After our adventurous day at the Maui Ocean Center, and a few more food comas, we decided that it was time to make the trip up to the Haleakala crater. Now, everything that I had read and heard about the crater said the absolute best time to get there was for sunrise. This would have been a great adventure had we done it in the first couple days before acclimating ourselves to Hawaii time. But, alas, we waited until a couple of days before we headed home. The night before we used my iPhone to figure out how long it would take us to get there, and approximately what time sunrise would be the next day. Sunrise was set to be about 6:10am that day, and according to SIRI it would take us…two hours (?) to get there.There was no way this pregnant lady was getting up at 3:30am to make sure to get there on time. So, we gave up on the sunrise idea and set out for the crater about 7:00am. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day, and despite the windy mountain road, I managed to not get carsick (trust me, this is VERY IMPRESSIVE). We arrived at the park about an hour later, and we were SO GLAD that we didn’t give in and leave at 4:00am to get there an hour or so early for sunrise only to have to sit that time in the freezing darkness.
Even in the sunlight it was pretty chilly, but the views were spectacular!
Cocktail hour was officially over, and there was a salad at every place setting awaiting our guests.
Today’s guest blogger is Kellee, the founder of the wedding inspiration search engine Lover.ly. Immersed in wedding colors all day, every day, she’s here to share the top five most searched (and bundled!) wedding colors of January 2013 with Weddingbee.
The primary way brides are searching Lover.ly is by COLOR! We’re able to determine what’s going to be hot in weddings this year based on what you’re searching for. One thing we’ve seen this month is brides moving away from choosing a couple primary wedding colors and focusing on just one hue—with ombre weddings being such a huge hit last year, the trend is carrying over to 2013 in a slightly different way.
The latest trend in wedding decor is to choose just one color and use several different shades to create an interesting sea of color, while still maintaining a clean, crisp look to your overall theme. For example, your bridesmaids: send them down the aisle in varying shades of pink or green, creating a layered effect when they’re posing for portraits, and letting their individuality shine through at the same time.
So what were the top 5 colors this month? Feast your eyes on these eye-catching, fun wedding colors and inspiration!
#5: GREEN
Photo by: The Schultzes on Every Last Detail via Lover.ly
Before we decided on a venue, I looked around at caterers in the area and got majorly discouraged. Either the prices were way too high for our budget, or the sites were hard to navigate and uninformative. I didn’t know if I could find anything to fit our vision, which has slowly evolved into…
A casual morning wedding and brunch reception celebrating family and love.
Then we finally found our venue. *cue sigh of relief*
Along with the venue came the options to use the venue’s caterer, do our own catering (although we would have to pay for the use of the kitchen), or bring in an outside caterer. Here’s where I need to make a confession: food is not a big deal to me. We like simple food. We eat cereal for breakfast, a salad with chicken for lunch, and pasta for dinner—with extra veggies. But at the same time, we want to provide our guests with plenty of healthy (ish), good-tasting food.
I finally got in contact with the venue’s caterer (a mix-up that was partly my fault and partly our venue’s fault…let’s just say I either need to answer my phone more often or set up my voicemail) about three weeks after first touring our venue. I talked to her on the phone and walked away from our conversation feeling SO good about it! She was a sweet older lady with a southern accent and a willingness to do whatever, but she also had her own ideas and direction, which was great since we still didn’t know exactly what we wanted.
nnenna1982 is selling an Amrita Singh pink statement necklace. She is asking $20.
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 remember the first time I saw these. Mrs. Turkey had done a post on her set. I remember thinking that they’re sort of cute, but I wasn’t sure I would get enough usage out of them to justify buying them off of Etsy. However, like many other little details that no one else will notice, it was a project that has been stewing in my head for a while.
What am I talking about? Stamped forks.
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| From: Mrs. Turkey |
Seriously, how adorable are those?
Because I have a tendency to assume I can make anything, I decided at some point that I’d like to try to make some. I mean the overall concept didn’t seem that hard. Take some forks, stamp them with some words, call it a day. I’ve been meaning to do this for forever, bit I really got stuck at trying to figure out what words to do.
