Weddingbee Blog

Once my bridesmaids and Momma Thimble were dressed and ready, all hands were on deck to help me into my dress and to share the big, (fluffy), wonderful, highly anticipated moment when I became a bride.

NY MoH helped me get my dress down from its hanging place. No one was too keen on me standing on a chair to get it, but I can be pretty stubborn.

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On wedding morning, LA MoH and I woke up, showered, grabbed some OJ from the hotel lobby and headed to Mr Thimble’s aunt’s salon at 9AM.  There, we met the rest of the bridal party, Thimble Momma, and my relatives visiting from Ireland. Once our hair was done, we headed to my parents’ house where the real fun could begin, and where our photographers were meeting us to start capturing the day.

I asked a makeup artist I met at the Benefit counter to come to the house for my mom, my sister and me to ensure the perfect wedding look and of course, for the bloggable photo-ops. (Getting ready pics are some of my favorites.). Her name is Lori and she went to art school and she’s super sweet and cool.

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It’s finally time to get to the good stuff: Wedding day! These recaps have been a long time coming. I held off at first because I just wasn’t ready to dive back in. I didn’t want to rush them out like they were another time-sensitive obligation. But then life caught up with me (see Mrs. Panther’s recent post that really hits the nail on the head. I need not be redundant. My story: new puppy, moving, more responsibility at work, I lost sight of blogging in my inability to prioritize my life, and then it had been a year).

But now it’s time to share our beautiful pictures, all the details, and the touching and funny moments of our wedding day.

Lorraine Daley Photography

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After a quick sprint to the end of our last minute wedding crafts, we packed it in, dressed it up, and re-grouped at the Thimble-In-Law’s house for our improvised rehearsal in the backyard. The most stressful and most rewarding part of planning our wedding was putting together our interfaith ceremony. Part of that stress: The priest thought the rabbi would run the rehearsal and the rabbi told me they don’t rehearse. Huh.

Reading blog after blog of beautiful brides with beautiful weddings and documented rehearsals, and coming from a Catholic perspective where weddings are always rehearsed, I was disappointed and scared. I did not want to wonder what’s coming next while trying to take in and enjoy every moment during our ceremony. We were also among the first in our group of friends and the first of our siblings to get married, which meant that most of our wedding party had never gone down the aisle before. So I enlisted a newlywed friend and called upon my theatre training and led us in a very basic blocking and run-through rehearsal so we could all feel a little more confident. To make the event feel more official and attune to my expectations, I created an e-vite using Paperless Post:

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In the final week (or, lets be honest, several weeks) leading up to our wedding, the Thimble apartment in Queens was a flurry of crafts and projects. Or… to be even more honest, in the words of my MOH from LA who was seeing my digs for the first time, it was a disaster. How, after a 2-year engagement, did I manage to save bridesmaids’ gifts, out of town bags, favors and my wedding garters for the last couple weeks? Well… I uhmm ehh…

Let’s just continue on. I finally got out of our messy apartment in NYC and on the road with my Mom, my sis, and LA MOH, en route to Pennsylvania…

Where I was greeted with Autumnal wedding charm…

Where Thimble Dad was working on our homemade wedding cake…
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Nearly a year ago already (yeesh!), I started getting nervous for my much-anticipated bridal shower. I shared with the hive my talented family’s hand-crafted shower invitations, my perfect bridal shower dress redesign, and I tapped Weddingbee’s incredible resources and hired the sweet Ms. Candy Corn to photograph the busy day.

{All photos to follow are by Ms. Candy Corn, aka Fromage Photography}

My bridal shower combined all the women from both sides of the Thimble family and friends, which made for a large guest list. It would have been a beautiful outdoor affair, but it rained that day (so fitting for a shower! Err…). So NYMoH and I entered a jam-packed house. I had to shout out for anyone to realize we had arrived, but I spotted Candy Corn right away!

Despite the crowd, my mother’s (and godmother’s, and mother-in-law’s) decor details were not lost on me. I took it all in as I made my rounds and greeted my loved ones:

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Married life has opened the door to all new kinds of commitment for Mr. Thimble and me. We’ve been researching buying a home, which has led us to set up some long-term savings plans, I’ve been pondering my dream job that I can love for all time, and we fell in head over heels for a little puppy we’ve named Penny.

So no, this post is not about marital finances (phew!), or about good luck proverbs, but about our newest commitment and love of our lives. Hive, meet the newest edition to the Thimble family: bitty pretty puppy Penny!!

Glamour shot

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I really like the energetic tone and writing style in this post. I had more steam and excitement in the early days of blogging. Actually executing our plans started getting in the way just before the wedding. You know, minor detail…

Whenever I felt like I was losing my voice or a DIY or research-filled post was too dry, I’d re-read this one to get me back on track. I still feel the same excitement now, just after the wedding, as I did then. I hit some stress bumps in the road, but on the other side of it all, I am really proud of how our wedding turned out, and I’m not lying in this post: I want to be a wedding planner/event designer. The job search is on! This post is a glimpse into why I wanted to be a bee, and how (I hope) I’ve found my calling by way of a big love-filled life milestone.

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A match-up of me and planning our wedding… that is… {Fair warning- I’m letting you all in on my bridal crazy, right here from the start. Keeping it real for y’all.}

I love planning our wedding. I think I was born to plan this wedding. I’ve been waiting my whole life for the opportunity to plan my wedding.

I don’t mean to take one giant leap backward for womankind. Of course I cringe at traditional female roles-of-old and their lack of possibility. I know there are women out there who don’t necessarily see themselves settling down, and I respect that. A good part of me envies their drive and focus. But I. love. every. second. of planning this event.

