Ahh! Flower second thoughts!

Why is this bouquet on Ruffled teasing me and making me want to change my flowers that I already told the florist I wanted!?!?

Gosh darn you wedding blogs. You make everything difficult with all your amazing and creative ideas. I want them all!

Pretty Hair!

I saw this picture and was admiring the girl all the way on the left's hair style. Sooo pretty! Definitely saving it!

Green Wedding Shoes

Then I saw this on Grey Likes Weddings. J'adore!

Make Way, Fatties Coming Through!

So today I left at lunchtime from work and my Mom came to meet me. We hung out and caught up on some happenings and then went to Joanne Fabrics to get some burlap. (eek. that stuff will make you ITCH) So, yes! I am doing the burlap runners, woot! I just need to talk AJR's mom into helping me with her sewing machine...

Anyhow, after our fabric store trip we decided we had to eat at Olive Garden. You know this restaurant has a deal where you can pay 10 bucks and have all you can eat breadsticks, soup, and salad? Well naturally that is the best deal ever and we had to do it! Breadsticks are every womans weakness I swear. And well, we may have indulged. Just a little. Several breadstick baskets, salad refills and four bowls of soup later, we were feeling pretty fat. My Mom looks at her watch and oh! It was time to get to Oksana (Russian seamstress) and check out the new addition to my dress/get my bustle made, and Mom had to check on her Mother of the Bride dress that she had Oksana hem. We waddled to the car where we busted out laughing knowing that Oksana would definitely have a problem with our full bellies in our dresses! We got to her store and sure enough, we could barely zip our dresses. I mean, neither of us! It was hilariously awful. It was so funny that I snorted several times. (as if I didn't feel piggy enough) Before we left she looked at me and said "tsk. tsk. tsk. I do no more to dress til you lose weight. No more Olive Garden! No eat next time you come in."

So I am hanging my head in shame as I write this and pulling on my tennis shoes. It's time to hit the gym!

A Cute Story :)

Last week I was at my Aunt Kimmy's house before my Aunt Jenny and Sarah came over to have some wedding talk. My cousin Connor who is in the 6th grade and just a total sweetheart came home from his trombone lessons and was excited to see me. He started asking questions about the wedding (yes an 11 year old boy... this kid is like a mini adult. At Christmas he inquired about where Andrew and I would be going on our honeymoon) and he announced "Well, I can do the music for your wedding!". I assumed he meant help choose songs for the DJ (at a party my aunt and uncle hosted about a year and a half ago, he became the DJ's sidekick and the party turned into a Beastie Boys tribute) so I said "Oh yeah! Maybe you could get them to play some Beastie Boys for the wedding guests!" (for the record, I don't really like the idea of my future in-laws out of town friends dancing to "Brass Monkey" at the wedding, but a funny thought at the least). Connor gave me a confused look and then chuckled and said "oh, no I mean.. I could play the trombone!" (well, it appears he is over his Beastie Boys phase...) Cutest thing ever. My heart kind of melted.

Recent Happenings :)

Here is a recap on some things we are up to. Last weekend I went to my hometown and had a meeting with the florist. It was kind of fun going in with my mom and bringing in pictures that I had printed to choose from. I didn't realize just how many people are going to be needing corsages and whatnot. Man, flowers are apparently a very big part of the day! I decided on my bouquet and I am VERY excited! And this arrangement of hydrangeas and roses are what I picked out!

We also went to talk to the man who is making our wedding cake and that was fun as well. I explained to him about the textured white frosting and he is also going to make 3 layers. The top and bottom will be vanilla and the middle will be chocolate and all three layers will have a raspberry filling, yum! Now I am on the hunt for a vintage cake stand (a silver ornate one like this) and some sort of topper. Any ideas?

Tuesday night a few of my aunts, my mom, and maid of honor got together to talk about the wedding. That mainly led to a lot of red wine drinking and gossiping, but we did get some ideas for invitations and for reception set-up. I spent a little too much time on Wednesday looking at invitation ideas online (which I have decided kraft invites are a MUST) and am trying to commit to clicking the "add to cart" and "purchase" buttons. Hoopefully I get brave before the weekend is over :)

Wednesday night I paid a little visit to the flower girls. Their dresses came in from J. Crew so they tried them on and it was sooo adorable! They looked perfect, oh they are the cutest flower girls in the WORLD! I gave them a book called Ten Neat Things About Being a Flower Girl so hopefully that spiked some excitement! Lora (the 5 year old) actually asked if she could be the ring bearer, but I told her that dropping flowers might be more fun than carrying a pillow.

