Weddingbee

As a teenager/twenty something, I took a job with Benjamin Moore to pay for my post-secondary education. At first, I was really happy about it, thinking that I could be creative and lend a visual eye to people’s home improvement projects. Unfortunately, what I came to find a few weeks into the job was that people don’t want creative. They want beige. Lots and lots of beige.

For every cool project I helped someone with (frescoing a ceiling red and gold, putting together a garden bedroom for a little girl), there were fifty more that just wanted “ecru” or “tan” or “off white,” which after a while, became kind of soul killing. I mean I’m not saying you have to paint everything lime green, but every so often, a splash of colour is therapeutic, you know?

Anyway, when it came to the wedding, an event where an overwhelming number of things are made to be white, offwhite or “champagne”*, I made Mr. Hummingbird promise me that we would have some colour somewhere, so this morning, when I went on a hunt for STD cards, I tried to pick out cool colourful ones to counteract my years of sensory deprivation at the hands of beige. Here are my results so far! Enjoy!

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As I said in my last post, I am certainly no expert when it comes to formal wear, and I would be lying if I said, after my first visit to a dress store, I wasn’t a little freaked out.

I had only been engaged a few weeks when I found myself in a boutique in New York City, and, for some reason, all of the dresses I looked at seemed to resemble sparkly puffy balloon curtains they were so beaded and inflated. Not wanting to look like a disco-era Von Trapp girl, I ended up fleeing the store, only regrouping a few months later to try again on my Canadian home turf. (Sorry lookieloos, no pictures from that trip, I’m afraid.)

Anyway, I’m still not sure what I’m doing dress-wise (although a seamstress friend of ours has offered to make my dress for a very reasonable price, so being a budget bride, I’m seriously considering that), but these experiences taught me a couple of things which I hope might spare some of your other ladies grief when you go on your respective dress hunts.

Therefore, I present to you, Miss Hummingbird’s dress hunting trips for the uninitiated!

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With all the wedding magazines and books I read, I’ve come across a lot of different pieces of advice to help when planning for the big day.

However as I’ve heard from everyone who has been married, despite all the planning, some things are just guaranteed to change so, instead of being upset that everything is not a 100 per cent duplicate of the picture you had in your head, the best thing to do is to pick three things that are important to you and focus on putting your energy into those aspects.

Although I like to think of myself as a pretty roll-with-the-punches kind of gal when it comes to wedding stuff, I know that I do tend to stress out sometimes when I feel overloaded, so I am embracing this “Top Three” idea and focusing on:

1) The dress - I want something that’s my style (perhaps with a splash of colour?) and that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. I don’t think that I could in good conscience drop $2,000 on a dress, knowing I would never wear it again.

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Since I haven’t purchased a formal dress since my high school prom, I have to admit that when it came to picking out a dress for the wedding, I did not know what to expect. I’d heard horror stories from various brides about pushy/grabby sales people and shoddy sample dresses, so after I made my appointment, I found myself worrying about what awaited me when I arrived at the dress store.

Fortunately, my fears were soothed when I arrived at Ritche in North York with my awesome MOHs, E and Greg, and met my bridal consultant Sheri. Not only was she respectful and helpful when it came to trying on dresses but when I went over with her the kind of styles I liked, she picked out some great styles I wouldn’t have even considered.

All in all it was an absolutely great day.

So, without further ado, the pictures!

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Hey everybody! 

First of all, I just want to say thanks to Mrs. Bee and the rest of the WB team, for not only inviting me to join the fold, but for all their hard work on the site. When I first got engaged back in May, the idea of putting together something as big as a wedding was incredibly daunting, but the site has really helped me get motivated and excited to start planning.

So, a little about me. As I mentioned, when we first got engaged, I kind of found myself at a bit of a loss in that I was never one of those girls who had their wedding planned out from birth. In fact, for a good number of years, I didn’t really think getting married was in the cards for me. I dated a lot in college, but the relationships I had were never very serious or very good. In my late teens/early twenties, I went through a whole phase of liking people who were wildly inappropriate for me and then thinking I could somehow magically change them. As anyone who has ever done this before knows, it’s nothing but bad news. Believing you can somehow transform your punk rock chain smoking bartender boyfriend into someone you can settle down with is pretty much guaranteed to result in emotional devastation.

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