Weddingbee Blog

Just like every other bride on the paper board (which I frequent!), I’m obsessed with all things paper. Invitations, menus, programs, save the dates…these are all music to my ears. I caved and decided that since we’re having a black-tie wedding we should have fancy letterpress invitations (and decided to DIY them). I sold my soul to the devil and we completed 100 five-piece letterpress invitation suites in a three-day weekend. Clearly I’m into paper. Along with letterpress, I also knew that I wanted to have an inner and outer envelope. Fiancee Eagle? Not so much.

To inner, or not to inner? / Image via Breathe Upon

Fiancee Eagle tried to argue that it was a waste of paper, but after I reminded her that all pieces of our invitation suite, including the envelopes, were cotton paper (and super GREEN!), she rolled her eyes and knew I’d won. Inner and outer envelopes for the Eagles!

I just love how “fancy” double envelopes make wedding invitations feel. After every single paper (550 sheets later…) we letterpressed, Fiancee Eagle was BEAMING with excitement/pride and kept saying “These look SO NICE and FANCY!!” I feel like the envelope(s) will really help further the “These are nice invitations!” feeling that people will hopefully have when opening them. It’s pretty old school (I’ve never received a wedding invitation with a double envelope), but I think it works for our invitation aesthetic and overall wedding feel.

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Remember earlier this month when I shared my biggest bridal fear with you all? Engagement photos. I was so scared that I would look ridiculous, huge, disproportionate or just un-in-love. Well, we took our photos this weekend, and our photographer Brittany Esther has given us “just one” as a sneak peek.

Amanda and Jacinda / Image via Brittany Esther Photography

Needless to say, my fears were clearly ludicrous. I think we look awesome (and Brittany’s stellar photography really helps). Since I was so nervous and obsessively worrying the week before the shoot, I thought I’d pass on some engagement photo shoot tips for other nervous brides like myself.

Miss Eagle’s Engagement Photo Tips

1) Spend the time on your hair and makeup! You’ll feel more confident and carry yourself in a different way. If you think that you look good, your confidence level will show through the photos.
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I know I’ve been totally MIA hive, but I’ve been dutifully letterpressing our 5-piece invitation suites, DIYing all of the calligraphy, and getting ready for my month-long trip to Africa. Blogger fail.

I wanted to talk about registering for non-china wedding gifts. I already told ya’ll how much I love china. I am so excited to finally have my own set of china, fancy silverware and crystal. But, we’re also only 22 and 23 years old (actually, we’re almost 23 and 23 - my birthday is April 1st!). While we do have our own apartment set up, we still need “grown up” stuff. I’m a bit of a bargain shopper, and a lot of our stuff is hand-me-downs from our parents. Together, this amounts to having a lot of crappy housewares. While we’ll still be in an apartment/condo for the next few years (hello grad school / living in one of the most expensive cities in Canada), we’d still like to upgrade our basic housewares and have higher quality bedding and cookware.

Since we already registered at BB&B for china, crystal, and silverware, we also added some fun housewares to our registry there. These were some of our favorites:

Paris Royal 630 Dot Queen Sheet in Ivory / Image via Bed Bath and Beyond

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When I saw Miss Mink’s table numbers, I knew I had to recreate these for our own wedding! I think that table numbers are a great, easy DIY that can turn out super beautiful (as evidenced by Miss Mink!). Since we’re going for a blush and champagne colour palette, I knew we would use those colours for this project, but I was worried it wouldn’t “pop” as well as the teal coloured number did in Miss Mink’s. But when I found silver photo frames for less than $2 each, I knew this project was just meant to be… and I thought the silver would help them “pop.”

I ended up buying some super cheap blush coloured upholstery fabric for $2/meter at Fabricland. For this type of fabric-backed table number, it is uber important to use a thicker heavy-weave fabric, to support the weight of the number.

First, we gathered the main supplies to attach the fabric backing. The glass of the photo frame, Mod Podge and a brush.

We traced the outline of the photo frame onto the fabric and cut it out.
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While we booked our photographer, Brittany Esther quite a while ago, we still haven’t taken engagement photos yet. We wanted to shoot them in late 2011, but decided to move it to late March. Why? We are both so terrified of engagement photos! I can’t put my finger on why exactly, but it scares me. When I was a teenager, I did some plus-size modeling and worked with tons of professional photographers. I’m not uncomfortable in front of a camera lens (which may not be the case for Fiancee Eagle), and I know what angles are best for me. I’ve even had people tell me I look better in photos than real life (rude, but true—I’m pretty photogenic!). I’m not afraid of looking bad in the photos, and with our photographers skill, I’m almost positive we will look absolutely beautiful in our engagement photos.

