Weddingbee Blog

Miss Kiwi was just looking for a good sash for her flower girl, so I was poking around online and came across the most gorgeous hand dyed silk ribbon at MJ Trim! I am sooo in love, and I’m not even a ribbon girl! Here are a few of my favorite color combos (they come in 5/8th inch, 1 inch, 1.5 inch, and 2.5 inch widths).

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I just got this forwarded to me. Sounds like a fun show, and a great opportunity for an NYC area planner!

Well Connected Wedding Planner Needed For New Cable Network Series!

Casting RIGHT AWAY:

Female wedding planner - that is established and well connected, to co-star in a new series featuring a single/successful woman and her quest to find the right guy and get married!
You would be on every episode and be a major player in this show. An AMAZING way to highlight your talents and promote your business!

**You MUST be based in the greater NYC area. Read more…

This weekend, shortly before Mr. Bluebell’s card got put on a temporary hold due to the “suspicious activity”of…buying lots of wedding stuff, I decided to finally suck it up and get my makeup done professionally so I could buy tons of crap and try to learn how to apply it myself. I am not usually a makeup person, so I made my friendly MAC counter Bloomingdale’s employee explain everything to me. I’m betting he got a wee bit annoyed. Although he was probably salivating as I confessed that I don’t own any good brushes or…anything else, yet. So now, way way way much more money than I was hoping to spend later (um, than Mr. Bluebell was hoping to spend ), I own a ton of MAC products!

I didn’t buy quite all of them because I figured I can buy my own frickin’ face lotion and I honestly have never suffered for lack of eyebrow wax in the past…but here’s my basic wedding look!

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Okay, now that we have received reply cards back for a total of 17 confirmed guests at our wedding (score!), I think it’s safe to assume everyone has at least received their invites, which means it’s picture time!!!

Haha just one teaser pic until you read my review! [um, or scroll down...hehe]

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There was a post on Gothamist yesterday about the NY Sun’s article on how bachelorette parties have turned so extravagant that friends have to pitch in hundreds or thousands of dollars to fly to a destination party, stay at a hotel, buy expensive dinners/spa treatments, etc. I’m sure that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of us, but the tone of the article was one of distinct resentment (I thought). Of course we all, as brides, try our best not to force the bridesmaids buy the $600 dress, and try to accommodate close friends and family with difficult financial situations, but it can still hurt to hear that someone can’t/won’t/isn’t willing to come to your bachelorette or even your wedding… regardless of how valid their reason is. It always feels like if they really wanted to, couldn’t they find some way to make it work?

That said… I’m also sure that many of us have also been in the opposite position. How much does it suck when you really do want to do something but can’t afford it/get time off work/whatever? Do you resent the bride for implicitly making you feel guilty, even if she’s nice and seemingly understanding about it?

Poll time! [assume that the bride and/or groom in question is a very close friend or family member]

Yick, I hate that money is ever an issue for anything, but it unfortunately is. How are you handling relative wealth disparities between you and your bridal party/family? Have you ever given or received money to be able to attend a wedding event?

Now that we have gotten not one, but TWO actual wedding gifts in the mail, our internal wedding sphere seems to have been expanded out into the public at large! This isn’t just something we talk about…it’s a real live event that other people (who aren’t vendors) are actually involved in! Whoa.

That said, as I was gushing over our new Cuisinart PowerPrep Plus 11-Cup Food Processor to Miss Kiwi…

…she gasped in horror that I was able to discuss in such detail its incredible awesomeness, since it’s before the wedding!

Eeeek.

Are you not supposed to use wedding gifts before the wedding?? For some reason that never even occurred to me! Since I had heard in passing that you’re supposed to send thank you notes for gifts received before the wedding within 2 weeks of receipt (even if that’s still before the wedding), I guess I just internalized the idea of “if you get presents early, you open them” and then added on a little “and if you have opened presents lying around you get to use them” bit myself.

That said, what are your thoughts on what you can or cannot use before the wedding?

A few weeks ago I found out that Mr. Bluebell’s brother (who’s in high school) has a facebook account. (Not so surprising, eh?) So I figured I should invite him to be my friend the next time I was on facebook, since I am very very rarely on there. I asked him the other day and today I finally got around to checking and he accepted! So that was nice, but not the point of my post. The point is that he also filled out the little “how you know each other” option and he chose “family”!!

I cannot tell you how much that made my day! I just love thinking how all his friends will be scrolling along and see me and think “who’s that girl?” and then say “oh, she’s in his family!” Haha okay yes, I am a loser, but it just warmed my heart soooo much knowing that this high school kid really considers me a part of his family. High school boys don’t tend to be the mushiest people out there, so it really got me choked up.

