Where is the LAST place a newly engaged couple should go two weeks after they get engaged?
a bridal show
That’s right. At a hotel, with hundreds of vendors, flashy dresses, bags of brochures, and, yes, cake. Talk about overwhelming times 500! OK, let me back up. After we got engaged, I happened to hear about a bridal show right next to my work that very weekend! It felt like fate. I was so eager to jump on the wedding-planning bandwagon and I wanted Mr. Squirrel to be just as invested, so of course I bribed him with, “There will be A LOT of free cake to try.”
What can I say, I know my man well…
Ah, the great venue hunt—such a time-consuming, stressful, but ultimately rewarding (if you find the place) process. As I mentioned in the previous post, we were really looking for a place that provided everything. There were some beautiful venues in and around Montreal that were in parks, art galleries, rooftops, etc., but since we were planning a destination wedding, we didn’t want the added stress of trying to find a caterer, chair rentals, dinnerware rentals, etc. in addition to a venue.
So figuring out what we did and did not want a venue to provide and having a guest list of about 100 people in mind really helped narrow down the list of potential venues for us. After some research, we decided to see six venues. All were hotels that offered all-inclusive pricing for a flat per-person fee. The per-person fee looked intimidating at first, but considering it included the venue, food, alcohol, waiters, bartenders, dinnerware, flatware, glassware, and basic table linens it was well worth the cost. Of the six venues, four were chain hotels and two were boutique Old Montreal hotels.
We scheduled our first wedding-planning visit in March, with two of those days set aside for venue visits. All the venues were nice and we were even able to do some food tastings the day we toured the places. (Here’s a tip: we ended up getting two of the tastings for free! We told our venues that food was a huge consideration for us and we wouldn’t have been able to accurately judge the hotel unless we tried the food. It really never hurts to ask.) But in the end, only one stood out amongst the rest.
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Hotel Nelligan’s indoor atrium / Image via CNTraveler.com
I’m excited to share with the hive the FIFTH annual Bee Ornament Exchange! For those new to the hive, each year the blogger bees get together and participate in a secret Santa ornament exchange. Each bee has the challenge of coming up with a handmade or store-bought ornament for $15 or less, and the ornaments resemble or represent the bee’s moniker that they’ve drawn. Check out some of the adorable ornaments the bees came up with this year. This is only part one of four, so get excited for more holiday goodness!
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– What could be more fun than a sledding octopus?… (handmade from scratch)
Tori is selling DIY paddle program fans. She is asking $0.55 each.
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 know I already said the photos in this post were my absolute favorite from our wedding, but I have to say these pictures are a close second. We chose “The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michelson for our first dance as husband and wife. I have always loved this song because so many of the lyrics make me think of inside jokes between Mr. Castle and me. For example the line, “Sew on patches to all you tear” reminds me of how I used to tease Mr. Castle before we began dating. He had these jeans with huge holes in both knees, like ridiculously huge. I still don’t understand how he could actually wear them—they were that bad. I used to say, “You know I can sew those up for you, or better yet I can put a patch on them. Maybe a big peace sign or a groovy flower?” It was my dorky way of flirting with him…
Anyway, this song is so simple and sweet, and I knew I wanted to somehow use it on our wedding day. I wasn’t sure exactly how we would use it until one day Mr. Castle suggested it as our first-dance song. I loved the idea. We wanted our first-dance song to be something with a happier tone, not too sappy, and “The Way I Am” totally fit the bill. If only I had thought of it first! Since I love this song so much I spent most of our first dance singing along. Afterward I thought, “Oh, that’s probably not going to look very attractive in pictures…oops.” Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Once again our amazing photographers captured out first dance beautifully. You can’t even tell I was singing along!
It was definitely a magical moment, not at all awkward like I had feared. Another great thing about our song choice was that it was short! It’s a little over two minutes long, which was the perfect amount of time for us.
