Weddingbee Blog

After that first makeup artist took another 2 weeks to return my call, I gave up and found someone else. I found Tasha and Sophie of Get Concealed. I really feel like they know what they’re doing, and they are super nice and fun.

Here’s what Sophie came up with for hair. She said it will be more defined during the next trial, but since we were fooling around with it this time there are a lot of flyaways and straight parts. Anyway, you get the general idea:

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Hi everybody! Today is a momentous day! Our invitations are finally going out!! Although I don’t want to post them here until our guests have received them (think end of this week), I thought I’d share the DIY pseudo-calligraphy I did (some of you seemed interested) and our adventures with stamps. Now, I’m not entirely convinced that anyone actually notices either of these two things, but we brides certainly do. So here we go.

First off, the calligraphy. I decided I wanted to get all fancy-pants, so I got a calligraphy pen and decided to try my hand at calligraphy. What did I discover? I suck at it. I can’t make all the little swirls and swooshes look good. Instead, I look like I am trying to be pretentious. So instead of addressing the envelopes using fancy calligraphy, I did two things: First, I just used the calligraphy pen with my regular handwriting. Then I added the one fancy pants calligraphy thing I really like, which is the spacing-out-of-the-zip-code (more on this in a moment).

Here is one of my envelopes:

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A couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of a conundrum: I couldn’t figure out whether or not to have menus. After reading everyone’s comments, I decided that I would do menus, but only if it were as simple as humanly possible, didn’t stress me out, and didn’t disrupt my very simple looking place setting. Here’s what I came up with:

You might be wondering where the circle of dots come from. I promise that I didn’t just throw them in there for the heck of it–these match our invitations, which you will be seeing in a couple of weeks.
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After receiving some comments that confused the heck out of me on my last post, I decided to re-read my post. As it turns out, Ms. Cream Puff is NOT THAT BRIGHT. Half of my post somehow got deleted before I posted it! So let’s try this again. The pink thing is my PHOTO ALBUM, not my invitations.

Back to Friday–I finally picked up my letterpressed invites from the printer. However, I also stopped by Paper Source, where my manager, Schbvonne, had the album she had created for Mr. Cream Puff and I. It is MAGNIFICENT. My excitement about the invitations was totally dwarfed by my excitement about the album. Now I am sad, because you guys all thought the album was my invitation, and my invitation is not nearly as cool as the album. You will all be disappointed by my invitations!!! Oh well, I guess. What’s a dense puff to do? Not too much at this point!

Anyway, so here is the album.
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I didn’t think anything could possibly take away from the excitement of finally getting my letterpressed invitations back from the printer.

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Remember how I wanted to do little memory boxes on the tables, but Mr. Cream Puff and Momma Cream Puff shot me down? Well, I have decided to ignore them. This is a great freaking idea, and I am going to do it anyway. Instead of putting them on the tables, though, we’re going to put them on the standing cocktail tables–and we’re only doing three of them. They will all have different pictures & trinkets inside.

Awhile back, I took some cigar boxes and covered them in colored paper. I’m not 100% sold on them–there are some bubbles in the paper, and it doesn’t really look all that perfect, but I think I’ll probably just let that go and stick with what I’ve got (unless, of course, they end up looking tacky on the colored cocktail table linens we may end up with–then I’ll just get plain wooden boxes and not decorate them). The only people who will probably notice the bubbles in the paper, though, are my buddies at Paper Source!

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From the beginning, I’ve thought about making signature cocktails for our wedding. This is a pretty trendy thing right now, but for good reason: it’s fun and it saves money, because you can serve hard alcohol, but you don’t have to have an entire open bar.

I was first inspired by bar menus I found various knot bios. They all seemed to be variants of the same thing: “Something Old” (gin and tonic), “Something New” (crantini), “Something Borrowed” (something from the couple’s past), “Something Blue” (Electric Lemonade). I knew I wanted to do something different, so Mr. Cream Puff and I had a brainstorming session. We toyed around with giving them a San Francisco theme (”San Francisco Bay Breeze”), but in the end decided to name all of the drinks after our pets, who aren’t included in the wedding in any other way. Here is my completed bar menu, which is being printed as we speak through Vista Print as oversized postcards:

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A quick note: Over the weekend, I played assistant to my friend Karen (of Huckleberry Karen Designs) and helped her set up centerpieces for a wedding. While we were there, the groomsmen needed help putting on their boutonnieres. As I was looking at them all standing there (looking very sharp, I might add), I suddenly got REALLY excited. In just two and a half months, that will be the Cream Puff groomsmen needing help with their boutonnieres and taking pro photos and looking really dashing. I AM SO EXCITED!!!

Mr. Cream Puff and I suck at dancing. Actually, I don’t know that for a fact, as Mr. Cream Puff has pretty much refused to dance with me at the weddings and Bar Mitzvahs we have attended together. No more, I say! So we’ve decided to start dancing lessons (I swear, I did not force Mr. Cream Puff into this–he wanted to do it).

Last week we had our very first lesson at Two Left Feet in Danville, California. It was…hard. Actually, let me clarify: it was hard for Mr. Cream Puff, because the man’s part is the hardest. All I have to do is follow (and I am very good at it, haha!). Right now we are learning East Coast Swing, but we’ll be learning a lot of other dances as our lessons progress.
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I must be evolving. Over the weekend, I managed to delegate three things. I delegated two of them to my wonderful mother. First, I asked her to deal with the tent-for-the-ceremony-musicians issue (which she has already taken care of!). Second, I asked her to ask her rabbi (as I do not have a relationship with one where I live) to help me figure out some inter-faith wording for our ketubah. I then asked Mr. Cream Puff to get us a basket of disguises for the photobooth. I cannot believe it did not even OCCUR to me to ask Mr. Cream Puff to deal with the photobooth rental. He totally would have done it, and it didn’t even occur to me. I’m a weirdo.

