The bridemsaids had spoken. No preference on color, but they wanted to pick their own dress style. Fair enough. I was loving all the weddings with “mismatched” dresses.
All the women look comfortable in their chosen dresses—picking designs that best flatter their figures. Isn’t that what everyone wants? My bridesmaids range in height from 5′ to 5′7″ and cover almost every shape and size in between. My maid of honor is on the taller end of this spectrum and, as a tall girl myself, I didn’t want her to be worried about a wardrobe malfunction due to a super-short dress!
So now the challenge was to pick a color as well as find a designer who had multiple styles to choose from (in the same fabric).
Originally published on August 23, 2010
Mrs. Cola nominated Mrs. Pin Cushion’s faux-to booth tutorial for the Helpful Series! Mrs. Cola says, “I’ve forwarded Pin Cushion’s PVC Faux-to Booth tutorial to several brides: I love how she breaks it down into an easy, manageable DIY, with something like PVC, which not everyone has worked with before. I really wish she’d posted this a few months earlier, because I like it so much more than the setup we used at our own wedding, with garment racks!”
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Oh, I wanted one.
I wanted one like Aladdin wants Jasmine, like a marathoner wants a gallon of Gatorade and like Hugh Grant wants to make another romantic comedy.
Pre-wedding, I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I wanted a photo booth. But my heart of hearts was also telling me we couldn’t spend a grand on a photo-strip spitting, old fashioned booth. And my heart of hearts wasn’t crazy enough to spend $464 from an online store ($97 for the backdrop, $367 for the support system [yikes!]) to build my own.
So, my (cheap, rational) heart of hearts led me to Home Depot to create a stand for our DIY faux-to booth backdrop. I had searched online for tutorials, but could only find extremely complicated versions involving power tools (and I preferred to keep all of my phalanges attached). Thus, we developed our own method which 1) ended up working out quite well 2) was cheap and 3) was easy to build.
For those wishing to build there own cheap, easy, fun photo booth, here is what we used:
(A) 2 of these (PVC pipe “elbows”)
(from Home Depot)
It was never a question for me whether or not I would design our invitations. My job is very logical and so any creative outlet I can utilize, I do. Client presentations have become very colorful, just to appease my creative urges. Our budget also had something to do with it; as much as I would kill for a custom illustrated suite, it wasn’t in the cards for us.
I started brainstorming in the first week we were engaged and over the course of the year I slowly created our invitation suite. Having time on my side was a huge advantage; I was able to take my time and when I would reach a point of frustration I could walk away and (hopefully) come back more inspired.
So, just how much did our DIY suite come out costing?
A Sweet Price Tag:
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.”
The venue! The venue! It’s all about the venue (at least in my book).
Our venue choice was extremely important to me. It was the first thing I wanted to arrange before even thinking about anything else. Fiancée Eagle was easy: she told me that she would love the venue if I loved it. Done!
I knew that we wanted something different—something unexpected as a wedding venue, but still semi-traditional feeling. And because we won’t be getting married in a church/temple/synagogue, we wanted a venue where we could have the ceremony and reception all in one place. All-inclusive, baby!
First, we considered somewhere simple and beautiful, like The Art Gallery of Calgary. They have a beautiful, modern space that is frequently used for weddings.
Image via Calgary Bride / Photo by The Art Gallery of Calgary
It was time to finish my wedding day look by getting into my wedding dress!
I made sure my garter was in place. Mr. HW is a big Cowboys fan so I decided to surprise him that night with a Dallas Cowboys-themed garter.
Read more…
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Yes, it’s true. The Foxy wedding will be sans videographer and sans lust-worthy highlight reels as such:
Meredith and Tommy from Monachetti on Vimeo.
::sigh:: My ultimate lust.
In all honesty, this decision has been a long battle and a big concession on my part. From the instant we got engaged and started planning a wedding, I always just assumed we would have a videographer…I just saw it as another staple that you book: venue, flowers, officiant, photographer, videographer, etc. So I started researching local vendors for work samples and pricing, and quickly realized that it would be a huge stretch on our budget if we were to get a videographer. As is often the case, the companies and styles I love are too expensive, and the ones I can possibly afford, I very much dislike. When I finally mentioned all of this to Foxy, his eyes got all buggy and…hive? He didn’t even really know that people got videographers for weddings. Really.
So I freaked.
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After a six hour drive (with lots of stops for sight seeing along the way) we made it to Hotel Parador located between Quepos and Manuel Antonio. Once again, everyone was so nice and helpful. On our first morning, with no plans, we decided to explore the hotel grounds. There were trails all over the place.
