Weddingbee

On another site I was visiting today (shoutout to Pricescope!), a bunch of brides were discussing what their wedding “dealbreakers” are. As in, I couldn’t care less what the cake looks like, but I HAVE to have the perfect dress, or whatever matters most to you.

My only real dealbreaker was having the wedding at my family’s summer house upstate. There is just no way I would agree to plan aaaaany sort of wedding, no matter how gorgeous, that did not result in our getting married there. I still don’t have a caterer, a photographer, an officiant…but I know where I’m getting married!!!

Other things I feel strongly about are the dress, the invitations…the atmosphere, but I could ultimately be happy within a (smallish) range of variations for each of those. Things like the cake, the music, the menu…I want them to be GOOD but, you know, I’m not going to flip out if we can’t go with A so we end up with B for whatever reason.

Do you have any drop-dead dealbreakers for your wedding? If you couldn’t get it, would you postpone a year, or have it on a weekday, or otherwise smoosh things around for it? What are your general priorities of what you want the most, vs. what you don’t care about so much?

Sorry I’ve been too busy to post much lately, but we FINALLY put our save the dates in the mail last Monday, and “we received them!”s have been slowly trickling in!!! It is seriously the most exciting thing EVER! I’m pretty sure I will physically explode when we get RSVPs for our actual invitations next year, because I’m already pretty close!!

The reason we kept our finished save the dates all addressed and stamped sitting in a bag on the floor for…um…nearly three weeks…is that we linked to our wedding website on the save the date and had the sudden revelation that the site just wasn’t “fun” enough! So we decided to fix it up, add pictures and stories, and not send out the save the dates until the website was ready, since we guessed most people would look at it once when they got the save the date, and then not again until they needed real practical details around wedding time.

How much energy are you putting into your wedding website (if you’re having one)? Do you think people (who aren’t wedding obsessed ) really spend time looking at them??

But onto what you’re actually here for…..the Save The Dates! We DIY’ed the entire thing, from all the text to stamping, cutting, gluing, hole punching, and tying, so (un)fortunately for you, there are lots of in-progress photos to scroll through before you get to see the finished product!

First, we (well, I) stamped this lovely double happiness (from paper-source) in red Color Box ink directly on the center of each front card.
Note how bored our cat looks with this process.

Read more…

A little update on my deciding on a caterer trauma!

Basically, I tried calling A (who catered my brother’s wedding) for the first time a week or two ago and we kept playing phone tag, but finally talked yesterday! I just really like him and we had a very encouraging talk. I’m feeling very good about everything with him, so I think there is a very good chance we’ll just choose him in the end!

As I explained to him, it isn’t that anyone else is doing anything wrong, but just that I feel like I would always be worried about them, whereas I know A will be able to pull it off in the end since I saw how wonderfully it turned out at my brother’s wedding. So, for example, if I were to call K and leave her a message a few weeks before the wedding and not hear from her in a week or two, I would COMPLETELY FLIP OUT, but if A did the exact same thing… I’d figure he was busy and just give him another call.

I realize (& Mr. Bluebell is very fond of reminding me) that this is 100% my own psychological issue, but at this point I have just been toooooo stressed about this decision (with almost a year to the wedding, so I’m sure it’ll only get worse!!). I think I’d rather just go for A to have some peace of mind.

I feel a little silly since a) there really is absolutely nothing wrong with K other than our non-meshing communication styles, and I loved all her ideas, and she’s a bit cheaper, and b) I really did want it to be completely different from my brother’s wedding which is why it took me so long to call A in the first place. But A assures me he can create a totally different menu and style (although they may use some of the same serving dishes…but they were pretty! It’s all good!), and at this point all I keep repeating to myself is “PEACE OF MIND”!!!

How much of a role does the concept of peace of mind play in your wedding planning? Do you find yourself flipping out over things that you know are really quite irrational, but you just can’t quite shake that, you know, disconcerting vibe?

Through the powers of Google’s targeted advertising in Gmail, I was informed of Green Karat. Out of curiosity at their one sentence blip, (”Eco Wedding Rings - http://www.greenkarat.com/ - Treading Lightly on the Earth - A Natural for Green Weddings”) I decided to take a look!

I must say I was quite impressed with what I saw. The premise behind the site is that recycling gold is far more ecologically sound that mining new gold (and that there is plenty of out-of-circulation gold for this to be feasible). So all their jewelry is made from recycled gold, and also does not contain any mined diamonds.

More importantly ;)…the jewelry is gorgeous! Here are a few of my favorites - go check them out! They also seem to be very reasonably priced.

After months of obsessing, two sets of printing, infinite outings for additional supplies, hours of manual labor and the resulting wrenching shoulder pain…OUR SAVE THE DATES ARE DONE!

They are, as you can probably guess, completely DIY. I was conflicted foreeeverrrr on exactly how much information we should put in them since all our guests will be travelling from afar and we are offering many of them lodging for free in family houses, but don’t want people who don’t get offered lodging to be offended, etc.

