Weddingbee Blog

Now that our wedding is less than three weeks away, looking at the weather has become a bit of an obsession. I know they never give real predictions further than 10 days out, but I can’t help it. I’m obsessed.

I remember talking to Mrs. Sunhat (who lives in Indiana, not too far from me) a couple days before her wedding and lamenting that she wouldn’t have the snow she desired. I want snow for our wedding, but I’m trying to be realistic. In this weird Chicago winter, I really can’t be sure of anything.

I happened to go to weather.com and look at their 10 day forecast, and their forecast finally included February!! February 1st was on the forecast.

I don’t know about snow, but I now have an obsession with how each day’s weather lines up with the average weather for that day. I guess I feel like doing all this pointless analyzing will give me a firmer idea of what kind of weather I can expect.
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When we last met, my wedding dress and I weren’t agreeing. Things have improved since then. My second dress fitting made me feel like slightly less than a fat ass. Slightly.

It didn’t take two women to zip up my dress. I could breathe in my dress. I didn’t get bruised ribs!

But the dress was still too tight. The seamstress thinks that if I lose another 1-3 pounds, I should be fine. Seeing as how I didn’t get back into exercising like I should have, I could probably squeeze in 1-3 yoga sessions and accomplish the goal the seamstress set for me.

It’s such a relief to know that I may get into the wedding dress without any alterations. They’re steaming the dress, and I’ll pick it up next week.

To celebrate a dress that finally fit, I went shopping. I bought a great hat for the honeymoon and a beautiful hair flower/fascinator for the wedding reception. I’ve always wondered about the difference between a fascinator and a hair flower. Is it the feathers that make it a fascinator?

Well, what I purchased has feathers, a tulle, and a flower. It will be perfect for my hair for the reception when I take the veil off. Speaking of veils, my lovely wonderful Etsy shop of choice, Joyous Illusions, and the angel behind it is currently working on my veil!
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My final dress fitting has happened and once I order my veil, every part of my wedding ensemble will be in place. I can’t wait to tell you how the fitting went. After that, I will share the entire outfit.

But first, I have to tell a tale of woe. A story about a petite girl who ordered a dress and then feared that dress would be too big.

That girl is me. When I first picked out my wedding dress, the sample size was a ten. That dress swallowed me up. They took my measurements and found I was a 6-6-8. You know, size-six boobs, size-six waist, size-eight hips.

After the initial shock of feeling extra huge because wedding sizes run extra small, Momma Kettle and I decided on the size six. The dress had an A-line ball gown skirt, so we’d rather fit the boobs than the hips in this case.

I worried about the dress fitting too loosely. The top has 3D flowers all over it and wouldn’t be easy to alter. I didn’t want to risk ending up having to fidget with dress all night long or having a saggy tube-top dress. If you’ve ever had a saggy tube top, you feel my pain.

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Mr. Kettle wants us to write our own vows; I don’t. We’re like the opposite of Miss Doily. Mr. Doily didn’t want to write their own but she did.

Mr. Kettle is the king of compromise and taught me an awful lot about the beauty of compromising. My main issue with the vows is that I’ve felt a bit on display with all the pre-wedding events. I know, I know. I’m a bride. And with a large wedding, I will definitely be on display. But I just didn’t want to have to write those vows to him and have to feel like every one was watching and listening, and yes, maybe judging.

Hive, I know this is probably a ridiculous feeling, since everyone there is there to support the start of our marriage, but I just couldn’t get past it. But Mr. Kettle really really wanted us to write our own vows.

So we came to a compromise.
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Daddy Kettle isn’t a dancer. He doesn’t seem to enjoy dancing very much.

Image via

Okay, Daddy Kettle isn’t quite that bad. He can dance. I know this for a fact because we danced at my cotillion when I was a debutante. He just doesn’t do it often.