It was probably not yet seven in the morning in these first two pictures. I should not that our sleep schedule went with the sun while on our honeymoon, so we were in bed around eight or nine and up by five.
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Originally posted on June 8, 2010
Mrs. Thimble nominates Mrs. Scissors’ tutorial for her DIY programs. She says, “I referred to Scissor’s DIY programs post a lot… in fact, it’s the only one I can remember right this sec because I purchased the printer she used—I needed one anyway and I wanted one that would print colors this pretty!”
~~~
I designed our programs to be design-friends with our invitation suite. I’m a stickler for consistency, so they work well together, but I also went a little more whimsical with these guys. The pressure was off for the programs, and I had quite a lot of fun with these. This weekend, Mr. Scissors and I spent a good two days printing, cutting, folding, measuring, nailing, threading, sewing, and assembling our eighty programs. He was a marvelous helper, and we are both so thrilled with the results.
I know I haven’t talked at all about where we are going on our honeymoon, but let’s just say it is out of the country. Let’s also just say that every time I go on vacation, I lose something, such as my favorite Juicy Couture jacket that I had found for $20 at Marshall’s that I am convinced got stolen. (Obviously I am still a little upset about that one.) Also jewelry, favorite makeup products…you name it. I don’t know what it is, I must have a hole in my suitcase or something.
This got me thinking (read: freaking out) that something would happen to my wedding ring while on our honeymoon. I wouldn’t be able to wear my ring while we are out snorkeling or swimming. I also wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving it in our hotel room. This is quite the conundrum…what do I do to keep my ring safe?
The easy answer is to not bring it at all on our honeymoon. However, I’m not really down with not wearing my wedding ring as a brand new newlywed.
Enter the “fakeagement ring.”
Read more…
So…we have a venue and we have a style…but how to execute?
WARNING: PHOTO-HEAVY POST AHEAD
As I mentioned, with our venue the issue was going to be controlling the vision. With the potential for there to be multiple vendors for the reception design and execution alone, we needed to think about how everything would remain cohesive and not turn into a garbled mess.
We spoke to the Kimmel Center and asked them if they could recommend any vendors who could “do it all.” In other words, were there companies that could help us with everything from flowers to chairs to forks and china? There were (hooray!), and so we decided to narrow it down to two that had done business with the venue and visit them one spring weekend.
I went armed with two things when visiting these vendors:
1. My wedding brand (modern elegance)
2. My binder of wedding inspiration
Oh…and 3. My mom and Mr. Turkey
When asked about the wedding I showed them photos around overall inspiration that I had compiled in my wedding binder, of bridesmaid style, food, and flowers.*
We were looking for them to tell us what could be done and see if they understood what we wanted. A fairly simple conversation, but our thought was that we could tell if there was a good “vibe” between us.
The first stop was Evantine. We had a feeling we would be “WOWed” by this visit, judging by what we had heard about their work and seen on the blog. I mean, check these out:
Place-card table at the Project H.O.M.E. iCare gala (at a private farm) / Image via Evantine Design
“You are the bride! It’s your wedding, do what you want!”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard this about a million times during my year of wedding planning, and I definitely think there is this culture in the wedding industry that the wedding is totally and completely all about the bride all the time. By the time I got engaged, this idea had pretty much infiltrated my brain. It didn’t help that I practically had the entire wedding planned out in my head within moments of saying yes!
So when I started bringing my ideas for the wedding to Mr Elk and Mama Elk, it took me by total surprise how often my ideas were shot down. At first, I can’t lie, I was pretty annoyed. I was still in this mind frame that it’s my wedding and I should get whatever I want. It didn’t take long, though, for me to realize how dumb I was being.
Read more…
Hi Hive! We’ve been getting several reports from users that the Avast antivirus program is marking Weddingbee as a suspicious/malicious site. We had tech look into this report and were able to reproduce the issue—the Avast Antivirus had recently upgraded their software which has incorrectly placed us on their block list.
You should no longer be receiving these messages as of this morning—Avast has corrected the issue in their release today at 9:45AM.
We just wanted to assure you that Weddingbee is safe to surf, and that this was an error on Avast’s end. Please let us know here, on Facebook or on Twitter if you continue to receive malware messages.
Happy surfing, hive members!
While Leslie from Sakura Photography was photographing us girls her husband Mark met up with the guys at their hotel while they were getting ready.
Mr. Gazelle had some really cool purple socks…
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honthon1 is selling a lavender Tadashi Shoji evening gown. She’s asking $400 for the size-6 dress.
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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