he has standards. Just me, alone, sitting on the floor of our kitchen with a box of cake on my lap.) Anyway, I wanted the most amount of delicious, buttercream cake flavors possible for our guests, and that meant several cakes:
Six, in fact. Six heavenly combinations of creamy icing and sweet ganache and dense, rich butter cake.
Read more…
| Visit our sister sites | eHarmony Online Dating |
eHarmony Advice Dating Advice |
Project Wedding Wedding Songs |
JustMommies Pregnancy Calendar |
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 |