Lat night my Mom came into town and she purchased her Mother of The Bride Dress! I will have to post on this later and show pics, but she looks gorgeous! She then met me over at the store with my seamstress and I got to try on my dress since the last few additions to the dress, ohhh I am getting excited! Although I did get yelled at by the Russian lady "You gain weight! You put two pounds on skinny body, you not fit dress!" because apparently I ate too much over the holidays... oops. No worries though, I told her it's just happy weight! I'm sure once the wedding stress kicks in, I will have no problems in my dress! (In reality, the dress fits totally fine haha). The most exciting part about last night though was THE VEIL! AJR's sister Lauren let me borrow her veil to try on and I fell in love! Her veil is a cathedral or chapel length veil, which at first I wasn't sure about. Well, in the world of veils I wasn't sure about any of them. But as soon as we clipped it into place I was all smiles. Perfect for my dress, it is gorgeous! Here are a few examples of chapel length: in the wind!, elegant, and just plain pretty. I just felt like such a BRIDE in it!  So I now officially have my something borrowed! Woo-hoo!

My infinite love of Etsy

I have been putting off posting this hanger that I ordered a few months ago, but I finally decided I had to share! I saw this seller on Etsy a while back and I HAD to have one of her custom made hangers for my wedding dress. I think this will look so neat in the pictures of my dress, I just love that the hanger holding my dress has the name that I will recieve while wearing the dress... so exciting! I ordered it from: LilaFrances

These are the buttons I bought from a couture store in Richmond so that the seamstress could add them to the back of my dress. Unfortunately I did not search Etsy before buying them and afterward discovered the same buttons for an unthinkable amount less than what I paid! The buttons I purchased were $3 a piece, which adds up pretty darn quick when you have 24 buttons to get! I then found a seller on Etsy who could make them for about .45 cents a piece. The couture store did not let me return the buttons :( I am still pretty mad about this situation... but oh well... ya live ya learn! Now hopefully future brides might see this post and learn from my mistake: Research a little before you commit to buying! The Etsy shop that I found was LiDDesignSupplies.

Flower Girl Dress

This morning I saw that J. Crew is having a 20% off and free shipping deal for all items that are already on sale. J. Crew is constantly teasing me with these type of e-mails, but I've had my eye on a dress for Lora and Lenna (my cutie pie flower girls) and so I thought it was now or never to order it for them! I got in touch with my Aunt Shanna and she agreed that we should get them because of how simple and lovely they are... so yay, we now officially have flower girl dress picked out and ordered! I am having dinner with them next Wednesday to finally let the girls know that they are in the wedding and that they will be the princesses of the day :)

J. Crew

FONTS!

I have decided for invites I really would like to have a unique and eye catching font with just a simple hand stamped design. I picture linen cardstock in a khaki color with black font and green stamp. I am obsessed with the idea of having the invites in kraft envelopes, but I realize the envelopes should probably match the invitations. I'll save my obsession for kraft paper for hand made cards and wrapping presents :)

The other night my friend Bridget and I sat on the couch at a friend's house pouring over free font sites and giggling at what they looked like when we typed inappropriate phrases to sample them. Never mind that it was 11pm and we isolated ourselves into a typography storm while all of our friends were socializing and heading out to DC bars. We are geeky like that. I am amazed at the amount of fonts there are! Oh, how I have come to love and appreciate the graphic design world. Bridget says I am a vicarious designer... it's so true. Can I have a career change? After my photography career change that is.

Anyhow, I decided to share some of the free font sites that are out there... I'll have to post on when I attempt to actually download and use them. Should be quite an adventure for this technologically handicapped woman (yes, this blog is a product of a miracle I tell you).

So here are a few sites:
Font Forge   Fonts 101   J Murphy Free Fonts   Vintage Fonts  DaFont   Abstract Fonts

 
See... look at all these fun things you can do that MS Word does not come with! Who knew?

It just has to be this.

Every time I see a cake with this design I stop and I smile and I think to myself "This just has to be the cake that I have on my wedding day!"

I think it may also be that I HAVE to have a vintage cake stand to go with it as well... I wonder if AJR will let me buy one off ebay?

Classic Bride

Saturday we have a meeting with the man who will be making our cake... I am excited to discuss options and see what kind of fun flavors and things we can come up with!

Listing it up

I really feel like I have a lot accomplished at this point, but I am also getting a little discouraged because of how much there is left to do. Sigh.

Some things still left to do that I want to cross off the list soon:

~INVITATIONS - this is really important because they need to be sent out in 7 weeks! That's 7 weeks to pick out a style, have them printed, stuff them, and address them. I'm a little worried.

~Groomsmen and my Groom's suits! For this I blame my beloved AJR... he needs to get off his butt and pick something out!

~My flower girls dresses. Actually, I need to officially ask them to be in the wedding as well, which I plan on doing next week. I had decided to wait so that I wouldn't get them hyped up about it too far in advance. I bought them a little book about being a flower girl and everything!

~A ceremony time. The simplest of matters, yet hard to decide. I must figure out how long the ceremony will be, how long it will take for pictures, will we have enough time for a cocktail hour and for people to eat before sunset? So much to consider!

