Weddingbee

I also added some Swarovski crystals all over but it’s hard to see in the picture.

I took my monogram to Kinkos, and asked them to blow it up to 28¢¢â€š¬?wide (my runner was 36¢¢â€š¬?wide x 125′ long). They printed 3 for me to choose from on large paper¢¢â€š¬”it was really cool. Cost about $3!

I taped the large paper to my hardwood floor, centered the runner over it and adjusted it until it was where I wanted it. (The runner is kinda see-through, so it was easy to see). Then I just painted over the design with acrylic paint. It was pretty easy, and I was able to get pretty clean edges on the runner I had. It took me 4 hours to paint!! LOL!

Here are some basic instructions if you’d like to DIY your own runner:

What you’ll need:

• 36″ wide cotton muslin in length and color you desire. The fabric I uses was 36″ wide cotton muslin. This can be purchased at any fabric store, and is usually located with the quilting materials.
• A cardboard tube that’s at least 38″ long. I suggest using the telescoping mailing tubes. Cut off the ends and put the rough edges inwards, so the smooth edges are what show at the ends of your runner. Make the tube as long as desired and use tape to keep it from moving.
• Iron-on adhesive tape
• At least 4 yards of satin ribbon to use as pull cord
• Clear Packing Tape
• Scissors

Directions:

• Tape one end of the runner fabric to the cardboard tube.
• Roll fabric onto the tube; try to make it as tight as possible.
• Once completely rolled, use the iron-on adhesive tape to make a finished hem at the front of the runner.
• Insert ribbon through one end of the tube and feed through to the other side–tie ends together to create a pull cord.

To Paint Your Monogram:

• Enlarge your monogram by printing it out on your computer as a multiple page poster 3 pages by 3 pages (if your computer does not have this program, you can take your monogram to be enlarged at any photocopy store such as Kinkos or Staples)
• Trim the edges of each page and tape them together to create one large poster size monogram (skip this step if you took it to get enlarged at a photocopy store)
• Place your poster sized monogram underneath your fabric
• Trace with a pencil
• Paint!

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions :).

PS: Make sure to put some paper between the runner and the monogram so the paint doesn’t stick.

~ Modernbride07
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I ordered the letters (Silver Acrylic Mirror) from weddingcuts. They were so helpful and designed the topper in the exact same font as the initials on our stationery.

Note: you should consider the width of the top layer of your cake before deciding on the size of your letters. You don’t want to have your caketopper be wider than your cake. The top layer of our cake was 6 inches wide so I specified 3″ high x 1/8″ thick per letter. You also have the option of ordering single letters, words, shapes etc. Total cost including shipping $46.80.

The crystals, glue, tweezers and mat were ordered from tamisplace. They offered free shipping which made them cheaper than other places. I bought the colors light rose, rose and fuschia. There are a range of sizes but I ordered them in sizes 20ss and 16ss only. Just remember: the smaller the crystals, the less space they take and the longer you’ll be sitting there gluing each one on.

Getting started…

Done!

It took a few crystals to get the hang of it and not get glue everywhere. But it was easy to do after awhile. Warning: This was an extremely long and monotonous task. It took me a long 7 hrs to sit there and glue each individual crytal on. I nearly killed my eyes and back trying to get this done in one sitting. The things that a bride does for her big day

* When you initally receive your caketopper, don’t be disappointed with how plain it looks. Once you cover the crap out of it with the crystals, it’ll look damn magnificant! *

My cake inspiration pic

+ (caketopper pic from Knottie DRZwife)

= and the end result:

I totally love love LOVED my cake. It was like my first-born child. When you spend so much time on something (and lose half your eyesight over it), I guess you can’t help but grow an emotional tie to it.

Good news for those who don’t want to go the DIY-route, you can actually custom-order your crystal caketopper from topperswithglitz. They’re on the pricey end though, ranging from $100 and up. Some examples of their work below:

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I have a thing with visiting the ship’s chapel everytime we sail. We actually saw a couple get married on the ship the first night. They wore their wedding gown and tux to dinner! Later during the cruise we also got invited to a honeymooner’s gathering and we got to meet all the other honeymooners on the ship (about 10 in total). We got free champagne, mimosas, cake, and deserts as well as a private room for 2 hours to dance and mingle.

Last year we had just gotten engaged so we did this at the chapel.

This year we got married so we decided this would be better.

Our first night at dinner, Paul and I sat at an 8 person. We actually became good friends with one couple close to our age, and spent most of our time with them when we weren’t alone. We exchanged emails and hopefully we will stay in touch.

The first Saturday of our cruise was our one week anniversary of being married, so Paul surprised me with this!

It was waiting on our bed when we got back from dinner along with a bottle of champagne.