Y’all, like I mentioned in my last post, there’s a hodge podge of things coming at you—so much has happened in the past few weeks, time is flying by, and things are getting checked off the list so quickly that I can’t keep up! (Which is definitely a good thing. 
)
I was going for Miley makeup—something pretty neutral and a little smokey on the eyes, but with big, big lashes. You see, I’m a bad example of how to wear makeup because while I wash my face daily, I don’t take my mascara off until the last possible day that it looks acceptable. I like my eyelashes to be super big, and since I have zero skills in applying makeup, false lashes aren’t in my future.
Photo via Fanpop / Miley’s Oscar 2010 look (I’m crazy obsessed with that Jenny Packham dress!)
So with all that said, here’s the before and after! (I’d like to point out that my eyes were NOT supposed to be closed, but Momma Otter took the photo and didn’t think to alert me to the fact that I closed my eyes. Sigh.)
You can’t get upset about everything. It will make you crazy. But sometimes things are worth fighting for, and if you’re like me, you’ll pick the most random, unimportant, and silly battle of the bunch.
Hive, I freaked out about the color of paper. See, we are framing our signature drink info and a few quotes/e-pics to be placed around the reception room. One day while we were in Minnesota, and I was having my hair/makeup trial with Laura, Mr. Sword was given the job of printing the quotes onto paper and putting them into frames. (Shout-out to Mrs. Treasure for letting us re-use some of the black frames from her wedding! Yay Chicago bees!)
The odd thing about the battle I picked is that there are other aspects of the wedding that are turning out a bit differently than I had anticipated, but I’m letting those things go. The guestbook, the favors and the bagpipe tunes are not entirely perfect and I’m OK with that! We’re doing an amazing job planning this wedding and our day will be wonderful no matter what happens. But as a writer, and a lover of words, I just wanted our framed love quotes and drink menus TO BE PERFECT.
So, I threw a fit about the paper color because when I asked for ivory, Mr. Sword and Dad Sword came back from Kinkos with this weird buttercup/pastel yellow. It was terrible. It just wouldn’t do. And no amount of words would make me see otherwise. “There is no yellow at our wedding!” I exclaimed, frustrated that no one else could see the difference as well as I could. They all started laughing at me and then I started laughing at me and it became clear I’d lost it over the dumbest thing on earth.
A few days later, Mr. Sword, myself, and Mom Sword went looking for the perfect ivory paper at Archiver’s. It soon became apparent that there are about 30 shades of white and off-white paper, but nothing that seemed to match the ivory matte in the frames. Some looked too gray, some looked to white, and some looked too yellow.
And that’s how we ended up with lavender. Ivory be damned!
First down the aisle were my grandparents.
Unfortunately, Mr. T’s grandparents were unable to travel to the wedding because of illness, so it was just my three grandparents who walked down the aisle. (My gramama is trying to sneak out of the picture on the left.) Next up were Mr. T’s parents.
After the speeches, Papi Boa and I hit the dance floor with the traditional Father-Daughter dance, to the tune of Jose Luis Perales’ “Y Como es el”.
This picture makes my Mom cry every time…
Nessafly is sharing this stunning photo of her vintage themed engagement shoot!
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…or I am, anyway. My undergraduate degree was in math and I’m finishing my graduate degree in business—does it get much nerdier than that? So somehow these *ahem* math-themed centerpieces really appeal to me.
Image via Style Me Pretty / Photo by Sarah Rhoads Photography
I would also love to totally annoy my guests by doing something like this.
When our wedding morning brunch was over, we had a few hours to kill before we needed to be at the salon for our hair appointments. I tried to take a nap, but I had too much on my mind to sleep. So, I spent two hours on the couch flipping channels and trying to calm the growing pit in the bottom of my stomach. Time was flying and, before I knew it, three hours had passed and it was time for me and my girls to get our hair done.
I let the girls pick any hair style they wanted, and all of them chose to go with up-dos.
MOH Dancer’s super long hair
What did I do over the weekend? I made this thing:
You might be saying, “What the heck is this for?” Well, a while back I mentioned that I most definitely will be having a candy buffet at my wedding. And in almost all of the inspiration photos I’ve saved, the candy buffet has this super awesome banner.
