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junice is selling gold mercury glass votives and lace-wrapped votives. She’s asking $1.20 each for 40 gold votives and $20 total for 36 lace votives.
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:
I came across an interesting picture on a wedding blog a few weeks ago. It showed a sign that asked guests to turn off their phones at a wedding. It was the first time I even considered the fact that people might take pictures with their phones to post on Facebook or Twitter during our ceremony.
Photo by Jodi Miller Photography
A quick Google search led me to an article on Offbeat Bride about “unplugged weddings.” It seems some brides are walking down the aisle to a crowd of people hunched over their devices or people staring at their screens. I also read an excerpt from a photographer’s memoir in which she complained that guests who think their job is to take photos and video get in the way of the shots that the professional photographers are there to take. She wrote that every wedding has an “Uncle Bob” who wants to play professional photographer for the day.
I think if our photographer had a tape recorder on our wedding day, it would have said, “Boys, hands in pockets,” in every photo…especially for the family photos! We all lined up outside the church for a big group shot from the balcony on the level above.
My mum had taken with her a bag of flower petals and handed them out to a few people, so we did a little rose petal photo. I was a little excited!
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I’ve already mentioned some ways Mr. Hawk and I are different. (Like I’m a crier and he’s pretty unemotional. I can be a gut-feel gal, and he likes the cold hard facts.) But the reality is that those differences are just the tip of the iceberg with us. I’d even venture to say that we are more different then we’re alike in a lot of ways.
Mr. H and I grew up very differently. We come from different ethnic backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and different lifestyles. Mr. Hawk was one of four children and spent most of his adolescence living out in the country (the sticks!). I was pretty darn spoiled, being an only child most of my life. Growing up I moved around quite a bit. From Arizona to Virginia to Texas to Tennessee and back to Virginia, I never really had a “hometown.”
In fact, our differences were so blatantly obvious that when Mr. H and I first started officially dating, I received a lot faux-pleasant “oh really?”s. (The Southern equivalent of “no effin’ way!”) I heard whispers (not always so quietly) from friends. None of the talk had anything to do with friends disliking one of us—I think we just really took everyone by surprise. They didn’t picture us together.
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 consider myself to be a traditionalist, but if something else works out better then I am not afraid to go in that direction. This is why we will be holding a rehearsal lunch instead of a dinner.
When we started researching options for rehearsal dinner locations, I was absolutely flabbergasted. It seemed anywhere decent I found cost nearly as much as the food at the wedding. I had a hard time wrapping my head around why a large amount of money is going to be spent the night before the wedding (where a large amount of money had already been spent).
Then a thought popped into my head about our venue. Our venue is fairly popular and tends to get booked up every weekend pretty quickly. There is a good chance that there will be a wedding the day before ours. I decided I should check with them on this because if that is the case, then a rehearsal dinner the evening before was not going to work. Sure enough, there is a wedding that Friday evening before ours. Our options are either to hold our rehearsal Thursday evening or a 10AM rehearsal Friday morning.
Well, shoot.
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As I’ve mentioned, I’m a wedding pro. This status also comes with wedding-shower pro and bachelorette-party pro patches for my wedding-pro sash.
With that I must state, for the record, that I consider my “expertise” to be more as a wedding guest or bridesmaid rather than a bride. So, through this blog, I want to share some experiences/activities from that side of the altar.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
chrispygal poses with her five sweet flower girls!
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Hive, I’ve talked about my honeymoon way waaay more than I ever intended. It’s like a bar joke that won’t ever die. “Two newlyweds walk into a bar on their honeymoon…” Or, you know, something more clever and memorable than that.
I have good news to share and then I won’t speak of the honeymoon again until recaps. Our honeymoon is booked! Woot!
It’s not at all the honeymoon I imagined and wrote about before. There were just too many obstacles in our way. Mr. Kettle has taught me so much about compromise since we’ve been together and that really came in handy when we were sorting out the details of our honeymoon.
To refresh your memory: I saw our honeymoon as a wonderful holiday triple threat. We were going to do Carnival, Valentine’s Day, and Mardi Gras. We were going to Panama and New Orleans and it was going to be wonderful.
The price ended up being more than I expected, so we waited to reassess our funds before we booked.
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I’m not sure I realized that weddings had color schemes before I discovered Weddingbee back in the day. My memories from BWB (before Weddingbee) are a little hazy, but I’m pretty sure I just thought all weddings had a lot of white. Silly Unicycle.
When I first discovered all the beautiful inspiration boards on Weddingbee and other wedding blogs, I realized I needed to come up with a color scheme for my wedding, stat! Never mind that I was 20 years old and nowhere near engaged. First I decided on yellow and pink, because pink was my old favorite color and yellow was my new favorite color. I even had an accordion binder I used for school that was pink and yellow already. Perf.