~A song for the ceremony. My friend Natalie who has a beautiful voice has agreed to sing at the wedding. I'm really thrilled about it because I enjoy having people that I care about involved in as many aspects of the day as possible. Now we just need to pick a song that suits her voice and that matches mine and Andrew's taste, and that the pastor agrees is appropriate to play in the church....

~Flowers. I've been doing a lot of posting on that lately, and I am comfortable with my taste in how the bouquets will look... but I need to decide on a florist, how many flowers we want there, and what exact flowers we will need.


So those are just some items that are on my mind that I want to get out of the way so I can focus on some detail things. I am currently in a mad job hunt because my lease in Richmond is up in 2 months! So on top of wedding planning, I need a job and a new apartment for me and my future husband to move into. Whew. I do however, have two bartenders! Yay! My uncle's sister and brother-in-law will be handling the job for us that evening, so I am thankful for that! We have also booked a caterer which is exciting as well! Our guests shall have food! Woot! (I will post on our menu choice and caterer this week! :) The dress is coming along nicely and I hopefully only have 2 or 3 more visits before everything is all finalized! (Wish I could share more details on this matter) My Maid of Honor and I have also chosen dates for my bridal shower and bachelorette party... so I know she is going to be busy planning that! So excited because I know she will do an AMAZING job putting those together!

So I think the key is to focus on all the progress that I HAVE made and not get too caught up in all the things left. I know it will fly by and before I know it, these things will be crossing themselves off the list! I can't believe how much we have accomplished thus far and I am pretty psyched about it all!

This is the moment I am most looking forward to... first kiss as husband and wife :) The moment that is kind of what all this stress and planning and life changing steps are for. The thought of that makes me feel pretty content about all the wedding nonsense. Who cares if my table runners aren't the right size or if the D.J. plays the song I put on the "do not play" list.... I GET TO MARRY MY BEST FRIEND! Life couldn't possibly get better than that!

From our very own wedding photographer, Kelsey Thompson's, blog

Videographer

Well... Videographers are rather expensive. And to be honest, the budget at the moment for this wedding is pprreettyyy slim. Luckily I am going to have fantastic photos and in fact don't really think I'll be sitting around watching our wedding video too often if we had one. However, I ran across this cute idea on Ruffled and I definitely wouldn't be opposed to looking into trying it out at the reception.

More flowers!

Oh, now I am starting to get excited about flowers... perhaps I can make an appointment with a florist next weekend while I am in my home town! I browsed my faves on Once Wed's flower idea section.

The following are a few I found on Style Me Pretty

Bridesmaid Dresses ~ J. Crew <3

I was waiting until we had officially ordered the dresses before I announced them and last night we got them all ordered and so that piece is done, hooray!

I seriously was obsessed with J. Crew dresses and while we all looked around at tons of dresses from other bridal stores and such, I couldn't stop coming back to J. Crew. My maid of honor and I were particularly infatuated with a floral print they make and so we decided it was absolutely necessary to have it somehow in the wedding party. I decided that my Matron and Maid of Honor would wear a light vintage floral pattern and that my other two bridesmaids would wear a caramel/champagne color. In the beginning I was convinced I would have the bridal party wear green since it's my favorite color and I had hoped to have my main color be green. I soon discovered that green is a mighty ugly color for bridesmaid dresses and I really didn't run across anything I loved. (J. Crew did actually come out with a green version of the champagne dress we chose that would have been beautiful, but we were still too sold on the floral pattern and needed something that matched better) I can't say I would have chosen strapless, but I think the beauty of the dress far outweighs my pit against strapless, so in the end the dress wins :)

So, here are the choices and I can't wait to see them when they come in! I love how romantic and pretty they are... the girls will all look gorgeous!

This is the dress for Michelle and Melissa. Very simple and definitely re-wearable so that is a plus! I'm thinking a green sash around the middle? See it here

The back of the floral print dress

Oh, how I adore this pattern!

Front view, I am thinking a creme sash instead of a leather belt. See it here

Thank You Cards

Now that we've receieved a few engagement gifts, I've been writing several thank you cards and I thought I would do a little post on them. I really think it is so thoughtful when someone puts time into their thank you. Whether it's choosing a nice personalized card or writing really heart-felt words, I think you should always put in a little extra when you are sending words of appreciation. I sat down one evening and made a little series of hand stamped cards. I did go out and later buy a set of thank you cards that I can use when in a pinch, but I am excited about using hand made cards for friends and family who are contributing toward the wedding. I used stamps and blank cards by Martha Stewart, and I am even thinking of using the same stamps on the invitations!

the front of an envelope

the back of an envelope

a different assortment of the back of an envelope, because I want to include scripture

a thank you card I made for my aunt when she hosted our engagement party... perhaps I can use the stamps in a similar manner as this for the invitations?