For our wedding, I expect things will be even better. It’s not a church event, so Daddy Kettle will probably have had at least a beer or two and will be more relaxed. Also, my dress is tea length and we won’t have to do special maneuvers to avoid tripping and falling over a dress that’s too long.

There’s only one problem: we haven’t picked a song yet. I’ve asked him at least three times. The first two times, he didn’t even respond. Literally nothing. No looks, no words, no nothing.
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Our wedding is less than a month away now. Yikes!! It’s so exciting and so nerve-wracking all at once. I’m so excited to marry Mr. Kettle and I can’t wait for our wedding day. But on the other hand, there are a million and one things left to do that I likely don’t have the man hours to complete.

There are big things that happen around the 30-day-out mark that any bride should be aware of. These things were not on any of my checklists!

1) Make final payments to vendors. Unless your vendors are magical elves who will take a credit card payment over the phone or internet, you’ll need to schedule time to make these payments. Between Momma Kettle, Daddy Kettle, and myself, we’ve been running around the Chicago/Joliet area like chickens with our heads cut off delivering certified checks to all our different vendors.

2) Confirm all details on all contracts. Again, unless your vendors are magical elves who have Ivy League or Oxford proofreading skills, check your contracts. There were errors we caught in contracts from our florist, our venue, and our photographer. They were small fixes, but they were details that were important to the vision of the wedding.
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Hi hive. I know I’ve been missing for a while…twenty days to be exact. I’m sorry about that. Really, truly, I will do better. But the holidays were a rough time. I can’t even remember the last time I uploaded the pictures from my camera into my computer. I’ve been keeping up with your activities, commenting here and there as I found a lone free minute at work.

I’ve been up to a lot. I finished the ring bearer pillows (finally). I finished purchasing the gifts for the bridesmaids, and picked out the gifts for the men. We started getting RSVPs back in (and only one family said no, yikes!!). There’s been a lot.

But this post isn’t about any of that. As the title says, it’s about favors. Our favors had to fulfill a number of purposes. 1) They had to fit our theme. 2) They had to fit our color scheme. 3) They had to do double duty because we weren’t having place cards on some table at the entrance to the dining hall. 4) They had to be pretty and/or shiny.

That being said, there was really only one option:
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Our wedding invitations are done!! They were mailed out last week, and I’m quite certain everyone has received them. Well, everyone except my cousin who live in Mexico. Hers was returned to my parents’ house.

There were some hiccups on the way to getting these invitations all done and ready to be sent out, but this is a celebration, so we’re going to focus on the positive. A group effort between me, Momma Kettle, Daddy Kettle, and a couple family friends got the job done.

The invitations were designed by an amazing photographer/graphic designer who’s dating one of Mr. Kettle’s friends. She did amazing work and I’m super excited about how they turned out. They perfectly fit our vision of the wedding of being a quirky twist on a classic. So enough talking; on to the pictures and captions!

Personal Image: I took this without the flash, so you could see the more ivory cream color of the outer envelope

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Hive, I’ve been a tease. I talked about all these DIY projects I had coming up, and then I immediately started talking about everything else but that.

While I did have my bridal shower this past weekend, I will give you at least one DIY post before I get to re-capping that loveliness. If my title wasn’t obvious enough (everyone hasn’t seen Despicable Me, although they should!), this screenshot should help.

Image via Hello Again Girls / Screenshot from Despicable Me

What’s fluffy, but not a stuffed animal? A pillow of course! For my first DIY project I’ve (mostly) finished, I made the ring bearer pillows. Okay, okay, so I’ve only made one so far, but I wanted to share it. And the other will be identical, so there will be nothing new there.
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No dancing on table tops or maxing out credit cards, but I’m sure at least one person woke up wondering if they had a hickey or a bruise. This post is all about partying without having a truly good reason to do so.

The one benefit of having such a large wedding party that’s comprised of people I spend a ton of time with already is all the extra hanging out that takes on a wedding theme. We already have five official wedding-related events, but this post is about the unofficial events. We had a bridezilla pizza party, we’re coming up on part two of our three part makeup-for-the-chicks party. And last Friday night, we had a signature drink party.

