Wedding Wednesday: Blooms!

 If the warmer weather and sunshine that lasts past 4 p.m. didn't already have me dreaming of spring, spending time online searching for floral inspiration for our wedding certainly has! Brian comes home this weekend (and I get to see him for the first time since New Year's, YAY!)...and we have a meeting with our florist to finalize some of our choices! :)

This has been a hard part of wedding planning for me (if making fun wedding decisions can be hard). I know the general colors and "feel" I want for some elements, like my bouquet, but other things have been harder to figure out. I am not a bride who has always wanted a bouquet full of peonies (or what have you)...I didn't know what a peony was until I saw them all over the wedding blogs I frequent! I have a hard enough time figuring out the difference between types of roses.

All of that said, here are some pictures that I will be taking with me on Saturday to help make my visions of beautiful blooms a reality on our wedding day!

(via)

How gorgeous is this bouquet?! I'm obsessed. (via)

(via)

I hope my inspirations have brightened your day like they did mine...a little reminder that Spring (and our wedding, eeeeeeek!) is just around the corner! :)

P.S. I am still trying to balance grad school and student teaching with having a life. I hope to have better time management, be less exhausted, and be back full time with my blog shortly. Thanks for sticking with me and my overuse of smileys. :)

P.P.S. 101 DAYS until we tie the knot!

A Theme?

A couple of months ago, I started struggling with making our wedding "us"...I didn't know what I could do to make it reflect our relationship and us as a couple. Well, with a little bit of help from Brian, we finally figured it out!

We knew that I wanted us to each pick a signature cocktail, but we were kind of stumped on that, too. Then, I got this text from Brian...

He suggested naming our signature drinks after drinks that we've had in special places together. Then, my mind started racing. We are definitley a couple that likes to travel...offhand, in the two years we've been together, we've taken a cross-country road trip from Maryland to Arizona, drove back from Arizona to Maryland (on a different route!), visited the Grand Canyon, gone to London, Paris, Key West, Sarasota, New York City, Lake Tahoe, and San Diego, plus lots of little day trips. We love to travel!

So we will be naming our signature cocktails after drinks we've had in special places: we can pick from a margarita from Southernmost Point, a Pacific cocktail I had at the Hotel Del in San Diego when we got engaged, a Rum Runner from Duval Street...I'm sure we will think of others!

Instead of doing table numbers, I think I want to name the tables after the cities that we've visited and put a picture of us in that place. I am really excited about this idea, and I hope I can execute it! We'll see how it turns out! :)

(P.S. Ignore B's "Viper" nickname...he thinks he's cool or something.)

I Said Yes...to the Dress!

So after trying on a billion beautiful wedding gowns and getting down to the wire, I was feeling the pressure to find a dress! I made a couple more appointments for a Saturday, and we started bright and early at Francesca's Bridal Salon. I had kind of given up on finding THE ONE (which sounds so silly now...but I was frustrated!) so I wasn't really expecting anything.

We walked in and started looking through the racks, pulling dresses that we thought might fit my expanding criteria (I wanted rouching, a little bit of bling, and not too plain of a back). It started looking promising! There was more than one dress that might actually be it, which was definitely not the case in other salons where we had shopped previously.

When I put on the Blue by Enzoani Brooklyn, I had finally found a dress that left nothing to be desired. I didn't have "the moment" that you always hear about on Say Yes to the Dress...but as my little, Kristi, said, I had kind of a "mini moment" where I knew I had made my decision. I only wanted to alter the beading on the front of the dress a tad, and Peggy, my consultant, assured me there would be no problem doing so. :)

As I said, the model pictures of dresses are horrendous. So here are the model pictures and some random pictures I found of the dress online!

 

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And here I am in the store sample of the dress. I can't wait put MY dress, the actual dress that I'll wear to marry Brian. It should hopefully be here in April!

  

  

I think what really solidified that I had picked my dress when they turned off the lights and put a spotlight on me, and I could see how the "bling" sparkled from every angle. It was so pretty! :)

 Even though I was pretty sure that this was THE DRESS, I decided to take some time to think on it. I called Brian's mom and she met me, my mom, my sister Jennifer, and my "sister" Kristi at Basta Pasta for lunch. After a delicious meal, we returned to the salon and I got into the dress again.

It was, most definitely, IT. We put a deposit down right there!

Before You "Say Yes to the Dress..."

...there is lots and lots of STRESS!