Made using Mosaic Maker. Image sources, clockwise from top left: (1) Kara’s Party Ideas / Photo by Lyndsey Fagerlund, (2) Martha Stewart Weddings, (3) The Knotty Bride / Photo by Jade + Matthew, (4) Paiges of Style / Photo by Sprout Photography, (5) Zappos, (6) Hostess with the Mostess, (7) Martha Stewart Weddings, (8) isakayboutique on Etsy, (9) Giverslog, (10) Green Wedding Shoes / Photos by Katherine Elizabeth Photography, (11) A Blissful Nest, (12) Martha Stewart Weddings, and (13) The Bride’s Cafe / Photo by Amanda Wilcher
So why’d I change my mind? Well, I was going to say that I realized this color scheme was too tacky, but after putting together this inspiration board, I realize it’s actually quite lovely. And I want it. However, I don’t want to force pink on Mr. Unicycle, so I moved on.
In my opinion, there are a lot of things country music stars do right. First and foremost, the music. I had no knowledge of the genre before I moved to Nashville five years ago and, to be quite honest, I really had no interest in learning. But then a funny thing happened.
My mom and I took a day-trip from Chicago to Nashville (thank you Southwest deals) to visit Vanderbilt. Mama Dalmatian says she knew right away that I would end up there, partially because I was completely enthralled by Vandy’s blooming gardens and pedestrian bridges (I really love me a pedestrian bridge), and partially because as we explored the city in our rental car I had the country music blaring and a huge smile plastered across my face.
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| My favorite pedestrian bridge at Vandy / Photo via DonHardingGroup.com |
And thus, my love for fiddles and honky-tonks was born. But we’ll get more into the music part in a later post. Right now, I want to talk about another thing that country music stars do right: LOVE.
They throw adorable rustic weddings with cowboy boots and all. Proof:
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Sorry—just had to get that one out of the way.
I am so excited to participate in this series—I love the idea of pulling completely random photos from our wedding, especially since I ended up with a couple that I probably didn’t share the first time around. It was so fun to go back and look at some totally random photos from our big day (almost a year ago!) and re-live the experience.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
Love this photo of Mr. Cardigan, Bridesmaid Audrey, and I doing the Cupid Shuffle in our Converse. Mr. Cardigan gifted me those yellow beauties on the morning of our wedding, and I still think about our wedding day every time I wear them. They definitely made dancing all night long much easier on my feet!
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After our rehearsal, we headed back to the guest house to sign the Ketubah, or Jewish marriage contract.
I ordered our Ketubah from Ketubah.com and the artist is Nava Shoham (highly recommended, if anyone needs a Ketubah!). Before the wedding weekend, I had the Ketubah matted so it was flat and sturdy for signing. Then after the wedding, we had it completely framed behind glass. Since the Ketubah is on high grade paper, I made sure to bring special archival pens that I picked up from the craft store. An associate at the store can help you find these if you need anything like this for your wedding. Make sure to not use regular pens as this can warp, bleed, or otherwise destroy the piece of work.
Our Ketubah
Many couples do the signing on the actual wedding day, but I was too nervous to have it out and/or on display at the wedding for fear that it might get damaged. So, I made arrangements with our officiant to come back to the guest house with us after the rehearsal so we could go ahead and sign it that evening.
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A couple weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, Mr. Hawk and I met up with Valerie of Valerie Demo Photography in Downtown Richmond for our engagement session. When trying to decide where to take our photographs, I had a little difficulty. After my relentless stalking of Valerie’s blog (along with other inspiration like SMP, Bride’s Cafe, and Weddingbee…), my brain was clouded with so many beautiful ideas.
I adored the look of on-the-beach photos with dreamy light:
But the beach isn’t really Mr. Hawk’s and my thing. (We’re kinda more pool people!)
I also loved the rustic countryside photos:
Alternate title: The non-perfectionist guide to veil making.
You may or may not remember that I was feeling totally overwhelmed with veil options. Well hive, I made a choice (literally I made it! (Har har puns are fun!)). I decided to go pretty traditional, with a fun twist. Props to you if you pick up on the twist. I will be wearing the homemade veil for the ceremony and Step-mama-Aardvark’s cute short veil for the reception.
Anyone who has any interest in being totally shocked by my wedding day look (Mr. Aardvark) should probably not read this post…Or only read about half way.
Ok, now that we have that out of the way, there is one more disclaimer. I am not a perfectionist. Not even close. I am a better-stop-now-before-I-totally-ruin-it-cause-it’s-pretty-good-right?-ist. That is the approach I used when I made this veil. I did do extensive YouTube “how to make a veil” research and took my favorite bits from each one. I have to say, I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. If you are not interested in a $200 dollar veil, perfect edges, or perfect symmetry, I recommend this project and tutorial.
What you need:
I look back at the first time I was a bridesmaid fondly. However, I cringe when I think about how much money I spent. I was just a graduate student, but spent as if I were comfortably installed in a lucrative career. (I was always headed toward a job in academia, so that was especially silly of me.)
I wasn’t really convinced that I would wear any of the bridesmaids’ dresses I’ve bought again. I held on to a couple, but they sat in my closet for years. I finally donated them to the Cinderella Project a few years ago.
When I started to think about my bridesmaids, I wondered whether they might have the cost of the role in mind. I came across this graphic from Mint a while back and posted it in the Weddingbee forums, but it’s so comprehensive that it’s worth posting again.
Check out the original on Mint.com’s blog.
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