Weddingbee Blog

It was finally time to step into my wedding dress! Although I had already spent quite a bit of time in the dress during fittings, I was thrilled to put the dress on. This time, Mr. Taffy was actually going to see it!

The lace on my dress made it quite heavy, but my friends were ready to lift! It didn’t look pretty or glamorous maneuvering to get inside of the floof, but stepping (OK, climbing) into that dress, surrounded by my mom, sisters and friends, was a wonderful moment, even though it looks like the dress is trying to consume me!
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There is no floof quite like wedding day floof! But before we could get to the dresses, we had some other things to take care of… like taking photos of said floof! I just could not put my camera down once we got to our venue!

Taffettes Susie and Kylie pose for the bride:

Since we got to the venue way early, we decided to take a peek at the reception room upstairs. We ended up setting up the guestbook and favor table, the gift table, and a few other odds and ends.
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Although I woke up at what seemed like the *$# crack of dawn, I wasn’t too tired on the morning of our wedding. (I was able to fall asleep the night before thanks to exhaustion and Advil PM! Mr. Taffy was not as lucky- he didn’t sleep a wink.) Fueled by excitement and nerves, I raced through my shower, rushing to dry my hair. I had forgotten to set aside a button down shirt to wear to the salon, so I grabbed the first thing I could reach out of my closet and headed out to run some last minute errands with Lexie, my maid of honor, who had stayed the night.

At the salon, ready for action!!!

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A U Haul truck!

image source

This weekend will mark sixth months of marriage for the Taffys. We will spend our anniversary moving out of Ann Arbor and closer to Detroit. Leaving Ann Arbor is bittersweet for me, but I have some big news that will explain the move: I have a new job!!!

Job searching for the last year in the current economic climate has been very challenging! The Weddingbee community was a great source of support not only during my wedding planning, but during the job search. I want to thank the bees, and all of you who provided support through my blog posts and on the boards. You are awesome, and I cannot thank you enough for your support!
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In my last post, I described the meltdown that I had on the day before our wedding. That evening, I had just enough time to shower, throw my hair into a sloppy ponytail, and throw on one of my favorite vintage dresses before the rehearsal began. I was very excited and overwhelmed when we arrived and saw our families, bridal party and friends at our venue. I was also very dizzy! Yes, I had made a classic mistake—I didn’t eat anything all day due to stress, and didn’t realize it until I was about to pass out. Luckily, my maid of honor had a Nutrigrain bar in her purse. I felt the stress edge away as our rehearsal began and my stomach stopped growling.

I will pass on showing you our rehearsal photos, and skip to the rehearsal dinner!

Mr. Taffy and I were so excited to arrive at our rehearsal dinner! Do you recognize this dress? I wore it to Mrs. Stiletto’s wedding!
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We just received our discs from our photographer, so the official Taffy recaps are ready to begin! Before I post about our rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, I’d like to start things off with a quick recap of the week before our wedding.

All week there had been a lot to do, but I was on track with my schedule and thrilled to see friends and family arriving from out of state. Last minute decisions were made: we scrapped the idea of OOT bags and used the money to pay for a guest shuttle after hours, and placed a map of Ann Arbor and an info card for the shuttle in their rooms instead. We nixed bathroom baskets because I realized the bathroom in our venue had no ledge to place them on!

A picture of our venue taken a few days before the wedding:

Everything was going very well until the day before, which resulted in what I like to call ‘the storm before the calm’.
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I did not intend on partaking in the popular post wedding chop.

I have pretty much always had long hair*, so I wasn’t even trying to grow it out for the wedding. I never considered taking a lot of length off! Not for one minute… until a very bad “trim” lead me to the chop. Let me explain.

I didn’t have time to get a trim after the after the big event, and by August the length was starting to get ridiculous! Here’s a picture of my hair a few weeks before the wedding… you can only imagine the length after three more months!

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This post isn’t really about school… it is about a recent crafting marathon for a friend’s upcoming wedding. However, we used enough pencils, erasers, rulers, scissors, and paper that night to justify the title!

