Weddingbee Blog

Originally published on April 14, 2010

Mrs. Meerkat nominates Mrs. Pug’s post on what a wedding timeline looks like if you’re not including dancing in the day. It’s a great reference for brides who may not be getting married at night, or simply don’t want to include a dance floor at their wedding!

~~~
As I’m waiting to start my recaps, I just wanted to share a few things…

Chances are at some point you will create a day-of timeline for the wedding, which may expand into a larger timeline for the overall weekend, and include important information like important cellphone numbers that will be distributed to key people.

So not mine but isn’t this pretty?

But I’m talking about something more hardcore than the above, with minute timing and tons of details, like that of Mrs. Daffodil.
Read more…

If you read through my posts (which I am *so* sure you will do immediately after reading this post), you’ll see that I am the bottom of the barrel when it comes to being a wedding blogger. I am neither crafty nor DIY inclined, but worse yet, my posts don’t even have a ton of inspiration or research for you. Practically useless! However, the biggest kick I got out of blogging was being random and sharing some humor during the often hand-wringing process of wedding planning. While my earlier posts started on the straightforward and narrow, at some point I veered sharply into attempting to be funny and entertaining. Whether I succeeded is questionable, although I sure got a giggle out of the whole thing. Wow…where am I going with this. Anyway, this is one of my favorite posts because it’s perfectly random—it doesn’t share anything useful with readers, doesn’t reveal anything interesting about my wedding, but I love it anyway because I think I’m so damn funny.

~~~

Get it? Get it? Today I’m talking about trains!

Betcha thought this was about me getting a yummy pair of Jimmy Choos, huh? Well no. Although perhaps that would have been a way cooler post.*

Back to choo-choo. I didn’t think much about the train in purchasing a wedding dress, but then I found so many lovely photos you can get with a train. And guess what I realized? Your train can be pretty demanding. It refuses to be left out, and bulldozes its way into every phase of the wedding. Needy, needy train, about to bore down with frightening might and speed on your wedding.

The train getting ready, *without you*. I mean, the TRAIN has its own getting ready pic?

Source

[train speaking:] Bow to me. ’Nuff said. And someone get me a steamer. Bitches.

Read more…

Sigh.

[ahem]

Sigh.

Oh man I’m sad and I haven’t even really started this post.

So hive, now that I’m at the end of my Weddingbee journey, maybe you’d like to hear how I got here and what I think of this whole operation? Oh you do? Please read on. Oh you don’t? Meh.

How I found Weddingbee:

I was searching for NYC makeup artists long before it was necessary for me to even think of having a trial (like, summer of 2008 for my March 2010 wedding—before we, um, picked a California venue), and I came upon posts by Mrs. Peony and Mrs. Canary. When I clicked to see the next posts, it was a post from another character. What the…? I was confused and slightly ticked off.

It took a few times circling back to Weddingbee to figure out the site, but once as I did, I was absolutely hooked. I distinctly remember becoming a consistent reader in October 2008, and like many of you, pored over every bee and the archives to see what I had been missing!

Applying to Weddingbee:
Read more…

Before I wrap up my posts here, I had to mention the efforts of my sister during wedding planning and the day of. However, I don’t know what I can say about my sister that would begin to describe what she means to me, and her instrumental role in planning our wedding.

Perhaps you’ve heard me mention that she made the homemade goodies for our out-of-town bags, baked our wedding cake cookie towers, Goccoed her heart out on my behalf, that she and her husband took charge of the wedding paper goods, hosted the brunch the morning after the wedding…

… and maybe I didn’t mention that she:

• constantly encouraged and supported me
• kept me in check when I started to lose perspective
• opened her home for all wedding-related activities leading to the day of
• along with her husband, took in our two pugs for weeks while we were on our honeymoon
• baked challah, cinnamon rolls, jam and who knows what else for the wedding day breakfast
• made the lavender honey syrup for our cocktails

Read more…

My posts are coming to an end, but let’s face it, there was no way I was going to let you get away without seeing a some of the sizable share that our pugs had in our wedding photos…

Sometimes I wonder if my dad wishes I had been born as a pug instead of a girl

Read more…

Our vendors, continued…

Photographer

CK Hwang of 39 East Photography

I actually found 39 East Photography mentioned on the Weddingbee boards. CK is very talented and a pleasure to work with, both leading up to the wedding and on the day itself. It is important to hire a photographer whose work you respect, but also someone whose personality meshes with your own in order to make you comfortable on your wedding day. And CK was that person for us.

In terms of the quality of his work, you’ve seen the photos that I’ve posted. While many photographers are on the photojournalistic side of the fence these days, CK is truly that guy. His photos have a subtle, atmospheric quality to them that portrays the mood of the moment—they have a muted elegance to them that seems timeless to me. There are many styles out there and you just have to find something that works for you.

I think CK excels at capturing sentimental moments, and beautiful bride and groom photographs such as the ones below.
Read more…

Here’s my big list o’ vendors and details.

Bridal Attire and Appearance

Bridal Salon: Hannelore’s, Alexandria, Virginia

Hannelore’s has a wide selection of dresses and is a full-service bridal shop. My sales consultant Sally was very pleasant and patient, although overall the store felt a tad impersonal to me. Also, if you do buy your dress there and you do not have complicated alterations, I highly recommend going elsewhere for the alterations because Hannelore’s alteration fees are fairly outrageous. My dress was Marisa #775. Would anybody like to buy? I’m selling it.