But now they’re done! We just have to get a few more addresses, weigh the final product to make sure it’s not over $0.39 (pleeeeeeease, please don’t be!!!), and drop them in the mail. I took a bunch of in-progress pics, so I’ll post those (& the final product) in a week or so when I can assume most of our guests will have received them! Yay!

Now we just need to actually… plan the wedding!!!

I just found out about Weather.com’s cool wedding weather tracking feature!

Just go here - and enter in your wedding date, and it tells you the average temperatures/weather for that date in history, as well as very specific details for the past 3 years! Plus the exact time the sun will set, cloud coverage estimates, and all sorts of other fun statistics.

My date’s looking good so far…keeping my fingers crossed!

My best friend and maid of honor just got engaged last night! I’m so excited for her and just wanted to share. Are you guys like me where you really get just about as excited when someone ELSE gets engaged? I’ve been bouncing off the walls all day and telling random coworkers who have never met her “my best friend just got engaged!” And now, look at me, telling the internet at large about it. Just can’t help it! Yay Maid O’ Bluebell! Congratulations!!!

We are having a fairly informal buffet at my family’s summer house, so one easy-to-cut-corner we thought we had was serving the alcohol ourselves. Not in the sense that Mr. Bluebell and I will be back behind the bar mixing drinks ;), but rather that we would only have beer and wine (and maybe a signature cocktail?).

Anyway, couldn’t our guests just pour their own glasses of wine? I understand that at a more formal occasion this would hinder the general atmosphere, but at a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house for example, no one is really put out by having to look through the ice for which brand of beer they want, are they?

At my brother’s wedding (because, yes, everything will always be compared to that), they had servers pouring the beer and wine and I guess it was nice, but mainly because they could give you advice on which wine you might like better. So it’s a pleasant addition, but not necessary for the style of wedding we’re hoping to have. It seems a little silly to pay servers X amount extra to perform a simple task that guests could easily do on their own. That said, one of our two main caterer options (no, we still haven’t picked one!!!), requires that they provide/serve alcohol for you, so we would have to pay that cost there.

I realize I’m just rambling a bit at this point, but this is yet another one of those issues I keep going back and forth and back and forth over!

I hope that covers most of the options! Please let us know how you decided what to do, as well, and how much the style of your wedding affected your decision.

One very difficult decision I had to make with regard to my wedding, was exactly what to do for the wedding party. I have one “best friend” who seemed the clear Maid of Honor choice (plus, I’d sworn to her a thousand times she’d be my MOH ), but then all my other friends are sort of in groups. As in, if I make X a bridesmaid, I absolutely HAVE TO make Y and Z bridesmaids. But if all three of them are, I can’t really exclude W….etc. So I would have ended up with…maybe 10 bridesmaids? And several of them I’m not even as close to anymore, they’re just part of “the group.” Mr. Bluebell has a similarly group-y bunch of friends, and since our wedding is going to be fairly small and informal, there was noooooooooooo way we were going to have 20 people in the wedding party!

In the end, we realized the only way to do this without hurting a lot of feelings was just to have one Maid of Honor and one Best Man - and nothing else. We liked this idea, but…well…I still love my other friends. I was a bridesmaid for one of them this summer, and I hope others might make me bridesmaids when they get married. So I really wanted to reciprocate not in terms of a fair trade, but just because I wanted them to know how special they are to me and how much I love them. It didn’t seem fair that just because of the nature of the wedding, they couldn’t be bridesmaids so they got stuck in the same ranks as all my cousins. (Love my cousins, but you know what I mean!)

So after a lot of hemming and hawing and message-board-posting, I have invented (sort of) a new title for my special-people-who-would-otherwise-have-been-bridesmaids. They are now my Honorary Bridesmaids, or, as I like to refer to them (honorary) bridesmaids. I will consider them bridesmaids emotionally, but they won’t have to buy a dress. My current thought is to give them a color and tell them they can all choose to wear outfits of their choice in that color so they look a bit like a group (if they want to), and then I’ll give them each a corsage or something to signify their special-ness. They’ll also be listed in the program even though they won’t technically participate in the ceremony.

What do you all think of this idea? Is anyone else doing something a bit untraditional regarding their wedding party? Can you think of any other ways I can involve my (honorary) bridesmaids?

I saw this article on MSN linked on Pricescope and was curious what you guys thought! The conclusion of a new study, commissioned by Oxygen, found that most women would choose new technology devices over diamonds or shoes.

I’m a little confused by the article though, since it seems to be discussing two fairly unrelated issues as far as I’m concerned. The first is whether women are as technologically savvy as men (pretty much!!), and the second is a series of choices between tech purchases or luxury items. Without a comparison of whether men would prefer a digital video camera or a fishing vacation (for example) to go alongside the stereotypically “female” ideal gifts, the study seems a bit pointless to me. Even the “comfort with technology” portion of the survey doesn’t have male numbers to compare it to! I just wonder how much this has to do with gender differences and how much it has to do with a basic practical vs. luxury conflict within a given person. The clear implication (to me at least) of the article is that men are more practical and women want more frivolous things - but they don’t give us anything to back that up!

That said, I’d totally take the diamonds.

What do you think of the article? How much truth do you think the practical men vs. frivolous women stereotype has behind it?