“The Way I Am” {Press play to listen}
Photography by Palos Studio
“If you were falling, then I would catch you…
Hive!! I’ve for sure been the worst, absent since Thanksgiving—sorry! Between school, and a full time job, and Howie, and weddings—I mean, we’re all in a similar boat, so you know how it is. 
Anyway, my last post was about my invitations, and I got more than one message asking about the pocketfolds and how they worked with Vistaprint products. Well, two things—first, my mom and I actually handcrafted them. I’ll show you below how to do that. And second, regarding Vistaprint—in my experience, Vistaprint prints in two main sizes, half a page and a quarter of a page. For some reason, I was really opposed to having invitations that were clearly half of an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper, so I altered them. Here’s how:
First, I used one of their standard templates, and put in all of the correct information in all of the allotted spaces. Then, I purchased the preview—I think it was a $1.99 charge. I printed out the preview, which was in the real size. On a separate piece of paper, I cut out a rectangle that was the size I wanted my invitations to be (for me, that was 4.5” x 6.5”). I outlined that smaller rectangle on the bottom right of my Vistaprint preview, and then went back into Vistaprint and moved each of the text boxes to fit into where the smaller rectangle was on my preview. Then, I bought another preview, printed it out, and cut it to the smaller size to see if everything was spaced correctly. I think it may have taken me two tries before everything was exactly where I wanted it. I went through the same process for my reception cards to make them smaller so they would fit into the pocket.
Hive, remember when I started daydreaming about changing up my look after the wedding? I grew out my hair for over a year to have enough volume and length for an updo. Update: growing out my hurr for all those months was totally worth it, because my updo turned out fab. I loved it. So worth it! How many times in a girl’s life does she have someone waiting on her with pins and bobby pins, holding the secret knowledge to taming fly-aways and rolling the perfect curl?
Mr. Wallaby and I were wed over a month ago, though, so it was about time for me to get a haircut.
I don’t have one of those dramatic before-and-afters, where the first photo shows a person mean mugging with no makeup and flat, day-old hair, and the second photo shows the same person (or is it the same person?) 25 pounds skinnier, beaming, with professional makeup and a fresh blowout.
But for posterity’s sake, here’s a “before” photo:
Bwahaha, I did manage to find a no-makeup, eyes-half-closed photo, from a brunch with Mama Wallaby. / Personal photo
And here’s my new Hot Married Woman look:
When I was a newly engaged young thing, there was a DIY project I just knew I had to do. To those on Pinterest or in the wedding blogosphere, this is likely very old news. Many other bees have done similar projects. In fact, Miss Camel had the same inspiration! Many of you have probably seen this and quite possibly will be yawning shortly. The good news is that most of my bridesmaids don’t fit into this category and I knew this would be very special to them.
One hundred percent of the credit goes to Bethany from Rinse Repeat. If you haven’t checked her out, do it! She has great style and had an awesome New Year’s Eve surprise wedding!
BE MY BRIDESMAID?
Since I live across the country from most of my family and friends, I wanted a creative way to ask the important women in my life to be in my wedding. I knew I could just pick up the phone and call, but I wanted the chance to ask them in a way where I could really express why I chose them and how much they mean to me.
Each bridesmaid was sent a box with the letter of her first name. I found unfinished wood boxes and letters at Michaels. Unfortunately, the Michaels closest to me only had three boxes shaped like this. My problem was once I found the box I wanted to use, no other box was going to work. So I spent the next couple days driving around to other Michaels collecting nine (yes nine, as in nine bridesmaids….more on that later) boxes. And yes, many coupons were used!
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In the pic the “M” looks like I missed some spots, but I think it is just from the flash.
So with the location set, it was time to delve into the nitty-gritty details. Planning a wedding is already no easy feat, so imagine throwing hundreds of miles and a different country into the mix (yikes!).