39 East Photography

Read more…

An apology is in order. Amends must be made.

For most of our wedding planning, Mr. Pug and I only had one pug:

The chubber above made it into my blog posts, the main picture of our website, and even our engagement photos. See following evidence:
Read more…

So you’ve hired a photographer. Very important. But what about all those other pictures that guests have taken? What if they captured moments that the photographer did not? One, or even two professional photographers cannot be everywhere. To try and collect all the photos from our hoarding guests, I used a shared online photo site like many other savvy brides.

I created a Flickr account just for the wedding, and paid the $25 or so to upgrade the account so you can have unlimited space (this was after one of our guests uploaded high resolution files that took up a good portion of our memory). I then sent out the following email to guests a few weeks after the wedding:

We are back from the honeymoon, all rested and wishing for about 5 more months of vacation. We can dream, can’t we? Thank you all for your love and friendship during the wedding weekend and beyond, we had an incredibly wonderful time celebrating with all of you.

While hopefully we deluged you with enough drink and food to keep you well occupied during the wedding, if there are any pictures you took that you would be willing to share, we have created a Flickr account for you to upload your photos. To upload your photos:
Read more…

I asked Sister Pug to give a behind-the-scenes detailed look at the creation of our wedding cake cookie towers (WCCT), which served as our escort card favors.

*******************

After extensive taste-testing (mostly by Mr. Pug), we decided upon the lime sugar and lavender sugar cookies. But I wasn’t going to just start kickin’ out WCCTs without some extensive preliminary calculations. Based on the size of the cellophane bags I was provided (read: one of the hundreds of boxes that just appeared on my doorstep, courtesy of some furious internet shopping by the Pug), I calculated the size of the cookies that would fit in the bag, and decided to do a mockup.

Then I figured that if I was going to go through the effort of doing a mockup, I may as well do it as accurately as possible, because can you imagine if at the end of all that they didn’t f’in fit in the bags. So I ‘made’ some out of cardboard and wrapped them in paper to make them more cookie-like.

Read more…

There’s a fuzzy line between joyously, tastefully celebrating yourselves as a couple at a wedding vs. unwarranted ego-centric narcissism.

For some reason, I thought of this guy

And on which side falls a guestbook that is comprised solely of engagement photos of you and your loved one? Well, because this is what we did, I’m saying that it absolutely falls on the side of justified and tasteful.

Remember our Halloween-themed engagement photos? I decided to put those bad boys to use by making an album of them for guests to sign. So, it was totally like a regular guestbook, except plastered with pictures of me and Mr. Pug.

The two popular places from which you can order your photobook are MyPublisher and Blurb.
Read more…

Oh, you thought maybe I was done talking about our wedding? That’s very funny.

Our florist was Orna Maymon from Ornamento, and she did a fabulous job. Orna is not exactly a budget florist, but extremely talented and very familiar with our venue. Also, since we weren’t having that many flowers, I thought it was worthwhile to splurge a little on the whittled-down list we did have, which included:

• 3 Cocktail hour table arrangements
• 6 Reception table centerpieces

Yep, that was it! But then…

After we changed our minds and decided to have a ceremony, I thought it would be nice to have some flowers for decoration. I called Orna with what I thought was a sufficient amount to procure two ceremony altar pieces plus aisle decor to boot. In response, she told me that my proposed amount would cover *one* arrangement. Er?
Read more…

The wedding reception ended, but we were lucky to have spent much more time with our guests than that during the course of the weekend. Because we wanted to spend as much time as possible with our 46 guests, we scheduled other weekend events that helped us relax and celebrate with everyone:

• Ladies’ Spa Time
• Welcome Event
• Wedding Day Getting Ready
• After-Dinner Drinks in Bridal Suite
• Farewell Brunch

Ladies’ Spa Time

On the Friday before the wedding, there was some downtime between the rehearsal and Welcome Event, which I planned to use by heading straight to the spa. I also thought it would be a nice opportunity to have a little “girl time” before all the formal wedding events started. So a few days before the wedding, I emailed the female guests with the following:
Read more…

So, guests found their tables. And hopefully they looked at their menus. What were they waiting for? Us! I don’t remember what happened because we had not planned on doing a “grand” entrance, but we had one anyway.

We were introduced by none other than my brother in law, who did a fabulous fabulous job as the emcee for the evening…

Read more…

When guests found their way to their tables, they would have found their menus at each place setting. I think there’s something kind of exciting about opening up a restaurant menu and perusing the delicious choices. We wanted the dinner reception to feel like a real treat for the guests, so menus were a must.

To create the menus, I got myself some wedding elves (i.e. my sister and her husband). Then, I purchased metallic sage 5 x 5 cardstock from Paper Presentation. My sister Goccoed our infamous artichoke image on the cardstock, and then inkjet printed menu text that I had created in Word.

My brother in law rounded the corners and meticulously spray glued each menu onto another, slightly larger (5.75 x 5.75) piece of cardstock, in Caramel Metallic.

Final product:

Personal photo

Read more…