Paul and I both took full advantage of the pools and hot tubs on the ship. Since we had second seating for dinner, we went to the pool deck everyday around 6 when most people were at dinner and we got a hot tub and a pool to ourselves almost every time!

Our first stop was St Thomas!

Paul and I did an excursion on this island. We went snorkeling with wild sea turtles in a place called Turtle Cove and rode a pirate ship to get to there. Here is the other ship in front of us.

I had gone snorkeling in Bermuda with Paul and really didn’t enjoy it. They just boated you out to the middle of the ocean where the currents were really strong and didn’t give you much of flotation device. So I was worried about going again, but this time it was so different.

The water was calmer and warmer and the life vest actually worked in keeping me afloat so I was able to enjoy myself. Paul and I saw 4 turtles and even got to see one surface in front of us. We also saw lots of fish and some sting rays (babies!) It was an awesome experience! Stupidly Paul and I forgot to bring an underwater camera so this is a shot from the ship’s website.

St. Thomas at night.

The next day was St Maarten. Paul and I had made friends with the couple who sat with us at dinner, and they were planning on going to Maho Beach. Eddie, the guy, works for an airline company and thus loves planes. Maho beach is right by an airport and the planes literally fly right over you as you play in the ocean. It was a really neat sight. And the water was as blue as you can imagine.

Our friend got us these slippers as a wedding gift, so we left these footprints all over the beach.

The next day we arrived at Puerto Rico. Paul and I went horsebacking through the rainforest!

These dogs followed us the entire time. Here we are at the rest place.

Unfortuntely horse back riding pretty much took up our entire time in Puerto Rico so Paul and I definitely want to go back.

Our last island was Labidee, privately owned by Royal Caribbean off of Haiti.

The boat couldnt dock close to the island so we were tendered by ferry.

Since Paul was pretty badly burnt, we stayed out of the sun most of the time and enjoyed things in the shade.

The next night was the second formal night. Paul forgot our garment bag at home so he had to rent a tux and I had to make do with what dressy clothes I had with me in the bags. Please excuse my dressed downess compared to Paul.

That night was the midnight buffet. The food was amazing!

Finally here are some towel animals Percival, our state toom attendant, left for us each night in our room - elephant, monkey, sting ray.

Thanks for reading! We had a fabulous honeymoon!

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Anyhow, after a while, she confirmed that the order was not received and told us to re-upload. So we did. Again, we used the same pictures, same order form but only changed the size of the albums. (Note: they do not combine orders to save on shipping, in case anyone is wondering).

Well, we received our books today: 2 Deluxe Hardcovers in Celery (default color on order forms) and 2 Classic Hardcovers in Ivory (original orders - Ivory). We contacted them by email (chat was down this morning) and told them of the inconsistency. Their reply was non-responsive — they merely confirmed that the books were delivered to the shipping address.

Their chat was finally up so we addressed the issue there, to which the reply was: “I can see the order was placed with the ivory linen cover. At this time we can reprint the books with the celery linen cover with a 50% customer courtesy discount.”

My (censored) reaction was “WHAT?! You want me to pay for your mistake?” He/She replied: “Again I am sorry for the trouble we put you through. You can also submit feedback through a survey with the option to win a free book.” Being baffled and fed-up with the matter-of-fact responses from them, we ended the chat. We know we gave up and did not put up a fight. But showing how upset/mad we were in words over a chat was not getting anywhere.

Summary: We will not order from them again. The ordering hassles - not being able to place different album orders at one time is crazy - and their lack of customer service is enough for us to take our money elsewhere.

We don’t mind the celery cover. As to the quality of the albums, they were better than expected. The pictures were printed on a glossy, heavier stock paper (not as thick as cardstock but not thin like a magazine — somewhere in between). If the fiance doesn’t object to his pics being posted on Weddingbee, I’ll send pics later for ya’ll.

Nhi
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Once the slide size was set, I then designed our pages to my little heart’s content. Graphic design in PowerPoint is soooo easy — you might not have as many features and special effects as you get in PhotoShop, but honestly, those features kind of scare me. And (if I do say so myself), our page layouts turned out really well with just the simple functions available in PowerPoint. You’ve got your standard resizing and cropping, but you can also rotate pictures in 1-degree increments, add text over pictures, create a “watermark” look (by drawing a rectangle and filling it with gray, and tinkering with the transparency percentage), etc.

Each page in our album was its own slide. Once I was done with the whole thing, I saved each slide individually as a .jpg — go to “Save as,” and in the dropdown list next to “Save as type,” choose JPEG. You can try saving the whole thing all at once by clicking the “every slide” button in the window that pops up after you hit “save,” but this made my computer crash, since the file size was so huge — huge resolution plus huge picture files plus “every slide” equals unhappy laptop. Which reminds me — save your work as often as you can!