I think that dress shopping was, by far, the most stressful part of wedding planning. Not only had I shopped for and worn quite a few formal dresses in recent months for West Point events (which I think made things more complicated, because it felt like I was just shopping for another dress), I also had pretty much ZERO idea what I wanted in a wedding dress. To me, they all just looked like white dresses. I felt like a failure as a bride.

I also put off wedding dress shopping. NOTE TO FUTURE BRIDES: Do not put off wedding dress shopping! I had no idea what I wanted, so I looked at pictures online for a couple of months before we even went shopping. Dresses in real life look NOTHING like what they do on the models...and that's a good thing! I wish I had just gone and tried them on! By the time we started looking, I was already feeling the time crunch. I had no idea dresses would take 6-8 months to come in! With an 11 month engagement, I should have started looking right away. You know what they say about hindsight. :)

I tried on probably 20-40 dresses before I found "the one." These are some of the dresses that just weren't quite it...

Sottero & Midgley SSM5210CS

Sottero & Midgley Tierney

 

Essence of Australia D940

 

Paloma Blanca 4015

Not sure what this one was, but it is NOT flattering in pictures! :)

 

Paloma Blanca 4002 

Paloma Blanca 3906 w/ a jeweled belt that was way too expensive!

 

Essence of Australia D1006

This last dress almost fooled me into thinking it was "the one"...until I realized that I had fallen in love with the fit, rather than the dress itself. Lace is not my style at all! 

So back to the drawing board it was...

For eternity! :)

Brian had my engagement ring custom made, and he even helped the jeweler design it! When it came time to get a wedding band, we knew we would have to go the custom route if we wanted them to match. After MUCH deliberation, I decided to go with an eternity band so that I wouldn't have to worry about spinning and the diamonds "matching up." This way, they will always look perfect together! We picked up my ring a couple of weeks ago, and I have been sneaking it on every now and then because I am so in love with how it looks. I cannot wait until May when I can wear it all the time! :)

"Peachy" Favors

One of the first decisions Brian and I made regarding the wedding was what we wanted our favors to be...kind of backward, right? What can I say? We know what we like!

Our guests will each be receiving a 7 oz. jar of Peach Preserves as a favor at our reception! Brian and I will be starting our new life together in Savannah, GA, so the favor is a little ode to the Peach State. We discussed making the preserves ourselves, but ended up finding a local farm that would do it for a reasonable price. So we went with it! Let's hear it for supporting local businesses! :)

The favor tags were designed by a fabulous woman I met on a wedding website. She does all sorts of custom graphic design work for a super reasonable price, and she was so patient while I tweaked the colors with these and our monograms until they were *just right.* Feel free to message me if you want her info! :)

I printed the tags on waterproof label sheets from www.labelsbythesheet.com and cut them out with a Fiskars rotary cutter. I am so happy with how they turned out!

 

The final finishing touch will hopefully be a blue or peach ribbon tied around the jar lids. We'll see if I feel like tackling the task of outfitting all 200 jars with bows! :)

*Wedding Week Edit*: I ended up hating the way ribbon looked around the lids of the jars, so they will be given to our guests as is. :)

Pomanders!

When I first started perusing wedding websites and trying to find some inspiration for our wedding, I fell in love with pomanders. That's not to say I had ever even heard the word "pomander," but I quickly learned that they were a much coveted wedding ceremony decor item as of late.

The specific look I was set on was this: pomanders hanging from shepherd hooks lining our outdoor 'aisle.' And I know that all of my florals will be in peach, pink, and white...so I envisioned pretty multi-colored pomanders all the way to the lighthouse.

(via Project Wedding's GoingtobeGoff)

After a little bit of research, I quickly discovered that these lovely pomanders could run up to $40 a piece! On top of all of my other floral desires for my bouquet, bridesmaid's bouquets, and reception centerpieces, that price tag was just not going to work!

Lucky for me that I realized that many brides DIY these pretties using silk flowers for a much more reasonable price tag! (In fact, the ones I posted above are faux flowers assesmbed by the bride, and she has an awesome tutorial here.) You can even make them using tissue paper!

I loved the idea of saving some money and buying all of the supplies to make my own, and was actually looking into it...until I discovered an amazing Etsy seller who would make them for me for even less than I was going to be able to make them myself! (Can I just say, Etsy is a bride-to-be's best friend!)

Heidi made me 24 lovely salmon (peach and pink) pomanders with ivory ribbon in less than a week! She e-mailed me today to let me know they were done and even posted some pictures so I could see how they turned out. I absolutely love them!

I can't wait to see how these look on our wedding day. I'm so happy we found a cost-effective and low-stress way to make my pomander dreams come true!