Purple Signature Drink Image by Wedding by Color

Our venue has a number of drink packages to choose from for the reception. The one we went with includes a signature drink. They had several options we could choose from or we could develop our own. Mr. Kettle and I quickly decided to develop our own.
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I’ve gotten a lot of great ideas from Weddingbee over the months. I know it’s my job to put out inspiration and give the details of my plans for others to read, but I’ve gotten as much out of it as I’ve put in.

I decided to put in a sampling of some of my favorite posts that have given me some amazing ideas for our  wedding, for posts, or hell, just for everyday life. These are my top 9. I guess I could have found one more, but I figured I’d just stick with the ones I’ve been saving up for months now. If you’re new to the hive, I suggest you read these. They may give you inspiration anew!

Mrs. Hyena’s idea to put the garter on the football was genius. We have a ton of young un-married people coming to our wedding (at least 50 on the guest list). I am looking forward to the garter and bouquet tosses. But most weddings I’ve been to feature reluctant catchers. If he puts my garter on a football, the guys may actually want to catch it. Plus, it’s a great reminder of the day we moved into together and an inside joke  amongst all our friends that our football belongs to me and not Mr. Kettle.

Mrs. Macarons idea to use Nailtiques for nail growth changed my life.
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Alternate post title: He went to Jared! Again!

I love my engagement ring, and I’ve never regretted the choice for such a unique ring. There’s only one issue: I want to wear my engagement ring and wedding band on the same finger, and I didn’t want a gap between the rings.

Ms. Fox wrote a post that perfectly describes my problem. And to show my version of these issues, some ring porn.

Personal image: My ring hanging out with my new natural long nails!

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Hive, I’ve talked about my honeymoon way waaay more than I ever intended. It’s like a bar joke that won’t ever die. “Two newlyweds walk into a bar on their honeymoon…” Or, you know, something more clever and memorable than that.

I have good news to share and then I won’t speak of the honeymoon again until recaps. Our honeymoon is booked! Woot!

It’s not at all the honeymoon I imagined and wrote about before. There were just too many obstacles in our way. Mr. Kettle has taught me so much about compromise since we’ve been together and that really came in handy when we were sorting out the details of our honeymoon.

To refresh your memory: I saw our honeymoon as a wonderful holiday triple threat. We were going to do Carnival, Valentine’s Day, and Mardi Gras. We were going to Panama and New Orleans and it was going to be wonderful.

The price ended up being more than I expected, so we waited to reassess our funds before we booked.
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After breathing a huge sigh of relief that all the big decisions were made for the wedding, I realized I still had a ton to do. But I felt good about this, y’all. I had a lot o’ DIY projects to get started on. I had checked a good number of things off my huge list, but nothing from that first column: the DIY column.

Personal image: Checking more off each day, but I’ve got to do better on that first column!

My DIY projects are numerous. And there are less than 75 days to our wedding. But I think we can do it! I started with my idea for table numbers.
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I’ve mentioned once or twice how large our wedding party is. Part of the reason it’s so large is that we’re counting everyone, including our two officiants. They are two men who each like a member of either mine or Mr. Kettle’s family. They are our pastors.

They both do pre-marital counseling for couples they marry. Mr. Kettle and I couldn’t decide which one we wanted to do our counseling, so we committed to doing it with both. Now, we didn’t think about how busy our schedules are. It’s been a very long time since we made that commitment, and we are just now going to our counseling sessions.

There are some similarities between the two sessions. We left each one feeling pretty good about our plan to get married. There isn’t much that was brought up (at least so far) that we haven’t already discussed in detail.

Also, Mr. Kettle and I are pretty well matched in a couple ways. For one, we’re both apparently teenagers when it comes to certain subjects. You know what I mean. We took a look at our counseling workbook, saw the word sex, and broke into giggles.
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