I then uploaded each .jpg file into the MyPublisher software, made whatever spacing adjustments were necessary, and voila! Within ONE WEEK, we had our wedding albums! MyPublisher is based somewhere in NY state, so we actually received our albums the day they sent us the email saying that they had shipped them out.

The one teeny, tiny little thing I wished I’d done was to account for the binding margin a little bit better. Clearance of about 1/8″ would have helped, I think. But nothing important in our album is cut off at the binding. And the albums are sooo beautiful! High-quality paper, great printing, beautiful binding… I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

I’ve included a picture of the cover (with ivory linen binding), and some representative layouts — the title page, pages with a “watermarked” picture in the background, full-bleed pictures, text overlays, and “frames” of varying transparency placed on a full-bleed picture.

You can view all the .jpg page layouts of our album, on my knot profile stinasim.

Christina
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Pre-Cruising
- I highly recommend booking any shore excursions you want to participate in ahead of time. You can book excursions on the ship but the lines are always ridiculously long and you risk having the excursion you want to do being sold out.
- You receive 3 luggage tags per person to put on any luggage you want checked in. Most cruise rooms are small though unless you books suites, so I wouldn’t recommend taking 6 bags of luggage with you.
- When you arrive there will be porters to help you unload everything.
- Cruising prices vary and the closer the sail date, the better deals you can get because they are trying to fill the ship. As with everywhere else, if you travel during the summer months (ie no school) prices are much higher than during the off seasons. Also there will be a lot more families and kids on the ship during the summer.

Arriving
- Most ships give you a time that the ship can be boarded; it’s usually a few hours ahead of sailing time. For our cruise, the sailing time was 5PM and we boarded around 2 PM. It’s always worth it to board as soon as you can because you get to explore the ship before everyone else.
- I would suggest taking a small carry on bag with any valuables, medications, passport and other important documents with you. Also bring a spare change of clothes and your bathing suit. Once your luggage is checked in, it can take up to 7 hours before it arrives at your room.
- The pools and hot tubs will be the least crowded at this time and you can have a chance to swim and enjoy the hot tubs before everyone else.
- All shops on board and casinos will be closed until about an hour after the ship sets sail. All shops on board are duty free and thus can not open until the ship hits international waters.
- About an hour before sailing, return to your room and prepare for a safety procedure called mustering. Your life vests are in your room along with instructions and on the back of the door should be a map that shows you where your mustering station is. This is mandatory.

SeaPass
- Your Royal Caribbean SeaPass will be given to you upon arrival. This will be your room key and everything on board will accept it, as it is linked to your credit card. You will need it when you exit and reboard the ship as well so it’s important to keep this card with you at all times.

Dining
- Most ships offer what they call a soda card - you pay a set fee and you can have soda and juice for free for the rest of the ship. Paul and I learned from our new friends on the ship to only buy 1 soda card and just go to two different bars!
- Cruising is all about eating! There are several places to choose from usually, and one place that is open 24 hours that serves sandwiches, pizzas, and small desserts.
- On the ships I have cruised with in the past, there has been a formal dining area and a less formal one. During the day they both basically serve the same food except the formal dining area is wait staffed and the casual is buffet.
- When you book you will be asked to pick a seating time. The earlier seating usually starts around 6PM and the later around 8:30PM. Paul and I did first in Bermuda and second for the Caribbean. The reason we chose second this time is because sometimes due to departure time on the islands, you barely have enough time to get back and cleaned up before it’s dinner time. With later seating, Paul and I never had to rush and had plenty of time to shower and relax before dinner. Since most people eat during first seating, we learned that the pools were basically empty and we could relax and enjoy it for a few hours. Also with second seating we could head up to the casual dinner buffet and see what they were serving that night and decide if we wanted to go to the formal dinner later.
- Another thing you will have to choose ahead of time is whether you want to sit at a table by yourself or with others, ranging in numbers from 2-6 other people. Paul and I chose to sit with others even though it was our honeymoon. When cruising, if you don’t come with other people this is an easy way to make friends. Paul and I met another couple from NY who were around the same age, and we got to spend the whole cruise with them. We even exchanged emails at the end of the cruise. It’s always better to sit with more people if you want to sit with others. That way if you are stuck with one couple you don’t like, there still might be other people you can talk to. Most times they do try to sit you with people around the same age.
- Dinner in the dining room is more formal. Most ships usually do one formal night where you get all dressed up. Depending on the length of the cruise, there might be more. On most nights though you are still required to dress nicely - no pool clothes, tank tops for men, shorts, and hats are allowed in the dining area.
- The formal dining usually takes about 2 hours. You will have one set waiter/waitress plus an assistant waiter/waitress for the duration of your trip. Everyday the menu will change and the wait staff will go out of their way to make your dining experience excellent. Case in point, I love croutons. On the 3rd day of our cruise our waitress Jackie noticed that I mostly only ate the croutons out of my salad and left the remaining salad there. She started to bring me out a huge bowl of croutons as part of my meal everyday afterwards. Another time Paul and I couldn’t choose between 3 different entrees between the 2 of us, so Jackie gave us all 3 so we could try them all. On another cruise Paul’s father got 2 entrees and 2 appetizers because he wanted them. Pretty much anything you want, they will try to give you.
- Room service is free and open 24 hours as well. The selection is limited though.

