Weddingbee Blog

I’ve been looking for a rehearsal dinner dress for a long time now. Originally I wanted a white dress, then I wanted a black and white dress, and, finally, I decided on just plain black. A while ago I became a member of the Gilt Groupe website, and every day I get to access some amazing sales. A lot of the items are a little pricey for me, but I’ve managed to find a couple of great dresses.

Today, I found the rehearsal dinner dress. Ladies, I present to you my new Vivian Tam Flower Petal Bubble Hem Dress:

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Wednesday night I was fortunate enough to attend a wedding event at the Crescent Hotel in Dallas featuring Preston Bailey. I have so much to share about the night, and pictures yet to download, but I just wanted to share a little story about the night.

My mom and one of my bridesmaids were sitting in the room waiting for Preston Bailey to give his speech, when my bridesmaid, Jen, mentioned that she had read Weddingbee for the first time and read through not only my posts, but many of my fellow Bees’ posts as well. As we were sitting there chatting, a girl in front of us, Kathryn, turned and asked if I was Miss Hydrangea. I felt so special that someone had come out to the event from my post, but even more special when she shared with me her story.

Kathryn is not yet engaged to her boyfriend, but they are very serious and have been together for about eight years. She reads Weddingbee often and thinks that her boyfriend will be proposing any day now. More importantly, Kathryn is dating a Hispanic man and felt that she could really relate to me, as Mr. H is also Hispanic.
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There is one issue that I’ve noticed while wedding planning that has become one of my greatest aggravations: parking.

Image found here

When we went to visit venues, they paid for our parking. When Mom H and I went to wedding events, we usually received a sticker to cover our parking. So why, I ask, do venues charge you for parking? I wouldn’t ever ask our guests to pay for their own parking at the event to which I invited them, even though our venue gives us a discounted rate on parking.
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Last week I posted about my hunt for an inexpensive little clutch to use at the wedding. You all voted and my mind was made up … I was going to buy this in navy blue:

#24744 - Gathered Satin Clutch, 10″ x 5″ x 2″ for $28 from La Regale

But then, our own Miss Sundae posted about the infamous J Crew clutch on sale that many of us had been eyeing for a long time and, when I visited the site, I saw this:

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I grew up with the understanding that, on the night of the rehearsal dinner, the bride and groom present their parents with gifts of appreciation. I loved the idea and Mr. H and I really like the idea of honoring the people who raised us to be who we are today.We decided early on that we were going to get nice gifts for each of our parents, individually. One of the hardest people of the bunch is Pops H. Pops H has pretty much everything he could want and there are only so many books you can buy and/or affordable items for his latest hobby.

While my dad has never specifically talked about loving planes, whenever we are at any event and military planes fly by, he knows right off the bat what it is. So, I thought, why not get him a flying lesson?

Well, mainly because they are pricey, but mostly because I know he doesn’t have any intentions of taking multiple courses after the initial one and I wouldn’t want to see it go to waste. However, while I was searching online for flying lessons in the Dallas area, I hopped onto the Addison Airport site and came upon the Cavanaugh Flight Museum.
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Since I’m pretty sure none of my bridesmaids read WB, I wanted to share with you my first gift to them. I knew from the start that I wanted to give them some sort of a bag. My original thought was to create a tote with my Hydrangea logo and put “Bridesmaid Hydrangea” on each one. I still think this would have been cute, but then I saw these:

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Just wanted to give a little heads up to the local brides around here. There are a couple of good bridal events coming up in the next few weeks that you might be interested in!

1) D Magazine’s 4th Annual Bridal Show
When? Sunday, June 22, 2008 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where? Bass Hall in Ft. Worth
Cost? $15
Details? Join D Weddings and Bass Performance Hall for the fourth annual Bridal Show 2008, an extraordinary display of Dallas-Fort Worth’s bridal industry offerings. Plan your special day at this uniquely upscale event featuring an array of vendors, including wedding planners, caterers, florists, photographers, video services, music, and more. The show is spread throughout the beautiful Bass Performance Hall and its adjacent facility, Maddox-Muse Center, which houses both the Van Cliburn Recital Hall and McDavid Studio. Admission is $15. For more information, visit www.basshall.com or call 817-212-4280.
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Since we are planning to go out with a small group of friends after the reception, I would like to have a little clutch with me, for quick makeup fixes and to keep my id and a little cash in. I don’t use clutches very often, so I just want something small, satin and navy blue to match my shoes … oh yeah, and inexpensive.

When I googled “navy blue satin clutch” I came up with various links, but one that really caught my attention was La Regale. Immediately I found two simple, satin clutches that came in navy blue, but what blew me away more then anything were their prices.

So now, I need you all to help me decide between two, very similar clutches.

1) #24106 - Gathered Satin Clutch, 8″ x 4″ x 1.5″ in Navy for $22

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A little over a year ago, Mr. H and I were fortunate enough to be able to build our first home. We had been apartment dwellers for quite a while and, once we knew that we were going to get engaged and our leases were up, we decided to take the next step towards getting our own home.