It has been downright empowering:
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So, you want to know what I was like in high school, eh? Oh man.

High School Thimble was: Drama Club Actress, Stage Manager and Treasurer; Choir Alto 2, and Officer with a made-up title of Instrumental Liaison to communicate schedules with Marching Band in which I served as a Squad Leader in the Flute Section. Add to that a community service stint in a traveling educational puppet show called Kids on the Block, my weekend job as a Cashier and Bagger at Shop N’ Bag and occasional Babysitter, a fairly intense Social Life and All Honors Classes because I was gifted and I could do it all!

In other words, I was a disaster. An all-nighter-pulling, granola-bars-for-dinner on my way to rehearsal, struggling-to-keep-up with my school work while maintaining an academic elitist attitude. An over-extended teenager who would not listen to reason from my parents to chill the heck out.

AP English class with some friends I’ve hardly seen since then during finals week, or the last week… or sometime toward the end. On the left is the AP chalkboard where students of note were posted for all to see… Mr. T and I were listed under “AP Couples.”

While my best friends were celebrating senior week at the beach, I was performing Moliere at the International Thespian Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska:
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We did it, Hive! We united in matrimony during the most beautiful ceremony I could have ever imagined. We smiled all day long…

photo by MD Bridesmaid’s fiance

We felt the incredible love and support of our families and friends every step of the way…

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Dear Hive,

It’s Saturday morning—I woke up with anxious pangs in my stomach at 7:30 and I haven’t been able to fall back asleep which means I need to cross something off my to-do list, and that thing may as well be therapeutic and happy-making. So I write.

Tomorrow afternoon, I marry the love of my life.

The past week has felt like the calm before the storm. I went to work on Monday and Tuesday, and I diligently plugged away at an overwhelming number of DIY projects with a sense of calm and accomplishment after work. I hastily packed up my DIY mess and dumped most of my clothes in a suitcase (I’ll sort out my honeymoon packing on Monday) and loaded up my mom’s car. On our trafficky ride from Queens to Bucks County, PA, LA MOH and I assembled programs in the back seat of my mom’s SUV. When we got home I went back out to do a walk-through at our venue and ran back home as fast as I could for welcome dinner with our Irish cousins, who have come to America for my wedding, unbelievably (and they read my blog!! Say hello, hive ). I feel like I haven’t stopped—probably because I haven’t stopped working—for at least two weeks. And now the anxiety and butterflies are hitting me. Thank goodness it’s a day before my wedding so I can sort them out.
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I can’t believe I haven’t written about our menu yet. Food was priority numero uno for me, which is why we chose October for its hearty harvest comfort food options, and how we chose our venue because we could bring in our own caterer.

Of course, I met our caterers at an open house at our venue, so they have worked together before and it wasn’t a research-intensive task. But they were just one of many suggestions from Open Aire Affairs. We could choose the kind of folks who sold themselves as all inclusive, full-service (for this semi-DIY bride?); we could choose the local “best” who has the exclusive catering rights to two other popular venues in our area (red flag: several events in one day potential!); and we could choose the folks who didn’t give us a huge sales pitch—they just gave us their food, and it was phenomenal:

GottaHaveDiSH.com

The chef, Michele Pulaski, prides herself on her “handmade” food.

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Our wedding date is finally on the 10-day forecast—not that I’m keeping tabs, or anything…

Umm, BTDubs, where did September go??!??!

Anyway, today weather.com is calling for a 30% chance of showers on our wedding day. This outlook may change several times over the next week, but New York was just hit with a “monsoon” last night that had made its way up the coast from Maryland. Said monsoon has inspired me to pull the trigger on a plan cooking in my brain for the last 2 years and take some precautions to ensure we can still enjoy the gorgeous grounds at the Pearl S. Buck Estate:

source, source

Enter brollies and boots into the equation.

Not sold on the look with a beautiful tulle gown? Then you need a big, delicious dose of embrace-the-rain wedding inspiration:
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aka lucky in love!

Hive, I am on the receiving end of a (very!!) happy accident. And you’re the only people in my life, besides my mother, who can truly understand how I feel. Again, I have to link back to this old post, in which I let myself pine over beautiful chiavari chairs in long rows down our guest tables, if only for a sentence or two. Siiiiiiigh… chiavaaari… One wedding splurge that I decided I simply could not allow. I stayed sensible, I compromised with white, folding, included-in the-price, padded chairs.

These chairs:

source

They’ll do, of course. They are lovely little basic chairs. I stopped thinking about my choices and my upgrade options, and I stifled my tinge of regret and slight jealousy whenever I would see a wedding with these beauts:
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Now that we have our RSVPs in, it’s time to figure out the final layout for tables and submit our final head count and rental requests. This is undeniably the most daunting wedding task. We are using a combination of long and square tables to give a modern, clean-line balance to our mixed china look which has its benefits and its drawbacks. Behold, my high-tech design tools to figure out the best layout:

Good ole’ Post-It notes! (Please excuse the dirty coffee table). The table in the top right corner (aka the back corner near the speakers) is a little short and stumpy so I wanted to make sure it would look okay “in person” versus on a computer screen.

Square tables can be difficult to seat, because if you only have seven guests at one table, there is an obvious single person. And if you have a crew with 9 people who should Ideally sit together, you can’t just squeeze one more in like you can at a round table. Fortunately, we only had one situation with a straggler, and I worked it out by breaking up the back stumpy table (my sister and her bests. They’ll be okay).

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