Weddingbee Blog

One of the things that has been most exciting to me about our upcoming honeymoon to Costa Rica is that it will be a totally different culture. A different language, even! While I have traveled, I’ve traveled from Canada to England and the USA. Yes, very different countries, and different cultures, but not different in the way I’m expecting Costa Rica to be different. It’s one of the reasons that when we decided to go somewhere tropical, Hawaii was never on the list. I want to try/see/experience totally different things!

Why then, do I find myself thinking thoughts like:

“Ooh, I should remember to pack some of our favourite tea bags!”

“Maybe a box or two of granola bars for snacks?”

Luckily, I hadn’t gotten as far as wondering if I should pack 3 weeks worth of cereal, but that isn’t too far off from those original thoughts.
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The random number generator seemed to have a thing for family, which really, is what a wedding is all about. Here are 10 of our wedding photos chosen by the RNG.

I love this photo because my beloved bouquets are in the front, and we look so relaxed. In actuality, we weren’t relaxed at all because we’d just taken off our shoes (quite a production for me) and were doing our best not to get our dresses dirty. I’m actually boosting myself off the ground with my hands!
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I got inspiration for my holiday cards this year from this post on Papertrey Ink’s blog. (Have I mentioned that would happily buy everything they sell, if I only had the money? Because I totally would.) I ordered the tri-fold card bases, and while those were in the mail (plus, ahem, some stamps) Cinnamon Buns and I went through the wedding photos and picked our favourites out. When the card bases arrived, we got to work.

You can switch up how you fold them up; we decided to go with this orientation.
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I think photo booths at weddings are a great idea, and luckily for me, Cinnamon Buns agreed. We sourced some pieces, and made a few more to fill our tickle trunk of props. We didn’t want a plain white background, so we found this great green and white oversized houndstooth fabric at Fabricland and bought up all they had. In the days before the wedding, I got my mum to sew it into a big square-ish piece (the sewing machine makes me cry; I’m hoping we can get to couples’ therapy sometime soon) that our photographers could throw over their own backdrop frame. We didn’t have any printing capability, just our second shooter with her camera on a tripod. We had plans to get these photos to our guests later, which I’ll go into in another post.

Right after the parent dances Cinnamon Buns pulled me in to the booth so we could show our guests how it is done.

We tangoed!
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And then the dance party started!

I danced with my mum.
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We danced our first dance to Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours. A few weeks before the wedding I’d gotten in my head that we needed dance lessons, so we contacted Dancing Til Dawn. I based the choice of teacher on which website mentioned “emergency” rehearsals, as we were only 3 weeks out. Dawn was a pleasure to work with; we ended up having a second lesson with her and both our sets of parents on the Thursday before the wedding as well. I wouldn’t call our first dance fully choreographed—it was more like she gave us a few bits and told us how to string them together, and then we just went out and repeated them in whatever order Cinnamon Buns felt like until the song was over. We could move around the floor, do a spin, and a turn or two.

But first, at Dawn’s suggestion, we faked everyone out like we were going to do the high school sway for the whole time.
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I know that family portraits are tediously boring to everyone but (and sometimes including!) family, so this is going to be short and sweet. We did photos with our parents earlier in the day (when we were photobombed by angry library man), but wanted to get a few photos of us with other family members—us and everyone who came from England from my side, us with Mr CB’s dad and uncles and family…etc.
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I’ve spoken a lot about the homemade wedding pie in previous posts, and as I don’t want you to think I’m totally obsessed with pie (although it’s kinda true) I’m going to let the pictures speak for themselves in this post.

Previous pie posts:

• The first wedding decision we made
• The secret ingredient for perfect pastry
• Post-wedding logistics tips for making your own pies
• Recipes & baking tips
• Our baking and set-up day

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After we were married, we walked down the aisle and out the door our guests came in. Then we went in another door of the building, into the ceremony side. Our venue was essentially two large empty rooms side-by-side, with a big sliding wall in the middle that you can open to connect the two of them. I just couldn’t figure out a plan for how to get the guests nicely into the other room, and eventually my mum suggested that as we’d already done our photos and everything, we just zip around and welcome the guests into the reception half of the building, like a receiving line. It worked so well! We opened two panels of the sliding wall, and everyone filed past and gave Cinnamon Buns and me a hug and some well-wishes, so we were certain we got to talk to everyone there at least once that night.

(guest photo above)

Above you can see what I mean about the sliding wall. The platform where we got married is to the far left in this photo—you can just see one of our orchids.
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We took our pre-ceremony wedding photos in a park very near our house. This park is Central Memorial Park, and every year there is a Remembrance Day ceremony there.
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A quick little detailed interlude before I start talking about the reception, dancing, photo booth, and pie.

The details. Now there have been a number of posts recently out in weddingblogland about saying ‘no’ to the vintage typewriter/mason jars/hay bales/jam favours/whatevers, and talk that the plethora of wedding bloggers is maybe leading people to focus more on OMG THE DETAILS than the marriage. All very interesting posts, as are the ‘rebuttals’ (for lack of a better word). We did work hard to make sure there were nice details at our wedding, but we know that that isn’t the focus of the event. The important thing was that we got married. That was the highlight of both our days. But in the time leading up to the wedding, I had a lot of fun planning what things would look like. It’s not often I get to throw a party this big, and frankly, I like decorating. You should see our house at Christmas!

All that to say, yes, the marriage is the important part. But the details were pretty, and some were even captured by our photographers. I would like to share them not to make you feel like you have to make jam for your guests or you won’t be married, but to inspire you like the photos of all sorts of weddings all over the blogosphere inspired me.

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When planning our ceremony in the awesome empty, blank-slate of a room we had, there was no question about where we’d be standing. How beautiful is that organ? You can also see the balcony in the left-hand corner of this photo, it had beautiful book-paper bunting strung along it. The bunting was made by my mum, and looked great.
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One of the surprises waiting for me on my wedding day was this sweet ride:

(photo by my mum)

Now it had been the plan all along for Cinnamon Buns’ step dad to drive my dad and me to the venue in his car. What I wasn’t expecting was ribbons and tulle! Apparently our mums were out in the parkade on the wedding day morning, giving the car a bit of flair.
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After we’d played around in the park, we decided to play in traffic:

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Otherwise known as “how our family portraits got photobombed.”

After our first look, we wanted to do parent photos, and then get all the photos of the two of us and the bridal party. We were hoping to be able to take some photos inside the library, but our photographers let us know that they’d talked to the people at the library and they’d said no, we could not take photos inside the library. Fine, oh well. We did decide that the outside steps of the library would be a nice place for family photos though, so we got set up and took a photo of us and my parents:

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