Weddingbee Blog

My journey down the aisle was truly one of the most spectacular events that I have ever experienced. Every worry or doubt that I had ever had about having a mountaintop destination wedding seemed completely insane as I turned the corner to see such a breathtaking, amazing view. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and the temperature was absolutely perfect. I was beaming from the inside out as I watched my future husband’s face light up with a smile as he stood against a backdrop of gorgeous mountains and pines. As I continued down the aisle with the angelic harp playing in the background, I literally felt as though I was thrown into a fairytale…everything was so beautiful that it didn’t seem as though it could be real.

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From the moment that I began my wedding planning journey, there was one aspect that I didn’t have to think twice about…the element of surprise at the end of the aisle. Even though there are tons of adorable first look photo shoots floating around the web, my desire for that grand moment of surprise when walking down the aisle remained. The night before the wedding Mr. B and I stayed in separate hotel rooms, the day of we got ready in separate locations, and we took extra care to be sure that we would not see each other when we got to the top of the mountain. Even though our wedding ultimately contained lots of non-traditional elements, I am so happy with our decision on keeping this particular tradition. Seeing my future husband’s reaction as I turned the corner and walked down the aisle is an image that I will always look back upon and smile. In fact, I’m literally smiling right now as I’m typing this and thinking back on that moment.

So I’m sure by now you’re wondering what first look I’m talking about! When discussing with my photographer which photographs were going to be most important and which “must have” shots needed to be included, the topic that kept popping up was how important to me it was to include the real moments with my father and not just posy type of pictures. This is when she came up with one of the greatest suggestions…a first look with my father before the ceremony!
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The morning of my wedding, I woke up surprisingly calm. I had been stressing the previous few weeks due to depressing weather forecasts that threatened to ruin our dream outdoor location, so waking up to a beautiful, sunshiny day instantly put a big smile on my face. Both my hair and makeup artist arrived right on time and looking fabulous (a great first sign to me since I took a huge leap of faith on hiring locals who I’d never worked with before!). They got to work on making me into a bride…

personal photo

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I’ll be honest with you, hive: I was extremely nervous about ordering wholesale flowers online and going the DIY route. You may remember my post on deciding to do my own flowers and how that decision came about. I was confident in my ability to arrange the bouquets, but scared about what sort of quality the flowers would arrive in. There are so many mixed reviews floating around the blogosphere and plenty of horror stories that would probably scare away a lot of DIY brides. It was motivating, however, that with the bad stories there were even more success stories of happy brides who saved lots of money and had beautiful flowers.

Here is a little about my experience with ordering wholesale flowers and going the DIY route using Fifty Flowers.

1. I chose to go with Fifty Flowers mainly because of their 100% wedding day guarantee. I also really liked the fact that their customer service was always very friendly and helpful in answering the million questions that I had about the whole process and about various flowers. They were knowledgeable about their products and always willing to give pointers on caring for the flowers. I really liked using the chat feature on their website because each time I finished a chat, I always saved the conversation to my email so that I could go back and refer to the advice and answers that they had given.

2. When choosing the type of flowers that I wanted, I did so with these things in mind:
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I know I told you that the arrival of our wholesale flowers would be up next, but first I’d like to finish up our first few days of exploring…

While our ceremony took place in Aspen, we all actually stayed in a nearby beautiful little town called Snowmass Village. The hotels were less pricey than staying right in Aspen, and  the town was a little more peaceful than the hustle and bustle of the busy streets of Aspen. We got such a great deal on our hotel and  having never been there, I was scared that it might be a “you get what you pay for” scenario. I was very happy and relieved when we pulled up to the hotel that turned out to be an adorable place full of Colorado charm. If we ever go back, I’ll definitely be staying there again!

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The Balloons entourage started out the rehearsal day by spending some time exploring Aspen.

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Hellooo, hive! MRS. Balloons here. That’s right, we’re back from our mountaintop destination wedding and it feels so good to finally be a Mrs.!

It’s been a busy time for us Balloons as we got settled back in from our trip to Colorado, prepared and executed an awesome at-home reception, followed by me starting classes again for my web design aspirations.

I cannot wait to share all the details with you! In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek:
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I cannot believe that in less than a week, the Balloons will be Colorado bound! In the meantime, our household is filled with last minute projects and errands (including finishing my dress alterations—cue freak out!).

I’ve been meaning to show you another DIY project that I did, but I haven’t been able to find the image credit to my original inspiration picture that inspired me to create it…so I guess I’ll just have to show you without it. It was a rustic yet elegant moss covered oval vase with a pretty ribbon and monogram wraparound detail.

First I picked up some moss from Hobby Lobby.

Via Hobby Lobby

I decided to go with a moss product called Moss Cloth because it came in sheet form & seemed like it would be the easiest to work with for covering a container.

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I’ve always loved the look of birch candle holders. As usual, after browsing numerous sites I decided that I wasn’t willing to pay that much for something that I could attempt to do myself. I knew that the exact look of the wood wouldn’t be the same since we have no actual birch trees nearby, but I was OK with that. It was just the overall woodsy, rustic look that I wanted.

Save On Crafts

If you remember, we had several trees that had to be cut down during the process of clearing area for our reception building. I had Mr. B cut various sizes of stumps from those trees. Then he took his biggest drill bit size that he had in his tool set to drill into the center of each of them.

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Craigs list, that is. Thanks to images like the ones below, I had my heart set on having some sort of antique- or vintage-looking desk or dresser at our reception.

Style Shoot via Style Me Pretty/Photograph by Picotte Weddings

Swoooon! I love furniture outside at weddings!

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Hellooo, hive! Balloons here. Oh how I’ve missed you! Yep, I’m still alive and I’m back and ready for action. You see, my laptop caught a bad virus and I’ve been without a computer for awhile now. Thank goodness that I have a talented friend who was able to recover it without loss of my beloved pictures and documents. *Oh and by the way…any time I tried to come up with a way to tell you “I’m back,” the Backstreet Boys song kept coming into my mind, hence the title.

Cyberflu

You may remember my 2 month mayhem freak out…This computer virus followed by some other disastrous events such as my car being backed into certainly didn’t help matters… but I’m happy to say that thanks to my wonderful fiance, I got through it and I’m happy, excited, and back on track again.

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My bridal shower is Sunday and I’m super excited, but also pretty nervous.

I feel so lucky that I have an awesome Matron of Honor hosting it for me in her lovely backyard and I can’t wait to spend the day with my favorite girls. At the same time, however, my happy thoughts about the day have been mixed with nervousness over a few issues that keep floating into my mind.
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OKK, just sticks. Well twigs. Err sticks and twigs…whatever you want to call them, here is a tutorial on how I turned an ugly vase into a cute, rustic one.

First meet said ugly vase:

So it’s not like its that ugly. It just has some rust type of stains in some spots so I wouldn’t have used it as is.

I started by hot gluing some burlap around the vase. I figured the twigs would stick better to it than the glass itself.
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