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Lots of my coworkers have babies since I work at a relatively young company, so I have always enjoyed the occasional baby pictures and stories. But now the new girl in my department has a baby, so every time I walk by her desk I see her smiling baby face wallpaper, and every time we have an awkward silence it’s…”so what did your baby do that was cute last night?”

I may sound like I’m complaining of too much Baby in my life… but not for the reason you might think. The truth is, I loooove the baby pictures and stories, and go out of my way to ask the QA guy who I rarely lay eyes on to pleeease show me those new videos of his toddler! So the only reason this new infiltration of Baby is bad for me is because we were solidly in the “wait several years” camp (and Mr. Bluebell still is! Ha!) so this is just making my brain go “baaaabiiiiiiiies!!!!!” all the time and not actually think real thoughts. Yeeeah. So we’re still planning to wait a good couple years, but maaan baby-vibes, leave me alone!!

So, after all the thinking I did about envelope decisions, I went out last week and bought a calligraphy pen! My local Eckerds only had one type - the Sheaffer’s mini Calligraphy Classic kit - so I just bought that. I found that I like the skinniest nib best, and wrote a bunch of names of people we’re inviting on a piece of paper. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

And then since I didn’t want to post a list of our friends’ and family’s full names, I wrote this for you guys!

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In Part I, I talked about all those pesky little issues you have to worry about for envelopes, which you’d think would be pretty straightforward.

But there are so many types and choices to make!!

(from Baddeley Brothers )

So let’s hear what you all are doing envelope-wise!

Yikes - another long post! Hopefully this will be informative though! Please leave comments with any unique decisions you made, or why you decided to go the route you did!

Reading everyone’s suggestions in yesterday’s beehive for what Joyful should do (does she have to invite all of her large church ceremony guests to what she was hoping would be an intimate reception?), it sounded to me like the most popular recommendation that made the most sense was to have two separate receptions. First, a large cake and punch reception, perhaps at the church, to which all guests will be invited, and then a smaller dinner reception afterwards for close friends and family. That sounded like a really logical solution to her particular situation, so I was wondering how many people have two different receptions. And then I realized, hey, I’m essentially doing that too!!

We’re having the wedding ceremony way upstate, immediately followed by a reception for all the wedding guests. But then a month later, in New York City (where we live, as well as most of our friends and Mr. Bluebell’s family) we’ll have a Chinese banquet to which we’ll invite all the wedding guests again, plus a lot of additional people we would have loved to have at the ceremony but couldn’t due to space limitations upstate.

This type of situation seems fairly common these days, plus a lot of people seem to be having a second reception back home after tying the knot at a destination wedding.

How did you decide to have more than one reception? Who’s paying for the extra ones if you’re having more than one?

Just a few short hours ago, we gave the official word for our invites to be printed!! I couldn’t be more ecstatic with how the design came out!! Sorry you guys will have to wait until after we mail them for pics, though.

But this new stage of wedding prep, like alllll the other stages, comes with new questions to ponder. So today I’ve spent much of the day thinking about… envelopes.

<from www.bagnboxman.co.uk>

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In honor of Venue Week, I thought we should get to know more about everyone’s venues - not just the bees’! So everyone pitch in and tell us a bit about where you’re getting married and how you decided!

Please tell us a bit more about where you’re getting married, and how you came to that decision!

At first when I heard the theme for this week was venues, I thought I wouldn’t have anything to contribute because we’re getting married at my family’s summer home, so reviewing the capacity and price etc. really wouldn’t be of any use to anyone else. But then when I thought about it more, I realized I had gone into the planning with a very different picture of how all the details would work out, than it actually ended up. So here’s my advice for anyone trying to plan a wedding for their own backyard, grandparents’ house, out in the woods - or wherever!

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Wish the Bluebells luck, guys, we have back to back vendor meetings from 10:30 to 5:00 tomorrow! That’s practically an entire workday!!! And it’s an hour and a half away from where we’ll be staying, so that really will end up being about as long as I’m usually away from home during the week. Sigh. But I can’t complain too much! Because we’re….

1) Getting free brunch from our caterer (yes I know we’re giving them a WHOOOLE lot more money than a brunch costs, but it’s a nice gesture nonetheless!) while we discuss all the food stuff & linens

2) Eating lots and lots of cake at the baker to choose which one we want. Soooo not complaining about this part. And choosing a design too!

3) Hanging out at what is supposedly “The Best Coffee Shop In The Country” with our florist to work on flower details.

There’s actually a wee break between 2 and 3, but it’s not like we’ll want to go relax in a cafe during that time. Hehe. But we are hoping to try and find a dress for my mom during the interval (or at least figure out what type of dress she wants) so that should be fun too! Wish us luck!!!

Next week: Updates on my crazy weekend…plus my first dress fitting!!!