With the start of a new year I realize that I put off my final post recapping the Gazelle wedding and my good-bye to Weddingbee far too long.
Two thousand twelve was a busy year for the Gazelles. We adopted the most adorable dog ever in March, Peat! He’s a four-year-old Scottish Terrier and we love him to pieces.
We celebrated our first anniversary in July.
With 2012 recently coming to a close, I figure I should wrap up the last details on the Gazelle wedding! I have put off my last few posts for far too long.
With dinner and cake complete it was time for Mr. Gazelle and me to have our first dance as husband and wife.
We had taken some dance lessons before the wedding, but we didn’t finish the round. We were dance-school dropouts! It was tough picking a song, but we chose Ryan Adams’s “When the Stars Go Blue” for our first dance. It was something we’d be able to sway to, and we had our first kiss way back when with a Ryan Adams song playing in the background.
Eleven days ago on August 4th, my parents walked me down the aisle…
Guest photo
We said our vows…
Well…the last year and a bit has all come to a head. It’s my wedding day! The day that I get to marry the most amazing person I’ve ever met…the day that I get a wife, and become a wife. Today is the culmination of a lot of hard work, planning and planning and planning…and it’s going to be gone in a flash. But—I’ll be married and that’s really what matters to me!
The last few days have gone by in a flash. We’ve both had family from long distances travel to be with us here today. We are seriously surrounded by love. With the help of two other design-oriented ladies, we put together our peony centerpieces/ceremony flowers—and I couldn’t be happier.
Some of our hard work / Personal photo
One of the very first projects we decided we would tackle when we first got engaged was brooch bouquets. We told my mom and aunts, and as my aunts are both professional artists, they were floored. I mean have you seen some of them?! They are amazing looking. My mom and aunts had bought us 100 brooches within a month of us telling them we were going to make them.
Brooch Bouquet with Hydrangea Collar RTS From Blue Petyl Shop
We collected around 250 more brooches, for a total of about 350 brooches. We made four bouquets, so that was a lot! (I refuse to add up the cost…it was a lot.) We decided to follow Fancy Pants Weddings’s brooch bouquet tutorial.
First we wired all of the brooches (this is the brunt of the job—we did this over a year).
One option our venue gave us was to provide our own wine and champagne, and pay a corkage fee of $15 a bottle. It seems steep, but because the venue has a loose policy on this and didn’t say magnums would be charged double, we bought magnum sized (1.5 L) wine bottles, which cost around $15 each. A regular bottle of wine (750 mL) at the venue was around $37, so we inevitably saved money on the wine front. For champagne, the price was around $8 a glass. We bought our champagne for $9 a bottle. We clearly saved money here too.
Yesterday I went to Real Canadian Superstore and bought all of our wine and champagne. At first, I wanted to place an order because they only had nine bottles of champagne in stock. However, I waited too long. The order wouldn’t come in in time for us to drop it off at the venue on Thursday to be chilled for Saturday. (I’m getting married on SATURDAY! YAY!) So, I ended up having to visit two stores. At the first store, I bought 12 magnums of white, 14 red, and nine bottles of champagne. At the second, I bought four magnums of red and 11 bottles of champagne. My car was PACKED!
It may not look like it, but I’ve got nine bottles of champagne and 24 magnums of wine in here!
It seems like a thousand years ago that I shared my rehearsal invitations with y’all. Remember, the red and white checkered ones? In addition to all things wedding decor, we’ve collected tons of red and white checker decor for our BBQ. But something cute and “blog worthy” was missing amidst my dollar-store tablecloths and napkins. So, when Mrs. Mink offered to make us some of her lovely paper straws with flags…I jumped at the offer.
We’re nine days out.
I just woke up in a cold sweat, having had the worst wedding nightmare of all time. Fiancee Eagle has had plenty of wedding nightmares, and I used to have them about a year ago. I once dreamt we got married in a pool and the centerpieces were those floating containers that hold your beer.
Image via Home Wet Bar
Fiancee Eagle has had several dreams that we get to the wedding and it has been changed to be a “Slip ‘d Slide” wedding. Ya know, those long plastic backyard “aisles” that make perfect sense for a bride to go down, right?
It’s no secret that I love Weddingbee. I’ve been blogging here for almost eoght months, and reading it for much, much longer. Long story short, I wanted to include the hive in my wedding some way, and I thought that a “Weddingbee themed” favour would be the perfect way. This process didn’t start this easily though: we had originally planned to do homemade jam, and my Mom rushed out and bought 100 mason jars. Then…we realized we don’t can. And that it’s pretty hard. But, we had all these jars, and needed to use them.
I stumbled upon this tutorial on Project Wedding, and knew it would be easy to adapt for a larger volume of honey. We had 100 250mL wide-mouth mason jars, and we bought 24kg, or 52 pounds, of honey from a local supplier. My Mom grows apple mint in her garden, so we just used that (hence:”organic mint” being printed on the labels). I didn’t take photos during the honey/mint combining, but we sterilized the jars using a canner and then poured honey to fill the jar half-way, then added 3-4 mint leaves in the middle, then topped it off with more honey (This took my Mom and I an entire weekend—it was exhausting). The result was something like this:
I designed a simple sticker using Adobe Illustrator that I printed through Vistaprint, and applied one sticker to the side of the jar, and one sticker to the top of the jar.
