Weddingbee Blog

Find all those dress disaster pictures you’ve chosen to ‘untag’ in Facebook, and upload them to the Amsale website for a chance to win a $2,500 shopping spree at the flagship store in New York! I know I have pictures from back in the day that I plan to sift through tonight. Good luck!

Mr P and I engaged in a think tank session this past weekend, brainstorming ideas for our invitations. How it works: I compile boatloads of pictures from the internet, and shove them in his face. He likes it. He’d rather me whittle down the choices to a select few, and contribute his two cents at the end.

All of the imagery below, I pulled from Flickr. The Flickr community never fails to impress. Using ‘wedding invitation yellow’ as my search criterion, I was presented with hundreds of ideas at my fingertips. And with one click of the mouse, I started hopping from one gallery to the next. Here are certain elements we hope to incorporate in our homemade invitations. I’m very much a visual person, so I add some color to each image to gain a better sense of the concept with our colors included.

I’m a huge fan of the graphite/yellow combination. Although slightly straying from the Save the Date colors (black/yellow on white cardstock, and teal envelopes), it’s close enough. We’re considering using graphite colored envelopes with yellow/white polka dot liners. I attribute my polka dot obsession to the Melissa Sweet Dora dress (Swiss dot organza). When considering that dress, too many polka dot ideas flooded the brain, many of which, I still think about.

image source

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What to do, what to do.  I’ve been in two weddings and had my makeup done for each.  I have the crease-less Asian eyes with microscopic eyelashes.  What throws some makeup people off is the downward slope of my eyes when I smile.  They usually apply heavy eyeshadow toward the outer edges to achieve the upward illusion.  In most cases, it’s a tough sell for me because I come out feeling as if I’ve been punched in both eyes.

I take the Amy Winehouse black eyeliner approach to achieve the illusion of bigger eyes.  It kinda works. :D  So here are the before and after pictures of my makeup experiences.  The second one was the best smokey eye application ever attempted, but it was a still a bit heavy for my taste.  For what it’s worth, it came out great in pictures.  The third picture is my first (and only) experience with fake lashes.  I wasn’t a fan of the yellow eyeshadow, but the lashes I likey.  They’re so much fun!

So for all you makeup experts out there, what advice can you offer to creaseless girls like me?

A couple weekends ago, my friend Jean asked our e-Photo photog extraordinaire, Inhar, to shoot some pictures of her and her friends. She was moving across the coast and wanted a keepsake photograph of her friends together. Selecting a location was easy. She wanted someplace representative of the east coast, and what better location than Washington DC?! So off we went on a friiiiiiiigid Saturday afternoon.

I wish I was camera ready because while en route to DC, we saw a couple of bridal parties taking pictures around the capital. One bride was dolled up in a pink wedding dress. That’s right folks. Pink.
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Yeeeup, another cupcake bride. In order to avoid the per person cake cutting fee, we opted for wedding cuppity cakes. We’re going with a tiffany blue-ish/canary theme for our wedding, and cannot decide between the two for our cupcakes. I’m not a huge fan of frosting, so all of the inspirational cupcake photos were selected for that reason. Each of the designs would be customized to our liking of course, but you get the picture. Depending on price, we may ditch the floral top pieces, and sprinkle orchids throughout the cupcake tower.

All cupcake creations by SugarBloom Cupcakes

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HOJO was my date this entire weekend as we roamed around DC looking for wedding inspiration. First stop: the opening reception of the Design S exhibition. The exhibit showcased the nominees for the Swedish Design award, all of which focused on the importance of design for functions, communications, and business. Fun fun fun fun fun.

After a couple glasses of wine, I decided this was my favorite. It’s a complete graphic design concept for the Japanese company, Askul, designed by Stockholm Design Lab. I really have no eye for art, but it looked super cool and my mind kept drifting towards packaging ideas for our OOT bags. Since HOJO’s focus is print design, she kept pointing out different design principles to consider. I kept asking her about the elusive pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.
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Fly fly away! We dropped our Save the Dates in the mail today. It’s quite a feeling of accomplishment to finish a craft project. I’ve been known to have problems following through on projects of this nature, but nevertheless, we done yo! I feel like I’ve beaten a dead horse as far as sharing our experience, but I have to close the loop and show you the finished product!

And here they are…

As you may recall, we had issues burning the screen, which eventually led to our demise.
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I love me some eggs in the morning. More specifically, my favorite is eggs with rice, ketchup, and kimchi (spicy Korean cabbage). This morning, there were two yolks in one of the eggs.

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Work expands to fill the time allotted to it. So true. So me. Rather than work on our save the dates, I watched the Making of the Band Damaged Special one… two… maybe three times. Despite setting up our workspace a couple hours prior, I was too intimidated by the Gocco to start on anything. Anyhow, it just takes me a bit to get up and running with a project.

George slept through most of it.