We had three goals for the marathon: create paper rosettes for the decor, cocktail flags for the reception, and flower pins for the bridesmaids’ dresses. Here is a sneak peek of our Martha Stewart-inspired rosettes:

You can find Martha’s directions for the rosettes here.
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I am so excited to share my bachelorette experience with you! My lovely bridesmaids, knowing that nothing delights me more than dressing up and eating sugary sweets, planned a ’50s themed dress up party for my last night out (or, in this case, in) as a single lady. I scoured my vintage collection the week before the party, excitedly putting outfits together for myself, and for the dress up rack for the guests.

I put my best housewife ensemble together and headed to the party. I was greeted by many of my closest friends, all decked out in vintage splendor!

Here I am with a “girl next door”. As a vintage clothing store owner, she was probably the most prepared for the party!
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The wait for our pro pics is over! I am so happy to give you a peek into the Taffy wedding. We haven’t received all of the images yet, but as soon as we do I will begin our recaps.

For now, take a look at these (and don’t mind the low resolution!):

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When we started to think about our guestbook set up, we agreed that making cards for the guests to sign was the best route for us. I wasn’t sure how I wanted the final guestbook to look, and I liked the idea of being able to assemble it after the wedding. A friend had already lent us a birdcage for our cards, so we purchased another cage for the guestbook. I bought this at Target last summer, but have seen them recently in their home decor section.

Mom Taffy had given us this white cake stand in the spring; I thought that it would be perfect for the birdcage and give it some height at the display.
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Mr. Taffy and I decided early on that we wanted to make a charitable donation instead of making or purchasing favors. Because there are many charities that are important to us and our families, we decided to choose three charities and have our guests vote during the reception.

We had a hard time deciding on an object to give people for voting purposes (of course, with my luck, I didn’t read Mrs. Lovebug’s post about her favors until we had already found one). We found inspiration in these wooden tokens from the Michigan Beer Fest, which I had been using as a circle guide while making our table numbers.

Mr. Taffy found some plain wooden coins on eBay, and we ordered around 200 of them. I will have to post in the comments on which eBay seller we went through, as Mr. Taffy isn’t here to ask at the moment. It was challenging to find affordable tokens in such a small quantity, so it is worth posting!
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Well, that or Miss Vampire. Yes, that’s right. You’ll see.

My regular hairstylist called me about five weeks before the wedding to let me know that she had a family emergency and would not be able to do my hair for the wedding. I was really sad, because she is super talented and knows me so well (I wouldn’t even need to bring inspiration pictures) but I completely understood her situation.

After briefly panicking, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I was able to book appointments for myself and the whole bridal party at a salon in Ann Arbor with very short notice.

I did my boudoir shoot right before my hair trial, and liked my hair down so much that I almost considered to go with it that way for the wedding. Up until this point I had wanted to put it up, mostly for the sake of convenience. Mr. Taffy suggested that I do the trial up, then decide between the two. I brought inspiration with me, and it seemed like it was going pretty well, but then the stylist decided to take a turn and it all went downhill from there. I found the hair to look very matronly; not my style at all.

But it gets worse…
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I have been excited to write a post about our wedding signage, because it touches on so many different aspects of our wedding!

Up until this point, the only thing that had graphics exactly matching our invitation was the backdrop for the photobooth. I decided to give a shout out to the invites on our signature drink menu. I say signature “drink” instead of signature cocktails, because we included two beers on the menu:

Mr. Taffy is a huge beer fan, so when we realized that we could have Oberon and Two Hearted Ale on tap from the Michigan based Bell’s brewery, we decided to order it right away. I had fun playing on words with “Wedding Bells Ale”, but didn’t have to make up a cute name for “Two Hearted Ale”… it already had the “aww” factor.
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Trying to find a cake stand was really frustrating. Our cake baker had one rule: for tiered cakes, she would only accept a platform type of stand. That was fine with us, as we didn’t want to chance a toppling cake! However, once we saw the platform stands available, we were disappointed with the choices. Our cake inspiration was of a very graphic nature, and we really wanted a simple black stand. I know I’ve shown you this a few times, but here it is again:

From In Style weddings, Spring 2008

We were hoping for a black stand, but we couldn’t find a black platform anywhere. The elaborate silver platforms that our baker had were beautiful, but really clashed with the graphic elements of our cake design. I was really getting nervous, and hadn’t once considered making our own stand…
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