Weddingbee Blog

Sigh.

[ahem]

Sigh.

Oh man I’m sad and I haven’t even really started this post.

So hive, now that I’m at the end of my Weddingbee journey, maybe you’d like to hear how I got here and what I think of this whole operation? Oh you do? Please read on. Oh you don’t? Meh.

How I found Weddingbee:

I was searching for NYC makeup artists long before it was necessary for me to even think of having a trial (like, summer of 2008 for my March 2010 wedding—before we, um, picked a California venue), and I came upon posts by Mrs. Peony and Mrs. Canary. When I clicked to see the next posts, it was a post from another character. What the…? I was confused and slightly ticked off.

It took a few times circling back to Weddingbee to figure out the site, but once as I did, I was absolutely hooked. I distinctly remember becoming a consistent reader in October 2008, and like many of you, pored over every bee and the archives to see what I had been missing!

Applying to Weddingbee:
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Before I wrap up my posts here, I had to mention the efforts of my sister during wedding planning and the day of. However, I don’t know what I can say about my sister that would begin to describe what she means to me, and her instrumental role in planning our wedding.

Perhaps you’ve heard me mention that she made the homemade goodies for our out-of-town bags, baked our wedding cake cookie towers, Goccoed her heart out on my behalf, that she and her husband took charge of the wedding paper goods, hosted the brunch the morning after the wedding…

… and maybe I didn’t mention that she:

• constantly encouraged and supported me
• kept me in check when I started to lose perspective
• opened her home for all wedding-related activities leading to the day of
• along with her husband, took in our two pugs for weeks while we were on our honeymoon
• baked challah, cinnamon rolls, jam and who knows what else for the wedding day breakfast
• made the lavender honey syrup for our cocktails

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My posts are coming to an end, but let’s face it, there was no way I was going to let you get away without seeing a some of the sizable share that our pugs had in our wedding photos…

Sometimes I wonder if my dad wishes I had been born as a pug instead of a girl

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Here’s my big list o’ vendors and details.

Bridal Attire and Appearance

Bridal Salon: Hannelore’s, Alexandria, Virginia

Hannelore’s has a wide selection of dresses and is a full-service bridal shop. My sales consultant Sally was very pleasant and patient, although overall the store felt a tad impersonal to me. Also, if you do buy your dress there and you do not have complicated alterations, I highly recommend going elsewhere for the alterations because Hannelore’s alteration fees are fairly outrageous. My dress was Marisa #775. Would anybody like to buy? I’m selling it.

39 East Photography

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An apology is in order. Amends must be made.

For most of our wedding planning, Mr. Pug and I only had one pug:

The chubber above made it into my blog posts, the main picture of our website, and even our engagement photos. See following evidence:
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So you’ve hired a photographer. Very important. But what about all those other pictures that guests have taken? What if they captured moments that the photographer did not? One, or even two professional photographers cannot be everywhere. To try and collect all the photos from our hoarding guests, I used a shared online photo site like many other savvy brides.

I created a Flickr account just for the wedding, and paid the $25 or so to upgrade the account so you can have unlimited space (this was after one of our guests uploaded high resolution files that took up a good portion of our memory). I then sent out the following email to guests a few weeks after the wedding:

We are back from the honeymoon, all rested and wishing for about 5 more months of vacation. We can dream, can’t we? Thank you all for your love and friendship during the wedding weekend and beyond, we had an incredibly wonderful time celebrating with all of you.

While hopefully we deluged you with enough drink and food to keep you well occupied during the wedding, if there are any pictures you took that you would be willing to share, we have created a Flickr account for you to upload your photos. To upload your photos:
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I asked Sister Pug to give a behind-the-scenes detailed look at the creation of our wedding cake cookie towers (WCCT), which served as our escort card favors.

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After extensive taste-testing (mostly by Mr. Pug), we decided upon the lime sugar and lavender sugar cookies. But I wasn’t going to just start kickin’ out WCCTs without some extensive preliminary calculations. Based on the size of the cellophane bags I was provided (read: one of the hundreds of boxes that just appeared on my doorstep, courtesy of some furious internet shopping by the Pug), I calculated the size of the cookies that would fit in the bag, and decided to do a mockup.

Then I figured that if I was going to go through the effort of doing a mockup, I may as well do it as accurately as possible, because can you imagine if at the end of all that they didn’t f’in fit in the bags. So I ‘made’ some out of cardboard and wrapped them in paper to make them more cookie-like.

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There’s a fuzzy line between joyously, tastefully celebrating yourselves as a couple at a wedding vs. unwarranted ego-centric narcissism.

For some reason, I thought of this guy

And on which side falls a guestbook that is comprised solely of engagement photos of you and your loved one? Well, because this is what we did, I’m saying that it absolutely falls on the side of justified and tasteful.

