Weddingbee

(couldn’t resist a little Lord of the Rings reference)

Mrs. Bell Pepper’s most recent post about ring holders really got me thinking…. How often do you take off your engagement/wedding ring?

I eat, sleep, shower, swim, cook, and craft with my engagement ring. In fact, the only time I take off my ring is to get it cleaned or when I’m making meatballs (for which I use my hands, and I’m afraid to get meat bacteria all stuck up in my ring).

On the other hand, my sister never sleeps or showers with her engagement ring on. She waits until she’s walking out the door to work to slip it back on after a whole night of being ring-less. I can’t do this because I’m afraid I’d forget it all the time, and my left ring finger just feels naked without it!

So where do you ladies fall in this spectrum? Do you take your ring off for specific activities or leave it on all the time?

…how many bajillion words will our wedding photography be worth?

In my “real life” (you know, the pre-wedding planning frenzy life) I’m pretty crazy about taking pictures. My little digital elph camera is always tucked into my purse, ready to make an appearance at the first sign of something cute/interesting/embarrassing. I’ve been known to take hundreds of pictures in a night of hanging out with my friends, and once, on a three week cruise with Mr. Chickadee, we managed to take 3,000 pictures.

So, you can imagine how important wedding photography is to me.

Prior to getting engaged, I thought I knew exactly who my wedding photographer would be. You see, when I was a senior in high school I had my pictures taken by David Lee. David Lee was the best around and back then everyone went to him for senior pics. When we got the pictures back, I was amazed! It was the first time I ever felt really pretty in pictures and I was convinced it was all due to David Lee’s great skills.

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This, my friends, is the obligatory ring post. Come on, you knew it was coming eventually, right? So here it is…

I’m not sure when it was exactly that Mr. Chickadee expressed his desire to go ring shopping with me, but I’d known for a while that we would do it together and I was all for this idea. I wanted to have some input on the ring I would wear every day of my life and he didn’t want the pressure of picking out a ring on his own. So it was the perfect arrangement. Last summer we started looking at rings, and I knew almost immediately what I wanted.

The story of my own engagement ring starts on a day in September with my sister. It was just barely over a year ago that my older sister turned 23 years old. But that’s not all: that afternoon I got a call from my mom explaining that my dad was in the hospital and would be going into emergency open heart surgery. Everything sort of crumbled around me and I was still numb later that afternoon when my older sister called and let me know she was flying down to Texas to be with the family. And then, right before she hung up, in this uncharacteristically quiet voice, she told me she had gotten engaged.

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I just got an e-mail from my FMIL letting me know about a bridal show coming next weekend to Bloomington-Normal. I’m not sure how many Weddingbee readers would be interested, but here’s the information just in case:When: Sunday, September 23rd from 11:00 to 3:00

Where: Doubletree Hotel in Bloomington, Illinois

Admission: Free!

There will be various vendors to talk to, prize giveaways, and fashion shows!

Visit the Your Dream Wedding Website for more information!

This weekend Mr. Chickadee went camping with the boys so I hopped up to the Chicago suburbs to help my older sister with some of her wedding plans. She’s getting married October 7th, so she’s getting down to that frantic time when all of a sudden she’s remembering all the things she’s forgotten to do.

I thought I’d share some of the things we’ve done for her wedding, as my own DIY projects are mostly in the conceptual phase at the moment.

To begin, this is my dress, finally altered. It’s still wrinkly and I’m looking rather bedraggled, but you get the idea. I had my alterations done at Wee Sew in Bloomington, Illinois. They were inexpensive and really quick (it was done the next day!) so I’d recommend them to anyone in the area.

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So, as you probably remember from my previous post, I was a little stuck on colors. I liked all the combinations I was coming up with, but something was just missing…there was no spark, nothing to really bring the wedding together. I guess I just felt like a purple and gold wedding would only take me so far and more likely than not, I’d end up with a discombobulated mess without any unity.

Then I stumbled across the Knot bio of springchic and everything started to change. Sure, she had a pretty color scheme but it was really more than that, it was a feeling, a tone that ran throughout her entire bio. It was the feel I was going for, in fact.

Previously I had seen bits and pieces of weddings that seemed absolutely perfect, but not perfect for us. I love rustic outdoorsy weddings. I love sweet beachy themes. I love my sister’s grassy green dresses…but none of those things seemed to scream Mr. Chickadee and I and the day we wanted to have. I would later have this same problem with dresses, but that’s a post (or three) for another day!

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The first few weeks after getting engaged, I was completely inundated by the ideas in one magazine after another. Everywhere I looked I found a new theme or color scheme that seemed absolutely perfect. Well, at first…Some people have a hard time choosing colors. I’m not one of them. In fact, I’m great at putting colors together. I’m just bad at sticking with them. I’m pretty resolute about most decisions, but THE color scheme? Well, it’s been a bumpy road.

1. First, I wanted Tiffany blue. I would have settled for David’s Bridal Pool (shown below). I’m not really sure where this idea came from, but it didn’t take long after getting engaged to change my mind. Maybe I didn’t see enough Tiffany blue in the magazines? That must have been the culprit.

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Hello Weddingbee readers! I’ve been reading Weddingbee for quite some time now and could not be more ecstatic to join the team here at Weddingbee.com! I think I’ll start by telling you a little bit about me and the hubby-to-be.

Mr. Chickadee and I are high school sweethearts, of a sort. We started dating at the end of high school, in time for the senior prom, but too late to go to the same college, as we had long since decided on where we’d be going to school. We spent an amazing summer together, but when it ended we headed to opposite edges of the state for college. Thus began our long distance relationship…and four years of getting to know Interstate 74 very well!

In February Mr. Chickadee proposed and the wedding planning officially began. In May we each graduated from our respective colleges, me with a degree in English and him with Mechanical Engineering. Soon after graduating we moved to Peoria, Illinois, an hour away from our hometown of Bloomington and, funnily enough, right in the middle of our two colleges! We had always lived in separate spheres with two separate groups of friends and we’re really enjoying having those worlds collide here in Peoria.

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