I haven’t talked at all about name changes with you girls, because I’m not doing it. Fiancee Eagle and I have incredibly similar last names (hint: they both end in “son”), so we won’t be hyphenating. We decided fairly early on in our engagement that she would take my last name, as her name doesn’t really matter for her job as much as mine does. I’m really excited about her taking my last name: I’m excited we have that option (very easy to change your last name in Canada – even in a heterosexual marriage the man can change his name to the wife’s very easily), excited that we’ll be linked even more that way… and excited that she so badly wanted to take my name. It makes me feel pretty butch. Yes, that’s right: I feel butch as I sit here in my yellow sundress and full face of makeup. I’m so not butch; but I can pretend.
With that being said, Fiancee Eagle really wants to be “Mrs. Wife Eagle.” She wants to be addressed as a Mrs. She always cutely says we’ll be “Dr. and Mrs. Eagle” (although I won’t be a doctor for four to five more years). I like the way that “Mrs.” distinguishes a female as being married. But…Mrs. is the possessive form of Mr. As in Mrs. means the Mr. owns her.
We have no Mr.
It’s no secret that I love veils. Miss Dragon told y’all yesterday that I shared my obsession with her and tried to help her pick one out. My wedding dress came with a matching veil, but it’s a cathedral-length veil, and I don’t picture myself wearing it for the ceremony. (After all, I don’t really think a veil bustle is possible.) So I set out to DIY a reception veil: a fingertip mantilla veil. I started with this lace from Fabric Hut67 on Etsy.
The wrong side of the lace—oops! / Personal photo
Then, I had to trim the lace so it was a single piece of lace, and not doubled like in the above photo. I rough cut it out (right side of the photo) and then cut it closer to the actual lace on a second cut-through (left side of the photo).
I can hardly believe that I’ve got one month until I marry the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. One month? How in the heck did time fly so quick?! It seems like just yesterday we were booking our venue 15 months in advance.
We’re still setting up our new house, ironing out kinks with vendors (like FI Eagle’s hair/makeup person cancelling—seriously?!), and DIY’ing like mad. We’ve had some disappointing RSVPs, but I’m trying my hardest to not let it rain on our parade. We’re getting married! I couldn’t be more excited to have her as my WIFE and to have our own little family.
Photography by Brittany Esther Photography
When I saw Miss Woodpecker’s DIY glitter champagne flutes, I knew I had to make them myself! We plan on using these with our bridal party and parents while getting ready. We’re going to gift two flutes each to our bridal party members as just a “little something” to accompany their actual bridal-party gifts. My mom is REALLY looking forward to the getting ready/pre-drinking aspect of the wedding (Her latest text message to me? “I am getting so excited for the wedding! I bought a lot of booze to drink in the hotel before it starts!” LOL), so I thought that including extra glasses for family members would be a nice touch.
With Miss Woodpecker’s cute flutes in mind, I looked up the original tutorial on Something Turquoise and got started. First, I bought 18 inexpensive champagne flutes from a discount store:
I’m obsessed with paper and paper products. I know there are some other ladies out there like Miss Archer and Miss Treasure who are totally in the same boat as me: completely obsessed with paper. I’ve already sent out our wedding invitations and our rehearsal BBQ invitations, but there was one last thing I knew I had to make: ceremony rehearsal “invitations.”
Now, when I googled “ceremony rehearsal invitations” there were NO hits that had anything relevant. I get that it’s not really a common thing, because usually you can just cover it in the rehearsal dinner invitation. Well, our ceremony rehearsal isn’t even on the same day as our rehearsal BBQ. Because our venue is SO busy and has weddings booked every Friday, Saturday and Sunday throughout the summer…we can’t have our ceremony rehearsal on Friday. So, Thursday night it is. I have been getting a lot of confused questions from the parents and the bridal party, so I figured a printed “ceremony rehearsal information sheet” would be a good thing.
Now I have to say, this DIY was the easiest DIY I have done for the wedding. I picked up this $10 DIY Gartner Studios invitation kit from Michaels.
All I had to do was download the template and fill in what I wanted it to say (which is way easier than invitation design in Adobe Illustrator!):
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Hive, I know I’ve been absent lately. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you…I’ve just been busy as ever with work and moving and trying to complete last minute wedding tasks. I just got back from a business trip to Los Angeles (USC is officially the prettiest campus I’ve ever seen)…but before I left, Fiancee Eagle and I had some really, really hard news to deal with.
Her grandparents won’t be attending our wedding.
For as long as I’ve known them, they have been nothing but nice to me…we’ve been out to their farm to visit them several times…her grandma has shared her family recipes with me, her grandpa has shown me (and let me pet!) their horses…We thought that they were pretty much accepting of our relationship. They even had our save-the-date magnet on their fridge at Christmas. But, alas, they are not coming to our wedding. And it’s because we’re gay.
I didn’t realize what opening up that RSVP envelope and seeing “decline” ticked off under their names would do to Fiancee Eagle. This “decline” isn’t due to health issues or previous plans or travel constraints. This is a deliberate “not coming” because of me being a woman. If Fiancee Eagle was marrying a man, they’d be there. The hardest part is that they do like me. They genuinely like me and wish us well (and included a very generous gift with their decline), but us marrying each other “just isn’t right.” The whole situation is mind-boggling and unfortunate, and I’ve never seen Fiancee Eagle cry.that.hard. Her grandparents didn’t tell anyone in their family about their decision, and the family are all just as shocked as we are (especially because they aren’t religious at all). FFIL and FSMIL Eagle had no idea what to say to us and truly had no idea this was coming. I almost feel worse for them than I do for us.
After Fiancee Eagle had stopped crying, I went to some of my fellow blogger bees for support (um…I need to get real-life girl friends) and a very sweet Miss Treasure shared this video with me, which made me feel like I wasn’t alone:
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