So why am I worried? I’m worried because all of the engagement photos I’ve seen have very “heteronormative” posing. There is a clearly defined masculine and feminine position in the “poses”, and while that works for heterosexual couples, I’m pretty worried we’ll look silly if we try to recreate these types of poses:

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I admitted to you all before that wedding planning has turned me into a mildly compulsive online shopper. Well, I’m a full blown online shopping addict, now. We bought one of the most important “wedding” things online. We bought our wedding rings.

I knew that we wanted/needed to save money on our wedding bands, and since we both have solitaire engagement rings, we thought that plain bands would look good and wouldn’t break the budget. But, Fiancee Eagle’s engagement ring is a round solitaire with a knife-edged band, and mine is a pear-shaped diamond with a rounded, comfort fit band. I really wanted us to have the same wedding ring, but a plain band that matched her engagement ring wouldn’t match mine, and vice versa. So we decided to buy matching diamond eternity bands.

The online vendor we used was Pompeii3. Their online storefront can be a bit overwhelming—they have so many choices and the prices are so amazing. The one thing that is important to keep your eye on is the diamond quality. Their quality is actually quite similar to mall jewelry stores, but sometimes they will have products that have diamonds rated I3.

The rings that we bought were rated SI2-I1. If you look very closely at the rings, you can see that there are a couple of diamonds that aren’t as good as the rest, but it doesn’t bother us. We customized the rings to be 3/4 eternity bands (to facilitate sizing in the future), and Pompeii3 knocked off 10% of the price, because there were less diamonds used overall. Their customer service was amazing, and we had the rings earlier than expected, even with shipping to Canada. I would recommend them to any bride or groom looking to purchase a quality ring, online.

We bought these rings. While they are designed to be worn one on each side, since we wanted the same ring, we each just will wear one.

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Registering for wedding gifts was something I was a bit apprehensive to do. I felt like maybe we wouldn’t even get wedding gifts from people because we already live together, or that people would think that because we’re gay, our wedding isn’t “traditional,” therefore “traditional gifts” aren’t needed. Yes, I realize the ridiculousness of these anxieties.

Wrong. We were encouraged from both of our parents to register quite early in our wedding planning, despite not having an engagement party. And everyone kept asking about china. China was one of those things I just knew we had to register for. We both grew up in households that used fine china on special occasions, and we both wanted to be able to continue that tradition, and share that with our future children. Plus, I just love housewares and get excited about the thought of hosting dinners with fine china. There is something special about being invited into someone’s home and eating off of their fine china.

Now I know there is a huge divide among brides everywhere, on the necessity of china. I will admit, I won’t be using the china every week, or maybe even every month. But it is something that will stay with us throughout our whole lives. Something that we hope to be able to pass on to our children one day. So for that alone, we feel like it is a necessity. China is the thing that we want the most off of our registries.

FI Eagle’s and my tastes lean toward the traditional. We both love very traditional looking china, but I noticed I was also drawn towards designs featuring pastel colours.

Philippe Deshoulieres Arcades Dinnerware / Image via Bed Bath and Beyond

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I’ve been pretty obsessed with veils lately. Well, actually, I’ve been pretty obsessed with veils since getting engaged. I knew I wanted a lace-edged mantilla veil before I knew what kind of dress I wanted. And after trying on 150 wedding dresses, I knew I wanted a cathedral length veil. I want to be draped in yards of soft Alencon lace, framing my face. As traditional as it looks, it’s my favorite style of veil.

Waist length Mantilla Veil / Image via PoshVeils

Just to remind you, my dress comes with a cathedral length mantilla veil. Lucky me. The lace is the same lace that is used on the dress, and it really finishes off the whole look. I love how it drapes around the shoulders and frames the dress.
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One of the biggest things we struggled with in wedding planning was choosing what sort of ceremony to have. Quite obviously, we won’t be getting married in the Catholic Church. I was raised Catholic (Priests and Nuns and 12 years of Catholic school are under my belt…) but I formally converted to Judaism around 3 years ago. While I still identify as a Jew, I’m not really religious. I identify as a Jewish Atheist, as confusing as that is! Point being, I wasn’t sure whether religion was really crucial to our wedding ceremony.

