Weddingbee Blog

Mom Pineapple made one of my favorite gifts I got at my bridal shower. It was a dress shopping scrapbook.

Way back before I was a bee, my folks and bridesmaids flew from all over the East Coast to go dress shopping with me. I didn’t want to plan the weekend before March, because Pittsburgh winters can be messy. However, I didn’t want to wait too long just in case the dress would take a while to arrive. So, March it was. I was wrong about the weather being okay. Almost every flight was delayed and our neighborhood (home to the steepest streets in the world) was covered in ice.

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At our rehearsal dinner, after a quick thank you and explanation of the RD location, Mr. Pineapple and I gave our bridal party small tokens of our appreciation.

all photos copyright Mingwei Tay

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all photos copyright Mingwei Tay

After our rehearsal we headed over to the bar/restaurant where Mr. Pineapple and I went on our first date. (Although we didn’t know it was a date at the time.) Smokin’ Joe’s Saloon was just a couple blocks from where both Mr. P and I lived at the time and we met there after work almost every day, no joke. So this little bar with the best condiments I have ever had and 60 beers on tap became our home away from home.
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When Carnegie Mellon student, Mingwei Tay, emailed me to see if he could shoot our wedding my hands were tied. We had already hired a photography duo with a single photographer clause in their contract. This clause is super smart because if several people are trying to take photos of you, it can make the process very difficult. When we met with one of the photographers, Tammy, I asked if there were any chance Mingwei could take photos for his portfolio. She thought it was a great idea for him to get some experience and I knew we had made the right choice of photographers. (So yep, we had three photographers with us at our wedding. Overkill? You bet. Guests joked that they were our paparazzi.)

Mingwei has already given me a DVD of photos from both our rehearsal and wedding day, but I am going to wait to share the latter with you until I have all the pro pics, so you don’t have to sit through two recaps. Until then, the rehearsal!

Meet Emily, the much loved event coordinator for the Rivers Club.
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When Mr. Pineapple and I first started looking for venues we did most of our search online. We stumbled upon the Rivers Club, in downtown Pittsburgh, and set up an appointment not expecting much. When we met with the coordinator, Emily, we were very impressed. She was kind and up front with us about their pricing. (The only other place we visited was very reluctant to tell us the bottom line, once they did we could tell why.) After looking around for a couple more days and not finding something as nice and as simple as the Rivers Club we put down our deposit.
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Now that we have done the whole wedding kit ’n kaboodle not just once, but twice, I thought it may be helpful to give my perspective on some of the wedding questions/topics I see often around the hive. Of course every wedding is different, but much of what seems like the norm on The Knot just didn’t happen that way for us.

The Guest List

One of the first and most daunting wedding tasks for us was the guest list. We had no clue percentage of “yes” responses we should expect. Many of the articles I found estimated about 80-85% would be able to attend. Our number was more like 60%. I think there were a lot of factors that led to our little wedding, a big one being hard economic times for a lot of folks.

The Registry
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I tried and tried and tried to think of a nice juicy secret to share with the hive, but alas I am boring. So instead I will share with you a big part of my life that you have never seen, our home. I am the mover of all movers and shakers. Between May 2006 and August 2008 I lived in 6 homes. When Mr. Pineapple landed his dream job in his home town, we once again began the familiar search for a home. We were having a hard time finding a place big enough for our 3 cats, dog and the two of us plus all of our stuff (I don’t know where it all came from). Then a friend of Mr. P’s told us her folks rented a house on a farm that was soon to be vacant. The monthly rent was way out of our price range, but amazingly her folks dropped the rent hundreds of dollars to fit within our budget.
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Last week I took my gown to David’s Bridal to have it cleaned and preserved by a third party. This morning I woke up in a panic. My grandmother made a handkerchief for my mom to carry when my folks were married. I pinned the same hanky under my gown on our wedding day. Well, guess who forgot to take out the hanky before shipping off her dress? Ugh.
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This weekend Mr. Pineapple and I planted a tree on his father’s property that we have dubbed Annie - the anniversary tree. We hope to visit Annie at least once a year and take a family photo, this year with just our little two-person family.
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… and by PWC I mean the post wedding chop!

I joined the bridal masses and cut off my lovely lady locks. I have not had short hair since an uber-traumatic hair cut at age 6 where I was called out as “a boy with a dress on.” I have to say though, I am lovin’ it!

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When Mr. Pineapple and I first chose our venue with the fancy schmancy food we were living rent-free. As part of Mr. Pineapple’s job at the time (he is now working at a different University) he was required to live in on-campus housing. Our housing was amazing. We lived in a four bedroom, 3000 square foot split level, rent and utility-free. So all the money that we had been paying for two separate apartments we could put toward our wedding savings. Then the poo hit the fan. The big wig above Mr. P was asked to resign and to save money Mr. P’s job description no longer required him to live on-campus. They gave us six weeks to be out. Since we had already put our deposit down on the Rivers Club we wanted to try and make it work. We did this by eliminating anything we didn’t “need” or care about. The second way was by doing a lot of searching before buying. Here are some of the resources I found along the way that helped me penny pinch.
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Our foodiemoon began every day with a wonderful breakfast from the Brownstone Inn Bed & Breakfast just two miles from the heart of downtown. The inn was such a wonderful choice by Mr. Pineapple. I loved staying at the Brownstone Inn because for the most part, a beautiful hotel is still just a hotel and often they lack charm and character. There was definitely no lack of character here.
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When people asked us where we were going for our honeymoon, we would tell them Cleveland, and we mostly got looks that were a combination of confusion and pity in return. Pittsburghers are not known for loving Cleveland. In fact, because of ye old football rivalry, we are supposed to despise Cleveland. Sorry fellow ’burghers, we loved it!
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copyright: Mary Mervis Photography

During my senior year of college an amazing thing happened. A dirty, lovely “rockin’ country saloon” opened on the South Side of Pittsburgh called Saddle Ridge. I was already known as “the designer who loved to line dance” at Carnegie Mellon (it’s not that popular for city chicks—go figure), when one of my photography professors suggested I do a series of photos at Saddle Ridge. 1600 photos and six months later, I had revived my passion from high school and made some of the best friends a pseudo cowgirl could ask for. Saddle Ridge is where bridesmaid Christy and I spent Thursday-Saturday nights and where we met BFF Free-J Mike.

Mr. Pineapple does not share my passion for dancing in a line, but he is really good at hanging out by the bar, spectating, and keeping my water cup full. So with a few of my Saddle Ridge friends in attendance and running the music machine, there was definitely a lot of line dancing happening at our wedding. Sister Pineapple ran the family camcorder by setting it atop her table, so the video is not of great quality (hello booties in front of the lens), but I thought you might like to see a bride attempt to boot scoot in a huge gown.
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Budgets are sticky topics, but when I first started planning I wanted to know how much people spent on everything. I knew weddings were expensive but I had no idea why. So, if you want to throw a Pineapple wedding of your own, here is the post for you.

From the get go Mr. Pineapple and I wanted to throw the party of our lives, but we didn’t want it to keep us from actually being able to afford living. I was constantly worried about the bottom line, about spending more than we had, about regretting the cost of just one day. In the end Mr. Pineapple and I came in about $3,000 under our goal budget and I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Here is the breakdown of our wedding day (which excludes rehearsal dinner, hotel, and foodiemoon, partly because I don’t know how much we spent eating the last 5 days and maybe I don’t want to know.) Read more…