Clearly I’ve never planned a wedding before, so with no prior knowledge (other than my kick-ass research and organizational skills) here are the first three things I did to get started…
Start with wedding books. If you are like me, you really don’t know anything about weddings and wedding planning, so start by getting your knowledge on. My favorite site in the world is Amazon, and they have a plethora of wedding-related books, from organizational binders to advice for destination and budget weddings. Here are some of the books I ordered that I found invaluable and subsequently recommended to recently engaged friends:
The Ultimate Wedding Planner & Organizer by Alex A. Lluch / Image: Amazon.com
bohosioux shares a photo of her DIY fringe heels.
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Before we move on to the ceremony, I want to show y’all some of my favorite details of the day! First, the bouquets and boutonnieres. I LOVED our bouquets. They were absolutely gorgeous, and exactly what I had hoped for. Posey really knocked it out of the park.
My bouquet included beautiful garden roses, ranunculus, dahlias, antique hydrangea, tea roses, scabiosa pods, dusty miller, and lots of other pretty stuff. It also smelled AMAZING. I had asked for something with light and creamy tones, with the antique hydrangeas worked in, and this fit the bill exactly. My favorite flower, alstroemeria, was also used in all the bouquets and flower arrangements as an accent. In the photo on the right, you can see the heirloom jewelry that the Posey girls tied to my bouquet stems for me. (And my manicure wound up being “Mimosas for the Mr. & Mrs.” In case anyone loves nail polish as much as I do and cares about that info.)
And look what else was tucked into my flowers…
It’s about that time folks. The invites have made it across the pond and the online RSVP’s are coming in (more on that awesomeness later)!
Of course we HAD to go with a fairy tale themed invitation. And of course we paid to get them done. Although I will say there was this box set at Michael’s that kind of mirrored the design on our cake but once again I was reminded by Mom Sword that I would not enjoy destroying making them myself. You would think she is made of money (or thinks we are) but no, she’s just being realistic.
After sending our Save the Dates with that dreaded typo in Mr. Sword’s last name I had a bad taste in my mouth about Wedding Paper Divas, so we went to Minted.Com and ordered their Once Upon a Time invitations with a dark purple font and they turned out absolutely beautiful! We’ve received nothing but compliments, and since our guests are really cool people they seem to appreciate the uniqueness of our invites as well!
Ready for photographic proof?
The front:
The back: All text on this side was written by yours truly. Feel free to steal.
I promise I wasn’t forced into marrying Mr. Unicycle, though my photos tell another story.
Photo by Jennifer Shaffer Photography
If Adele can have snot during her Grammy speech, so can I on my wedding day!
Also for some reason I thought people couldn’t see me behind the veil. But you clearly can.
I was a nervous wreck the night before the wedding, all the way up to the ceremony. Why? It wasn’t because I was afraid our cocktail hour would be rained out or our guests wouldn’t use our guestbook, or some other detail would go wrong. It wasn’t because I was having second thoughts about marrying Mr. Unicycle (I mean really, how could I?).
You’ll have to bare with me, as much of the ceremony is a complete and utter blur to me. Thank batman we had Officiant Em’s hubs record it for us, otherwise I’d probably need to skip over these posts entirely. (Sorta kinda kidding…?!) Fortunately for us the video, as well as our amazing pictures, do a wonderful job at telling the story for me, so we at least have that!
I do remember that one of our last-minute decisions—and surprisingly, one that I didn’t really over-think too much—was what to have playing while our guests arrived at the Vandiver and took a seat by the gazebo for the ceremony. We ultimately chose a little medley by the Vitamin String Quartet, including “Hey There, Delilah” (by Plain White T’s), “Stolen” (by Dashboard Confessional), and “Wonderwall” (by Oasis). Of course I never actually heard the songs play myself, but I have it on good authority that they could indeed be heard in the background!
So while guests filtered in with music in the air, Stepsis Mac took care of handing out programs and directing everyone to their seats.
All photos by Exclamation Imagery unless otherwise noted
Personal photo by Foxy Mama