Beautiful, but so NOT for us / Image via NYCago

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One of the biggest strategies I have for keeping costs down with all of the wedding “stuff” we have to buy, is to shop online. Even when I factor in shipping to Canada, I can save typically at least 30%, and often get a higher quality product than I would have in stores.

Image via Ocean Centre

For example, when we were just looking at rings, we found exactly what I wanted in a chain jewellery store (minus the colour of the diamond being a bit low for our taste): a .75 ct pear-shaped solitaire, which was retailing for around $4700 CAD. Well, we were shocked. We didn’t have that kind of money, especially because we needed two rings, not one! Fiancee Eagle ended up purchasing my ring online for just under $2000 USD, and got a higher grade of diamond.

This was just the beginning of my online-wedding-shopping addiction.
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Wedding planning isn’t all cupcakes and flowers and smiles all the time. One thing that I’ve been reluctant to blog about is the fact that my grandmother may not come to my wedding. Yup, you read that correctly. My own grandmother may choose to sit my wedding out.

I understand and respect that some people just don’t agree with same sex marriage. And that is fine! Especially when they are 85 years old. My grandmother was raised in a different time. She grew up in a time where racism and homophobia were the norm. I can’t judge her for that. I can’t judge her for not accepting gay marriage. But it still hurts.

Why? Because I’m her granddaughter. I’m the one who she taught how to bake and sew. I’m the one who went to her house every day after elementary and junior high school. I’m the one whose education she bragged about to her friends. I’m the one who she actually dubbed “her favorite grandchild.” I’m the one who taught her how to fill her car with gas when my grandpa passed away. I’m supposed to be loved and accepted by her, so why can’t she come to our wedding?
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I got proposed to on Valentine’s Day! Well, I also got proposed to long before this, but yesterday Fiancee Eagle surprised me again and proposed all over. Except it wasn’t a diamond this time. Just gold. She got down on one knee and proposed all over again, just to be cute. It was very cute.

I had been wanting a plain band that I could wear while I am in Africa for a month, and just in general when I don’t want to wear my engagement ring. A “fakeagement ring“, if you will. Even though we have already bought matching diamond eternity bands as our wedding bands, I couldn’t help but try it on with my engagement ring.
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When we first started planning our wedding, we thought that we’d have an iPod reception. Our venue offered up their iPod deck and said a lot of couples choose to use it. It seemed like a great idea.

Image via Apple

But I swooned over the idea of having a string quartet for our ceremony music. Something about it seemed so classic and pretty. And just very wedding. But it got me to thinking…why not have live music for the reception, too? Well, it’s expensive. That’s why. And it wasn’t something that we had thought about before, so the imaginary budget we had doctored up didn’t include an extra couple thousand for live music.

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No, I’m not buying a second dress for the reception.

I’m talking about Fiancee Eagle! Remember her? The other bride, in this two-bride wedding equation?

The Eagles @ Lethbridge Pride Fest

She had no problems finding a dress whatsoever. Do you remember those 150 wedding dresses I tried on, before settling for a dress I couldn’t try on? Not her shopping style at all.

She found her dress in one shopping trip. It was the 8th dress she tried on. Not fair!
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It’s no secret around here that I have had a horrible time trying to find a wedding dress. I tried on many lovely satin dresses, but after trying on over 150 wedding dresses, I was ready to be done. I was ready to either order a replica Pronovias dress online or give up. I gave myself until the end of January to find a dress in store, or I was going to order online.

I called salon after salon inquiring about dresses I wanted to try on, that I had found online. I had five dresses I picked out that I wanted to try on. Not a single salon carried them in my whole province. Not a single one. I literally felt defeated. But then…Mommy Eagle said I should come down to Lethbridge. You know, that little small town I left behind the day I graduated high school and moved to the city. My hometown. So off I went for the weekend, sans Fiancee Eagle.

I was reluctant to say the least. I really despise my home town…I’ve been back probably under 10 times since in the past five years. But, I will admit…if there is a place to buy a wedding dress, Lethbridge is it. There is a huge LDS population there, and there are always a ton of weddings going on every weekend. There even is a street that has three wedding dress shops owned by the same owner, so they really do have a little bit of something for everyone! I bought my dress from Bella Fiore, which is the sister store of Once Upon A Bride and The Wedding Cottage.

But hive…I have to tell you something. I committed a wedding dress sin.
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