Mr P and I read up on every tutorial we could find, and watched tons of You Tube Gocco videos. There are some talented crafters out there; several of which are buzzing around this hive! We decided to go with a photocopy of our design to burn our screen and failed with flying colors. The master screen had blotches of the design missing. I’m not sure what to attribute this failure to… perhaps because we were newbies? Who knows.
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… But I’m stuck with them for now. My eyes can only take a couple hours of contact wear before drying out. Then the excessive blinking begins. Unfortunately, my corneas are irregularly shaped (I have a mild form of keratoconus), thus, disqualifying me for LASIK and PRK, aka LASIK without the flap. While there are several contact brands available specifically catered towards dry eyes, only a limited number offer the toric lens in my power.

I rarely wear contacts during the week, but when I do, 2-3 people always comment, “You look different today.” Hmmm, does it make that much of a difference? The glasses I don’t mind so much, especially since they cover up the bags and the occasional zit that pops up in between the brows, but I won’t be wearing them come wedding day! In the meantime, I’m using artificial tears pretty consistently and will be heavily lubricating my eyes the week of the wedding per my doc’s recommendation.

I normally use the Systane preservative free drops. My doc just gave me a sample of Systane Ultra to use when not wearing contacts.
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Me: Do you think we should try to do our own calligraphy?
Mr Piggy: Oh I took calligraphy classes in high school. I can do it.
Me: (1 week later) Hey! I bought a cheap calligraphy set. I’ll start practicing.
Mr Piggy: Here here here, give it to me. I’ll show you. I’m gooooood. You angle the pen like this. See?
Me: (peeking at his writing) What’s that say on the bottom?
Mr Piggy: My name. Mrrr Pig. Mrrrr Pig. Mrrr Pig. Mrrr Pig.
Me: Umm. I’m going to practice. Maybe you should, too.

To Miss Kitten’s point in her recent post, I love that Mr P is so involved with the wedding planning; hoooweeverrr, I’m not sure if calligraphy will be one of his responsibilities.

Has your fiance volunteered for a wedding task that you wished you’d have just done yourself?

I may have downplayed my borderline psychotic behavior during the hunt for the Amsale Bali. Allow me to share.

Gmail > Open Documents > Piglets Wedding Budget Spreadsheet *tap*tap*tap*. My restless fingers began typing away, reallocating funds to offset the pending purchase of the Amsale Bali. I was stoked. Saks was offering the dress at nearly 20% off. At the time, I convinced myself that this was a steal. We had until Saturday to make a decision (we, being Piglet and sista, since I’m incapable of making a decision on my own). Thursday passed… Friday… Saturday… (hmmm open spreadsheet)…

Sunday. No dress. Couldn’t do it. Damnit Pig! Weak sauce.
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Early on, we decided to split the cost of our wedding down the middle. How my parents contributed would be handled between yours truly and Papa/Mama Piglet, and the same went for him and his parents. For the most part, we’re trying to cover the Hawaii wedding ourselves, which means controlling our spending these days. We love eating out, Piggy loves shopping, and we both love snowboarding! For the past four years, we’ve gone on an annual trip with our friends to resorts all over the country. Mr. P is a-w-e-s-o-m-e and often claims he is X-Games material. I’d hate to total the amount we’ve spent over the years, because it would likely be enough to pay for 10 Ben Chrismans. I have so many fond and not-so-fond memories from each trip, but we’ve decided to forgo our annual trip this year and save the Benjis for Hawaii.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane…

Lake Tahoe, 2005. I actually have no pictures from this trip because I came down with the flu the day before we left. What luck! I bucket this trip into the ‘not-so-fond’ memories. I slept in the master bedroom, humidifier on full blast, while everyone hit up the mountain. Tahoe was dumped on that year. So much so, that the road was blocked off on their way back from boarding, and also, with my food in hand. Mr. Pig got out of the car and trekked it back to our cabin to deliver my food as quickly as possible. How sweet is that?! It was the wrong order.
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We really wanted the engagement photos to capture us as a couple. We’re low-key and love the outdoors. Well, I’ve learned to love the outdoors. Mr. Piggy was born and raised in Baltimore (poor Ravens!), and will always consider it his home base. He planned out the entire day of our engagement shoot. While I would’ve loved to have seen myself in a fancy dress and Mr. Piggy in a nice suit, we decided to leave that for the wedding! We’re both the jeans and t-shirt types and we unintentionally have started to match our clothes more often than not. This is the outcome… we love our photos and feel that they truly capture our personalities! Here’s a quick visual recap of our day.

The day started off at Park School in Baltimore. Mr. Pig attended this school from kindergarten through high school and we loved the nature-type setting it provided.

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As I reviewed our handy checklist from The Knot, I’m sad to report we weren’t able to check off any of the items with the exception of photography! Well, sort of. We considered videography a ‘nice to have’, not a ‘must have’. It was never at the top of our priority list.

Reasons being: 1) we had already splurged on our photographer, 2) friends commented that their wedding DVD collects dust on their shelves, 3) I sound so nasal-y all the time (thank your lucky stars you only see me and not hear me through the screen), and 4) this one goes hand-in-hand with #1, but we just didn’t have room in our budget for a videographer.
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