Fast forward to a year after we move in. We have a home, a pup and a wedding to plan. All of our ideas for decorating the house, aside from a few essential purchases, flew out the window. The wedding is even starting to take over our house. Case in point: our dining room. No longer a dining room, it is now a workroom and a storage room. Boxes upon boxes of wedding items, table numbers strewn about, our work table filled with projects that are yet to be completed. Instead of a nice room to eat in, this is what people see when walking into our humble abode:

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Another one of my Memorial Day weekend trips was taken to Hobby Lobby. I love this store. It seems like every time I walk in there, whatever I’m looking for is 50% off. This trip was no different! I knew that I wanted to put about five picture frames on the guestbook table - two pics from my bridal portraits, and three from our engagement portraits.

Lo and behold, when I walked in and headed to the black pictures frames, they were 50% off! I chose 2 - 8×10s, 2 - 5×7s and 1 - 4×6 to put on the table. I believe I spent somewhere about $40 with tax for all five frames. Then, I took my cds of pics to the local Walmart and printed them out on the Kodak kiosk. $20 for all 5 photos, not too bad if I say so myself. In about 30 minutes I had all of the pics, headed home to trim them up and put them in their new frames.

Our big e-pic. Some people have complained because they don’t get why it’s so sunny and orange, but this is one of Mr. H and my favorite pics, so it was definitely in!
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For our OOT bags, I knew that I wanted to put in a couple of bottles of water with our logo on them. Since water doesn’t go bad, I figured I might as well get these knocked off my to do list. I decided to use Nestle bottles of water because the labels are the easiest to remove. I took off a label, measured it, and created a label with our monogram. I put about 6 labels on one sheet, then took them to Staples and had the labels printed on white paper that was waterproof (at $16 for 10 sheets, it was not cost efficient, so I probably wouldn’t chose this again in hindsight).

After cutting the labels, I ran 30 of them through the Xyron machine for an easy stick. We’re only expecting about 15 rooms for out of town guests, so I figured 30 bottles was a good start. It took me all of 20 minutes to unlabel and re-label the bottles. I made more labels than bottles of water, so if I need to get more water, it shouldn’t take long to recreate the end product. Here’s a little play by play:

A 30 pack of Nestle water, purchased from Sam’s Club for all of $4.

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This post is a little more TMI then I normally like to put on here, but I think it’s important to bring up because I know I’m not the only girl who has this problem. I’ve fought on and off with acne my entire life. Right when things start to clear up in one area, they pop up in another. Right around dress fitting time, this area happened to be my back.

I used to have this problem when I played tennis all the time and sweat up a storm, but never just because. While I would love to get “back-cials,” or facials for your back, it’s just not in my budget. When perusing the skincare section of my local Walmart (I refuse to spend tons on beauty products, except for shampoo and some makeup) I came across Neutrogena’s Body Clear Body Wash. Read more…

While we won’t be assigning each guest to a specific seat, we will be assigning guests to specific tables. Because Mr. H and I come from very different families and cultures, we didn’t want his side of the family on one side of the room and mine on the other. We are having a buffet/stationed dinner so assigning a specific seat wasn’t necessary (phew! I know that takes a lot of work)!

I decided that Memorial Day Weekend would also partly become my wedding prep weekend. I got quite a few tasks checked off my list, and the great sales around town definitely helped this. My first task was to make the table numbers. I designed the numbers in Illustrator. Because I think that we will be using 6″ stands, my original idea for 5×7 cards seemed too big, so I shortened them to 5×5. Then, I decided that I wanted them double sided, so I bought some black card stock to attach the numbers to.

After my design was complete, I took the document to Kinko’s because I wanted to be sure that the print quality was better then just my printer at home (plus I am running out of ink and was too lazy to buy a new cartridge). While the cards printed, I used their paper cutter to cut the black cardstock to 5.5×5.5 pieces.
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I keep on forgetting to blog about some of the details for the wedding, but luckily some of the members of the Hive are good at reminding me! A while back, I saw a post on the boards about For Your Party matchbooks from Weddingbee reader, Suzanno. She wanted to know if anyone had ordered from the company because she wasn’t 100% sold on the samples that she received.

I decided to use For Your Party to print our cocktail napkins and our matchbooks. I created two logos that incorporated our names (or initials) and the initial of our married name. I have tried to not use our married last name in any of the monograms, except for the reception items, when we are actually married. I went with black napkins with a white monogram and white napkins with a black monogram. I copied these for the matchbooks as well.

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I know that I talk about my photographer a lot on here, but I just can’t help it! When browsing through my Google Reader this morning, I saw that a recent wedding he photographed was on Style Me Pretty. What is so awesome about this wedding is how completely unique it is, from cowboy boots to feathers in the flowers, toy guns to chunky turquoise jewelry … Country Chic all the way.

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