Remember our Halloween-themed engagement photos? I decided to put those bad boys to use by making an album of them for guests to sign. So, it was totally like a regular guestbook, except plastered with pictures of me and Mr. Pug.

The two popular places from which you can order your photobook are MyPublisher and Blurb.
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Oh, you thought maybe I was done talking about our wedding? That’s very funny.

Our florist was Orna Maymon from Ornamento, and she did a fabulous job. Orna is not exactly a budget florist, but extremely talented and very familiar with our venue. Also, since we weren’t having that many flowers, I thought it was worthwhile to splurge a little on the whittled-down list we did have, which included:

• 3 Cocktail hour table arrangements
• 6 Reception table centerpieces

Yep, that was it! But then…

After we changed our minds and decided to have a ceremony, I thought it would be nice to have some flowers for decoration. I called Orna with what I thought was a sufficient amount to procure two ceremony altar pieces plus aisle decor to boot. In response, she told me that my proposed amount would cover *one* arrangement. Er?
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So, guests found their tables. And hopefully they looked at their menus. What were they waiting for? Us! I don’t remember what happened because we had not planned on doing a “grand” entrance, but we had one anyway.

We were introduced by none other than my brother in law, who did a fabulous fabulous job as the emcee for the evening…

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When guests found their way to their tables, they would have found their menus at each place setting. I think there’s something kind of exciting about opening up a restaurant menu and perusing the delicious choices. We wanted the dinner reception to feel like a real treat for the guests, so menus were a must.

To create the menus, I got myself some wedding elves (i.e. my sister and her husband). Then, I purchased metallic sage 5 x 5 cardstock from Paper Presentation. My sister Goccoed our infamous artichoke image on the cardstock, and then inkjet printed menu text that I had created in Word.

My brother in law rounded the corners and meticulously spray glued each menu onto another, slightly larger (5.75 x 5.75) piece of cardstock, in Caramel Metallic.

Final product:

Personal photo

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After the cocktail hour, the hotel staff nudged and herded our guests to the reception room. To inform guests where they were going to sit, I loved the idea of edible escort favors. It would not only let guests know at which table they were sitting, but also, who doesn’t enjoy a little something tasty?

My original idea was to make some shortbread cookies, plop ’em in a cello bag, tie it with a tag and be done with it. My sister, who was my much more ambitious right hand during the wedding planning, wanted to do something more complicated, like these:

Source

Despite my protests, she was determined to make them, and make them she did.
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After we said our vows, it was time to mingle, eat, drink, and celebrate with our loved ones!

I love a good cocktail hour. Love it love it love it. A drink in one hand, a tasty morsel in the other, mingling, laughing, and the fun vibe of getting the evening started. It was crucial to me not to miss the cocktail hour. We did steal away for a few minutes with our photographer somewhere in there (honestly, I can’t remember exactly when), but otherwise we were present and in force for the festivities.

To start things off, immediately after the ceremony—and I mean immediately, as in, the servers were waiting with trays at the back of the ceremony—guests were greeted with our Bee’s Knees cocktails…

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I wanted to pause my recaps and hash something out that’s been on my mind.

As far as any big changes that came along with getting married, there were not many for us—we live together, have two dogs together, we are each keeping our last names, etc. Of course it’s been a trip getting to call him my “husband”, but otherwise it’s been low-key.

So I am weirdly excited about deciding what to do with our finances. (Freudian blip: I first typed that as “my finances” and had to go back and edit to “our finances”. So telling.) Anyway, there’s the whole question of whether to do completely joint, completely separate, or a combination where you have a joint account as well as individual accounts.

I had always assumed that we would do the combo—a joint account as well as separate accounts. But now I don’t know. Here are the reasons I can think of for the combo route:

1. Maintaining financial independence. Hm, I may have lost this race before it started. I’m not financially independent from Mr. Pug. We already share expenses and I could not afford to do many important things without him—like, um, live in our apartment.

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While we were having our paparazzi moment and I was pretending that Edward Cullen was watching us from the treetops, guests began to gather at the ceremony site.

Naturally, they would be poring over our ceremony programs, killing time before the big show began. And where did these programs come from? The Pug wedding elves.

Let me come clean and say that I did not physically make the paper goodies for our wedding. I designed and typed them in Microsoft Word, but then promptly shipped the materials to my sister and brother-in-law (aka elves) out in California for assembly.

The Pug wedding elves swooped down on my wedding prep and with a wriggling of their magic fingers (and hours of hard work), they turned my ideas and blank paper into wedding reality. They were hands-down unbelievable and we absolutely would not have had the weekend that we did without their incredible help and generosity (with the paper products and far far beyond).

Personal photo

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