Rooms
- Like I said most rooms are small unless you get suites. Paul and I always get a balcony because of my claustrophobia, the extra space helps. Cruise ships often have many different rooms. The basic stateroom has no windows so just know that it will be pitch black in your room, unless you turn on a light, at all times in there.
- Some rooms have a window you can look out of but can’t open. Some look out onto the water, some look in on the ship.
- Balcony and suites cost more but you get more room and windows. The junior suites and up have walk in closets and bathtubs you can lay down in.

Shops On Board
- Alcohol on the ship is cheap and tax free. US customs says you can bring up to 5 liters per person back with you. Anything above that you have to pay customs for (Last I heard it was $2 per extra liter so basically nothing). If you buy alcohol on the ship, they will box it up for you and deliver it to your room the last day, because they want you to purchase it from them.
- Make sure to bring all your essentials from home with you ie suntan lotion, asprin, contact cases, deodorant, etc. If you forget anything the general store on the ship has most sundries but be prepared to pay a lot for it. A bottle of suntan lotion cost me $10 on the ship.
- Practically every day the ship will have something for sale in the middle of their mall area. It’s fun to peak and browse.
- Jewelry and alcohol are always cheaper on the islands though. If you buy alcohol on the islands sometimes they will deliver it to your ship for you.

Drinking and Gambling
- Because cruise lines spend most of their time in international waters they usually have their own rules about this. On Royal you have to be 18 or older to gamble. If you are 18 you will be allowed to drink beer and wine only.

Activities and Other Amenities
- The mark of a good ship is the number of activities it affords its clientele. On Royal Caribbean, Paul and I could have played mini golf (we did 4 times), in line skated, ice skated, climbed the rock wall, played basketball, ping pong, exercised at the gym, read at the library, used the Internet, or attended any of the various seminars ranging from towel animal making to how to buy fine art held on the ship.
- The ship also had a spa and a salon (appointments needed to be made for this).
- At night there were a range of shows to attend from comedians, to variety shows, to the ship’s own gameshows as well as a night club where you can dance the night away!

Tipping
- Everything on the ship is priced a bit higher because 15% gratuity is added to everything. You are still free to tip above that if you feel there is exceptional service.
- At the end of your trip you will be encouraged to tip the following people: your state room attendant (cleans your room and make those cute towel animals for you), head waiter, waitress, and assistant waitress. Most ships will give you a recommended rate of how much per day per person. It ranges from $1-$4 depending on the service and most of the staff depends on these tips. You usually tip in cash though you can put it on your SeaPass (credit card) as well.

Miscellaneous Stuff
- The ship will usually place some kind of newsletter in your room everyday so you can view all the activities, shows and events happening the next night and plan accordingly. On Royal it’s called the Cruise Compass.
- Make friends on the ship if you came alone. Paul and I made friends on this cruise and they took us to this beautiful beach we would have never known of.
- Paul’s tip is to make friends with a bartender and visit him often. On this last cruise Paul and I as well as our two friends Eddie and Jen made friends with this one bartender and we visited him every night. By the end Paul was paying for about 2 drinks when he really had close to 10. He tipped the guy very well for it. Paul’s dad said on his last cruise he tipped $50 and received close to $200 in free drinks. So yeah, if you like to drink that’s the way to do it.
- My favorite part of the ship was the fact that they have photographers to take nice pictures of you. They are usually there when you get off the ship, during formal night they have stations set up, they come to the tables, they are around the pool deck etc. It was always fun to me to go to the photo area and hunt for our pictures. On Royal they would usually have a photo station with a white backdrop and you were allowed to take more causal and fun shots called Lifestyle portraits. Paul and I loved that and have 5 Lifestyle shots from 2 cruises. You have no obligation to buy any pictures so it’s just fun to see if anything comes out well.
- On shore days make sure to get up early (or close to landing time) so you can enjoy the whole day on the islands. Also make sure when you leave the ship you bring all necessary paper work and documents to get back on to the ship. Keep track of the ship’s departing time - the ship will leave without you.

Well that’s all I can think of. I hope this was helpful and if you have never been cruising before, I highly recommend it. It’s a ton of fun and the best way to travel in my opinion! Bon Voyage!

Coming soon - pictures!
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