Anyway, the photobooth situation is completely taken care of, deposit down and everything. Apparently they were very busy for a couple of weeks, and that was why I couldn’t get through to them. We are going with Party Booths–their booths look great and they were the only option I could find for under $1000. We decided to have it for our entire reception, which will be 5 hours…so we’ll be paying $1045 for the whole thing. It’s still a ton of money, but I think it will be worth it.

Photo courtesy of Party Booths

Okay, now to more thoroughly address what has been stressing me out:

1) The letterpress issue. I did our entire invitation suite myself (which I will post here after they’ve been sent out!), except for the front part of the invitation, which I designed and will have printed at a local letterpress printer. I ordered the entire thing online, uploaded my image and communicated a couple of times with one of the employees at the printer. I thought there would be no problem. On their website, they say single pieces will take 2-3 weeks, and that people should call for a specific delivery date.

So… it has been two weeks, and yesterday I decided to call to get an exact time estimate. Turns out they lost my order. The guy on the phone was kind of condescending, asking me why I placed the entire order online and why I wouldn’t have called to make sure everything went through. I had to explain several times that I’d had an email exchange with one of their employees and didn’t think I needed to call. Initially he told me that I would need to pay a $50 rush order fee in order to have them done by the end of this month, and if I wasn’t willing to pay the $50, they would be done mid-June (my invites are supposed to go out at the beginning of June, and I still have to do some assembly once I get the letterpress). Needless to say, I was rather upset about the situation, because it isn’t my fault that they lost my order, and I shouldn’t have to pay a rush fee in order to have them done later than they should have been done in the first place.
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I was about to craft an entire post about organization when I realized I had more important things to ask you guys about.

As a recap of the past few days: I. have. been. stressed.
Things I have had to deal with:
1) drama with the people who are supposed to be printing my letterpress invitations. Let’s just say there were a lot of raised voices, they almost weren’t going to be printed, and none of it was my fault.
2) a very, very cheap groomsman.
3) a makeup artist/hair person who is missing in action
4) decisions about ceremony music
5) photobooth people who refuse to answer their phone and don’t call me back

Yesterday I decided to work on the menus for our bar. We’re having a few signature cocktails, so I wanted to create a menu so people know what their options are. I was discussing all of this with my friend Amanda when she brought up the fact that we have no menus for our food.
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Confession: I am a huge internet dork. I am the girl who immediately googles something if she doesn’t know the answer and doesn’t go out to dinner (or plan a wedding) without first consulting Yelp.com. I really wish I had an iphone or a blackberry (okay, who am I kidding, I just want the iphone–there is no substitute) so that I would be able to do these dorky things from anywhere. And, just to air out the rest of my dorky laundry before I get to the point, I will remind all of you that Mr. Cream Puff and I met on the internet.

Now. When we got engaged, my first thought was, “why would I buy the Knot magazine if they have a website with all of the same information on it?” A few weeks later, I discovered something that would change my life forever: the knot message boards. Specifically, my local board. In the beginning, I spent most of my time reading other people’s posts and asking the occasional question. I found almost all of my vendors because of the people on the knot, and tons of great ideas. But mostly, I found some truly amazing friends–friends who I will probably know for years and years and years.

Some of my friends from the Knot at the Bridal Soiree in San Francisco last month.

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Not long after we booked both venues, the band and the caterer, Mr. Cream Puff told me that he thought our wedding was “too grand.” He was having a mini-freak-out about the size of our wedding, and it caught me totally off guard. To me, our wedding is pretty modest–we’re aiming for 130 guests. Apparently Mr. Cream Puff would be more comfortable with a smaller wedding–think 20 people–and he didn’t tell me until we’d already put down a bunch of deposits.

So I had a mini-freak-out. After all, this wedding should be representative of both of us, not just of me. However, we were in a position monetarily where we would lose out on thousands of dollars if we backed out for a smaller wedding. And the fact is, I’m not sure how we could get our guest list below 120 people, period. My family + Mr. CP’s family = 109 people, and that’s with none of our friends–not even those closest to us. We are both very close with our families, and the idea of leaving any of them out seemed like pure tragedy to me.

I consulted my friend Kathy, who was recently married. She told me that her husband-to-be had a very similar freak out before their wedding. She reassured me by telling me that her husband eventually got over it and actually started to look forward to the wedding.
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I basically just cried a river while Mr. Cream Puff laughed at me.

Don’t worry, I’m not in an abusive relationship: I just cry at everything (including commercials).

This time, we were writing our ceremony. I read the following final blessing from The Wedding Ceremony Planner by Judith Johnson, and basically ended up a sobbing, snotting mess. I then declared, “that’s GREAT! We must use it.” Apparently I looked pretty funny.

“Yorkey and Sara
on behalf of your loved ones
who are here with you today,
I would like to mention some of the things
we wish for you:

First, we wish for you a love
that is rich, deep and powerful enough
to inspire others and to support you both
in bringing forth the best that is within you.
May you lavishly love one another
and love being loved by one another
today, tomorrow and always.
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